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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: Vadim Cherny <VadimCherny AT mail.ru>
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Why Semitic languages had no written vowels?
  • Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 12:11:09 +0100

On 03/05/2005 07:06, Vadim Cherny wrote:

What do you mean by a "complex vowel"? Although possibly shuruq and
holam were originally one vowel, they were certainly distinct from
qamats. You have no argument.



Of course, I do, you just do not listen.

I treat tzere and holam as complex vowels ae and au, as opposed to simple
vowels a, u, i. Complex vowels exist only accented, and break into simple
when losing stress or limited by a stop (diber- dibar.ti).


My point is that complex vowels are still vowels. Your argument about the alphabet requires that Hebrew has no vowels at all, or at most one vowel with no distinctions.

...
I likewise explain every morphological form. They all derived from the davar
form.


In this case you need to explain why in many cases there are semantically distinct words which differ from one another only in their vowels. On your theory this is impossible.

...


In the most simplest form, the argument boils down to: did the Hebrew (or
proto-Egyptian, for that matter) emerged as developed language, or did it
start from a single grammatical form, likely davar? I think, the latter is
obvious. If so, it has necessarily the single vowel - just did not use
others.


You seem to assume that Hebrew emerged in isolation as some kind of proto-language among a previously entirely mute population. But that simply did not happen. The very first human languages may have emerged like that, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, but they were not Hebrew (and probably already had many vowels). Hebrew clearly emerged from common West Semitic, and the latter from proto-Semitic, and that from a common Afro-Asiatic root, by gradual processes (possible other steps omitted). It is known that proto-Semitic already had multiple binyanim, and was already a fully developed language with millennia of history - all of it long before anyone had even thought of alphabetic writing.

...


Well, this is a new claim and an interesting one. I suppose you claim
that the concept of consonant-only writing was developed before the
dynastic period of Egypt for a non-Semitic language and preserved
throughout millennia from which the only surviving writing is
hieroglyphic - only to reemerge with the same concept but different
letter shapes for a different type of language. Not impossible, I
suppose, but it does seem highly unlikely, and you do not have a shred
of evidence.



I do. Besides the already mentioned reasoning that vowelless syllabary (or
alphabet) is natural only in the absence of differentiated vowels, another
argument is historical. When Moses came to Israelites, they did not know God
under the name Moses knew. Quite obviously to me, Moses made a standard
trick of associating their earlier beliefs with the new religion by
proclaiming that two names both refer to God. I do not seriously doubt that
Moses passed to Israelities ancient Egyptian religion (already surpassed by
polyteist beliefs in Egypt proper) of Aton. Why not suppose that among other
knowledge, he passed to them old Egyptian tradition of writing?


By Moses' time, Egyptian hieroglyphs had been in use for nearly two millennia, and the only writing known in Egypt was this and simplified variants of it. This, and nothing else, was the old tradition of writing.

The religion of Aten was not ancient Egyptian religion, but if it did predate Moses it did so by less than a century.

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



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