Hebrew is a written language that appears in books without the vowels/ niqqud - or diacritics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_diacritics
It is a classical rabbinical claim that the Torah is illegible without these diacritics. However, these rabbis are unaware of Biblical Hebrew, Phonecian, or related semitic languages such as Arabic of Persian, the latter 2 having similar diacritics, but can be read without them.
The fact remains that even in modern hebrew, books, journals etc are written without the diacritics. And reading something in the Hebrew news today I am reminded of a typical rabbinic type fallacy.
The word בגין can mean "for" and can also be read as the name Begin, i.e. the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin. How then, can a modern Israeli, reading or writing legal documents , official papers or only reading a newspaper know whether the word is referring to the late PM or to its other meaning, "for"?
The answer, is that it depends very much on context.
The polemicists choose examples where both meanings are possible. In that case, it would presumably be the more likely option. Thus the famous example of חלב in 14:21 - is it referring to milk or fat? The most reasonable answer is milk, since mother's milk is a well known term.
When adult Israelis require diacritical vowels to understand Hebrew, then we might be open to this rabbinic argument. However, since millions of books, journals and newspapers are published in Hebrew without them, it seems that the whole argument is rather weak.
I am sorry but this is too simplistic. The rabbis did not say that the Tanakh is *illegible* they said that a tradition of vocalisation was needed to ensure the *correct* reading. No Karaite scholar would dispute this and the Masoretes who fixed the niqud were probably Karaites. The Rabbis point was that before the niqud were formulated there had to be an oral tradition for the vocalisation.
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