Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

> > I don't say it's impossible to use vowelless script for
> > multi-vowel language. Rather, it is implausible that
> > people who developed script omitted semantically
> > significant vowels. Who would deem acceptable
> > a script that does not unambiguously relate words?
>
> Some of it depends on what you mean by ambiguous. Is it ambiguous that
> in English "read" can be pronounced like "red" or like
> "reed," with a difference of tense between the two? Or that
> spoken /red/ can mean a color or a past-tense verb? Yes, in
> a sense, there is some ambiguity here, but as used in
> context, the ambiguity almost always disappears.

Right. Every script tolerates minor ambiguities. But quantity turns into
quality. Vowelless script contains too much ambiguity. It is syntactically
impossible to distinguish vowelless paal-piel or davar-haial-segholate.
When you write dffclt, the options are two. When you write Hebrew dvr, the
options are sixteen.

> You say that the vowels are the morphology in Hebrew, but
> clearly this is not entirely true. There are consonantal
> prefixes and suffixes for most verbal forms.

Yes and no. Even omitting the prefixes, vowels show the form.
In most cases, vowels are the only morphological instruments.

> You have brought up the distinction between Qal and Piel, but from
> working with Ugaritic, I can tell you that even from the
> remote perspective of a modern scholar, we can usually
> select the appropriate stem form.

How? I don't think that meaning of paal and piel so diverges that it could
be usually derived from context.

> The other problem with your analogy is that
> there is no case in which we're talking about someone
> sitting down and trying to construct a writing system from
> scratch. They started with logograms and progressed from
> there.

I'm not an expert on writing systems, but I didn't hear of any other
vowelless script. When Sumerians created cuneiform for developed multi-vowel
language, they resorted to syllabary. Why no equivalent stage in West
Semitic?

Vadim Cherny