Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 27/04/2005 13:01, Trevor Peterson wrote:

> ----- 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.
>  

I have studied it a little, and it is nothing like cuneiform. As I 
understand it, Egyptian hieroglyphic (and hieratic and demotic, I am not 
talking about Coptic which is different) writing consists of signs, some 
of which have phonetic significance. And those signs with phonetic 
significance each indicate a series of one of more consonants. They 
never indicate vowels explicitly. There may be some correlation between 
the consonants and the expected vowel sounds, but no clear rules.

The vowels used in popular transcriptions of ancient Egyptian names are 
guesswork, sometimes based on Greek, Coptic etc forms of the same names.

> [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. ...

But cuneiform was used almost only for East Semitic languages. And well 
before the Persian period (although admittedly later than cuneiform) 
there was a more or less common writing system for West Semitic 
languages, based on the 22 character alphabet usually attributed to the 
Phoenicians, and used with some variations from Egypt to northern Syria. 
Ugaritic was probably a variant form of this. This system later became 
the standard in the Persian empire, with slightly different glyph 
shapes, and is the origin of the modern Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac and 
Thaana writing systems - and less directly of European, Indian and SE 
Asian writing systems. This is surely what Vadim was writing about.

> ... 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. ...

No, not separate vowels, only syllables distinguished by vowels.

> ... 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?
>  

On this I agree with you. To find languages which are truly primitive, 
we probably have to look back 50,000 years, not 3000. And of course 
there are no records from those times.

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



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