Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

That's right.   I carefully hand-copied and scanned the Egyptian hieroglyphs
concerning the Shasu of Yahweh.   By the middle dynasty, Egyptian writing
was a mixture of syllabic and phonetic.   Only a few particularly common
words were signified with single hieroglyphs.   The word Shasu is spelled
several ways with a number of combinations and permutations of letters.
One form uses a particular symbol for "SHA", and another uses the same
symbol for "SH" and adds a character for "A".
Yours,
Dora Smith
Austin, Texas
villandra AT austin.rr.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vadim Cherny" <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
To: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
Cc: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2005 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?


> > The oldest known epigraphic West Semitic
> > is the Wadi el-Hol inscription (in upper Egypt) of around 2000 BC. This
> > inscription seems to use simplified Egyptian hieroglyph shapes to write
> > the consonants of the Semitic language of Asiatic mercenaries serving in
> > the Egyptian army. By 2000 BC cuneiform, complete with vowels, had been
> > in use for a millennium for Sumerian and for several hundred years for
> > Akkadian i.e. East Semitic.
>
> Even if we accept that West Semitic writing derived from hieroglyphs, we
are
> still left with the question why the Egyptians seemingly did not mark
> vowels. At least, we don't know for sure that vowels in Egyptian are
> differentiated.
>
> > >It seems to me that West Semitic is much closer to cuneiform (or,
> perhaps,
> > >vice versa) than to hieroglyphs. Cuneiform looks like cursive West
> Semitic.
> > >This is subjective, of course.
> > >
> > Looks are subjective, but the objective historical evidence proves that
> > you are almost certainly wrong.
>
> Would you please point out that evidence at least broadly? Wadi el-Hol
shows
> very limited resemblance to hieroglyphs, and that semblance could result
> from assimilation of style, couldn't it?
>
> > >>It seems to me that your theory requires an
> > >>explanation of this point. If a vowelless writing system can
> > >>only be explained by an absence of vowel differentiation,
> > >>then significant phonemic differentiation of vowels would
> > >>have created enormous pressure to adapt the writing system.
> > >
> > >It did. Masoretic vowel marks, Arabic diacritics.
> >
> > Which are not used by most modern writers of Hebrew or Arabic script.
>
> They are fluent, sophisticated readers. I'd like to point again that
> ancients are more like students in their reading skills - and students use
> vowels. Also, as I mentioned, casual readers are satisfied with
> understanding 25-27% of the text. Also, ambiguity of vowelless writing
> increases in short texts, which are most common in antiquity.
> It seems to me meaningless to develop a writing system that does not
> distinguish, say, piel from paal - unless there was no distinction then.
>
>
> Vadim Cherny
>
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew