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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Vadim Cherny <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?
  • Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 11:42:37 +0100

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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