Hebrew vowels
I know a little bit about Hebrew, having studied it for one semester in college, just for fun (had to drop it because I couldn't afford the time it took). The Hebrew language does have vowels, of course, but there are no letters in the alphabet to write them with. You were supposed to know what vowels went where, and there are rules for what vowels can go with what combinations of consonants. The King James translators rendered the combination yod-he-vav-he (the Tetragrammaton, or name of God) as Jehovah , which is not correct -- those vowels can't go with that arrangement of consonants. We now know that it should be Yahway. Sometime after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the diaspora of the Jews, the rabbis became worried that the correct formation of words might be lost, since the Jews were now dispersed among other peoples and languages, and Hebrew (and its close relative, Aramaic, the spoken language of Palestine in New Testament times) were no longer a common everyday language. For this reason, two things were done: a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Pentateuch) was produced so the content would not be forgotten even if the Hebrew language was; and to help in studying Hebrew, a set of markings, called the Masoretic points, was invented. You might suppose that the simple solution to this problem would be to invent, or borrow, letters to represent the vowels, but this was impossible, since it would be been considered blasphemous to add letters to the sacred text. Little marks, however, apparently didn't count. They are still used in Hebrew textbooks, and in some prayer books, for those who are not expert enough in the language to do without them.

If I remember correctly (this is coming off the top of my head -- my textbook is at home) there are six marks. They are written under the consonant which precedes them, except for a final consonant. "Short a" looks like a hyphen; "long A" is like a tiny letter T; "e" is two dots following each other like ".."; "i" is a single dot; three dots arranged in a triangle, two over one, is "short e" but is actually pronounced like schwa; finally, two dots vertical, like a colon, is no vowel, indicating no vowel goes with that consonant.