Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Karl Randolph" <kwrandolph AT email.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
> 
> ... People
> recognize that vowels are necessary for modern writing: to my knowledge, all
> other languages mark vowels.
> Most certainly, "if" different vowels exist, it is necessary to mark them in
> writing. Absence of vowels in Semitic testifies to non-differentiation of
> vowels.
> 
> 
> Vadim Cherny
> 

Vadim:

People _think_ that vowels are necessary for modern writing, but that’s 
merely because that is the way they learned reading and writing.

Take a native speaker in English, present him with an English text that has 
only consonants, and usually in less than a day, he can read that 
text fluently, with only rare cases of ambiguity, using the correct vowels 
and stresses. The experiment has been done, and it has been shown 
that even in modern English, writing vowels is not necessary.

Consonants are the framework upon which spoken language is constructed. The 
vowels are the decoration between the framework. Thus 
vowelless writing still communicates.

Likewise, a native speaker in ancient Hebrew could read fluently with few 
ambiguities a vowelless text. In fact, he would have an easier time 
than modern English speakers who could read vowelless English text, because 
ancient Hebrew writing had a better corrolation between 
consonental sounds and writing glyphs. We find it hard because we are not 
native speakers.

(The fact that letters were being added to the DSS texts to indicate vowels 
is evidence for the argument that there were no native speakers of 
Hebrew, particularly Biblical Hebrew, at that time.)

Therefore, the absence of vowels in writing does not indicate the absence of 
vowels and vowel distinctions in spoken language.

Karl W. Randolph.
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