[b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?
Uri Hurwitz
uhurwitz at yahoo.com
Sat Apr 30 17:33:36 EDT 2005
Yes, and, it appears that they boorrowed and modified the Egyptian signs earlier than the Ugaritic inventors of the alphabetic script. There does not seem a connection between the two, or is there?
It is however interesting that two separate scripts appeared roughly in the same time, give or take a couple of centuries. A script, incidentally, that uses, with some changes, but in practically the same order, the very letters of our electronic correspondence.
Uri
Trevor Peterson <abuian at access4less.net> wrote, in part:
> ...." The point of the West Semitic innovation in borrowing from
Egyptian was to create a simpler sign set, which could not have been
done with a syllabary. Since that was the only other way that vowels had
been represented up to this point, it's perfectly understandable why
they wouldn't have gone in that direction...."
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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