Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <06PETERSON AT cua.edu>]

As I said, it "started" as shorthand.  (The common example is the cuneiform 
sign for sheep, which seems to have begun with little round disks with an 
inscribed plus.  If these were standard counters used to keep track of 
numbers 
of sheep, it would have been natural to use the sign of a circled plus as a 
sign for sheep.)  In its logographic origins, the first concern was probably 
to find the simplest sign possible to represent the word in mind.  But over 
time, as writing takes on its own life, other concerns become more pressing.  
Because cuneiform was written on clay with a reed stylus, it was easier to 
make wedge-shaped impressions than to scratch linear shapes.  The wedge 
patterns may have approximated the original drawings, but they were quickly 
losing their resemblance to the word or idea represented, in favor of more 
efficient style.  The trick is getting from whole-word representations to 
something more versatile.  With cuneiform, they went in the direction of 
syllabary--the sign for a common word could be used to represent the initial 
sound in that word, and the syllabic values could be combined to form more 
abstract concepts, foreign words, morphological elements, personal names, etc.
 Cuneiform never lost its original logographic quality, but the inventory of 
syllables multiplied, and syllabic writing became more prevalent, with 
certain 
stock terms retaining their logographic representation.  By modern standards, 
a syllabary is quite complex, and the logographic values complicate matters.  
But it was what they had, and they made adaptations within that system.  
Imagine how difficult it would have been to completely overhaul what already 
existed and come up with a new system that everyone would use.  I think the 
tendency is for writing systems to adapt, but not change their nature 
altogether.  Of course, once cuneiform came into competition with the much 
simpler and more versatile NWS abjads, it didn't last long in common use.  
(Not that it ever was in "common" use.  The system was so complex, probably 
very few could use it with much facility.)  Then again, we can't think only 
in 
terms of replacement of writing systems.  Aramaic also replaced Akkadian as 
the standard language of Mesopotamia--to my knowledge, Akkadian was never 
written widely (if at all) in the newer, alphabetic script.

Meanwhile, in Egypt you had hieroglyphics--basically an alphabetic 
system--and 
another system that used wedge-shapes at Ugarit--also alphabetic (in the 
loose 
sense--technically, if it doesn't represent vowels, it can be called an 
abjad).  The Phonecians (and probably other Canaanites) used a linear writing 
system with similar representational quality, but otherwise a bit difficult 
to 
trace.  (I think it's generally thought that Egyptian influence was stronger.)
 The Greeks borrowed the same system and adapted it to represent vowels; 
other, Semitic groups seem to have got along fine without them for much 
longer.  Yes, many of them would eventually introduce voweling in one form or 
another, but it was usually not essential for writing and often a secondary 
development on top of already existing consonantal texts.  Today, most 
surviving Semitic languages can be written with or without vowels.

Again, the pattern seems to be adaptation and adjustment, but not full-scale 
overhauling of what already exists for a given language.  Just like spoken 
language and spelling convention pick up a lot of extra complexities along 
the 
way ("silent" consonants, for instance, which are usually just diachronic 
vestiges; or "irregular" forms that also go back to causes in an earlier 
stage), writing can hardly help but preserve some of its history.  At least, 
that seems to be part of the picture.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics

>===== Original Message From "Matthew R. Miller" <biblicalscribe AT hotmail.com> 
=====
>Thanks to all for the interesting replies to my Semetic written vowel
>questions. I suppose my questioning was more theoretical than anything
>else. The answer I received that makes the most sense to me so far is that
>writing was developed as a sort of shorthand, so that the fewer elements,
>the better. The only problem I have with that answer would be that, given
>the several languages I have studied, writing seems anything but
>simplified. Take for example, the accents of modern Vietnamese, or the
>vowel pointing of Arabic, or the thousands of ideograms of modern Chinese
>or ancient Egyptian. Is it that spoken language is just SO complex that
>ANY writing must necessarioly be complex, even though it be simpler than
>speech? Or is there another possible theoretical explanation of the lack
>of vowels in many ancient Semetic languages? Thanks, Matt
>
>---
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