Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 27/04/2005 11:20, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> I wonder if anyone would like to discuss this topic.
> The absence of vowels is puzzling: why omit meaningful morphological data? 
> Shorthand writing doesn't just omit characters, but rather uses new symbols 
> instead of common combinations of letters. As far as I know, no other 
> language deliberately omits morphologically significant letters.
>  

Your knowledge is incomplete. Ancient Egyptian and all languages, 
Semitic or not, written in Arabic script omit vowels, or only mark them 
sporadically. And many languages including English omit semantically 
significant data - even Russian, which normally fails to distinguish in 
the orthography e.g. muka "flour" from muka "torment" (a stress 
difference), and vsye "all (plural)" from vsyo "all (neuter singular)".

The reason for this deficiency of ancient Semitic scripts is rather 
simple: the concept of writing vowels as independent letters had not yet 
been invented. It was probably the Greeks who first did this 
systematically, long after Semitic alphabetic writing was well established.

> In my opinion, Semitic languages had no vowels because there was no 
> distinguishable vowels originally. All words sounded like C'C'C', then CaCaCa 
> with kamatz. The last vowel sound was naturally reduced.
>  

There are no current human languages without distinguishable vowel 
sounds. (Some people have tried to analyse Abkhaz in this way, but most 
scholars now hold that it has two distinguishable vowel sounds.) So, 
unless you hold that the ancient Semites were somehow sub-human, you 
need very good reasons to suggest that their language was different from 
the 6000+ current human languages.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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