Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Trevor Peterson" <abuian AT access4less.net>]

----- Original Message Follows -----
From: "Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
To: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written
vowels?
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 14:16:10 +0300

> My mistake about Egyptian. But, then, how much do we
> really know about the Ancient Egyptian vowels? All we know
> , I think, is mere guesswork. Egyptian also seems close to
> Semitic in the root system.

Egyptian writing is a syllabic system. I haven't studied it,
but if cuneiform is any basis of comparison, we know a good
deal more about vowels in these languages than in most.
> 
[snipped]

> You are talking of consequences, not the reasons. Greek is
> a late language. By the time it emerged, vowels were
> semantically significant, and Greeks employed vowel
> letters. But if vowel sounds were originally meaningful,
> why omit them in Semitic?

They are not omitted in "Semitic." There is no "Semitic"
writing system, for one thing. There are writing systems
that happen to have been used by different Semitic language
communities, but the categories are overlapping. The closest
thing to a universal Semitic writing system before the
Persian Empire--and the only competitor with Egyptian
hieroglyphics for the most ancient writing system
attested--is cuneiform, which is syllabic and therefore
encodes vowels. So if age of the writing system is your
basis for making inferences about the presence or absence of
vowels, we need to make clear that as long as there has been
writing (that we can ascertain), there have been vowels. And
cuneiform was used not only for Akkadian (a Semitic
language) but also for the writing of several other ANE
languages, including our earliest Canaanite texts. Akkadian
was also a diplomatic standard throughout the ANE, which
means that at Ugarit we find side-by-side texts written in
Akkadian cuneiform and others written in Ugaritic language
and script, which encodes even fewer vowels than we normally
see with Hebrew. Much of what we know about Ugaritic comes
by comparing forms of Ugaritic words that show up in both
types of texts, so there was clearly an underlying vowel
structure for the Ugaritic texts. Even if you think that
correspondence is a scholarly fabrication, the fact still
remains that Ugaritians were able to work in two different
Semitic languages, one that by your model was pronounced
without vowels because it was too primitive and the other
that clearly was pronounced and written with vowels. It
might be remotely plausible (if we ignore the evidence) that
Canaanite or Ugaritic was too primitive to differentiate
vowels, but how could such a state have persisted in close
proximity to a fully developed language like Akkadian?

I'll close with a suggestion. If you really want to float
your theory with those who would know, I suggest you try
posting to the ANE list. There you will find some of the
world's foremost experts on Semitic writing systems.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics