Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

----- Original Message Follows -----
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

> 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.

Well, "nothing like cuneiform" may be an exaggeration :-)
But I see your point. I was mistaken here.

[snipped]

> But cuneiform was used almost only for East Semitic
> languages.

I didn't say it actually was universal--only that it came
the closest. And in fact it did. Cuneiform was used for East
Semitic languages and several non-Semitic languages
throughout the region. But it was a known and frequently
used script in West-Semitic speaking communities and in
Egypt, where Akkadian was a lingua franca. It was also used
to write a form of Canaanite in some situations (Amarna
material), and it could be used to render Ugaritic glosses
that appear in Ugaritian Akkadian texts.

> 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.

Agreed. But my point is that the ubiquity of cuneiform and
Akkadian before this point shows that this writing system
was not vowelless simply because of a primitive state for
Semitic languages. In fact, cuneiform had already been used
to write Semitic languages for centuries, which shows
clearly that there were vowel distinctions in Akkadian and
in the West Semitic languages recorded in some cuneiform
texts. For that matter, the morphology of West Semitic
languages like Hebrew and Aramaic from their earliest
writing in West Semitic script shows a more advanced stage
than extant Akkadian, in that they had already lost case
endings (for instance). So far from being more primitive,
they had actually already progressed to a later stage of
development.

> 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.

I know that's what he was writing about, but by ignoring the
cuneiform evidence, he reached a faulty conclusion.
Stressing the cuneiform evidence from throughout the ANE,
which predates texts in West Semitic script, is a useful
corrective to this problem.
> 
> >... 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.

I meant phonetic vowels. My point is that there is no stage
of attested writing that we can say convincingly predates
the existence of vowels in spoken language. And
incidentally, cuneiform does have separate vowel-signs.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics