Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 28/04/2005 13:13, Vadim Cherny wrote:

> ...
>
> > Are you talking about children? Or are you claiming that the Hebrews and
> > other Semites of the biblical period had only just evolved to a level of
> > intelligence at which they were able to talk?
> >    
>
> Speech is a physical ability, not directly related to intelligence. Early
> humans had limited speech abilities.
>  

Well, I am glad that you have backed away from calling Semites 
unintelligent. So now you claim that humans 3000 years ago were 
physically incapable of producing vowel sounds? Or was it a matter of 
their brain wiring? Well, let us leave aside the incredible implications 
of suggesting that some kind of mutation allowing for vowel sounds 
spread around the whole of at least the Mediterranean world in less than 
a millennium so that everyone in the Roman Empire was able to pronounce 
Latin and/or Greek complete with vowels - and look at the evidence. 
Mesopotamian cuneiform, indicating vowel sounds, was in use by the 
Sumerians from around 5000 years ago, showing that the Sumerians were 
able to pronounce vowels. The same writing system was used around 4000 
years ago by Akkadians who were Semitic speakers related to the 
Canaanites, and this writing shows that these Akkadians pronounced 
vowels. And there is a limited correspondence from the Amarna period in 
which western, Canaanite Semitic was written in this same cuneiform 
complete with vowels - and the language of these is more or less the 
ancestor of Hebrew. So it is simply untrue that the Semites were 
physically unable to pronounce vowels.

> What it all boils to, is that dropping vowels in writing is highly unlikely.
> Not impossible, but bizarre, meaningless, and unlikely. ...

Iranians do it all the time. There are vowel points which they could 
write in their Arabic script, but they choose not to, in almost all 
texts, except occasionally to resolve ambiguities. And their language is 
not Semitic, but is Indo-European and so as dependent on vowels as 
Russian and English. This is just like Russian dropping the dots on 
their yo vowel - in most cases the dots are redundant and so no one 
bothers to write them.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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