Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net>]

Vadim Cherny wrote:
> what if the ancient Hebrew writing was not letters as we use them in
>
> modern languages (and even in some ancient languages such as Greek) giving
> every sound, rather it was a syllabery? And that each syllable was a
> consonant followed by a vowel?
>
> Cuneiform has diiferent signs for syllables differing by vowel. Hebrew has
> no such distinction. I suggest that proto-West Semitic or Egyptian script
> was syllabary (there was not concept of individual letters yet), but since
> the language had a single vowel, syllables were equivalent to consonants.

You would have to add that a character could represent a letter by 
itself without a vowel or a letter preceded by a vowel. At this point, 
there is little practical difference between this and saying that it 
doesn't say anything about vowels at all. Incidentally, the idea that 
West Semitic script is a syllabary has already been advanced. I'm not 
terribly familiar with the theory, but it has been discussed several 
times on the ANE list. The general outlook is that writing started with 
logograms, then logosyllabary, then syllabary (West Semitic), then 
alphabet. But as I recall, the point is supposed to be that the West 
Semitic syllabary allowed each character to represent a consonant 
followed by any (or no) vowel, so it's not quite what you're saying, but 
fairly close.

Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics