Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>]

> > 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.

No, we don't know anything about Egyptian vowels for sure

> > 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.

Obviously, vowels already developed by the time of Ugarit, and likely
already in Sumer. What I suggest, is that original version of Semitic lacked
distinguishable vowels. This created the vowelless writing. Cuneiform
developed as more advanced writing system - already seemingly with different
vowels. By the time Biblical Hebrew emerged, vowels were long
differentiated, but the writing system preserved the earliest concept of
single-vowel language.

Vadim Cherny