Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dora Smith" <villandra AT austin.rr.com>]

Huh?   Semitic speakers were people, not chimpanzees!  The way you put it,
chimpanzees must be more highly evolved than Semitic speakers, since their
speech contains more vowels!

This is the most interesting wrinkle on the notion that the Semitic
languages are more primitive than other languages, that I have yet seen!
(Mom, Larry, scroll on down until you find his theory.)

Oh, boy.  Now I see how in the world we could be having such a discussion of
why Semitic alphabets lacked vowels.  I couldn't believe it took five people
making eight posts to explain that the Semitic alphabets were the first
alphabets and originated as shorthand writing schemes among merchants who
lacked the time and money to learn syllabic writing!

Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, Texas
villandra AT austin.rr.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2005 5:20 AM
Subject: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?


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.

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.

Later, the vowel sounds differentiated because of syntactical accent. For
example, since verbs are generally followed by nouns, verbs have ascending
syntactical stress. This feature elongated the second vowel sound: catAv -
catAav* - catAiv* - catEv. Thus could appear tzere. (We also see an effect
of syntactical accent in pausal forms.)

Alternative elongation produced holam: gadAl - gadAul* - gadOl.

When the Masoretes introduced stops (dagesh), vowels in so limited syllables
shortened. This produced patah, as diber - dibarti, nizcher* - nizcar.

Also, short vowels appeared when complex vowels (tzere, holam) lost stress,
such as in gadOl - gdulAh.

Any opinions?

Vadim Cherny