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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: abuian AT access4less.net
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?
  • Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2005 14:01:42 +0100

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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