Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>wrote:

> An online "for-the-layman" article on the subject is at:
>
> http://www.thewritingcode.com/pages/transcripts/daniels.html


Wow! I didn’t finish the first paragraph when I already disagreed with the
author. He wrote, “Writing is not about ideas.” He could be hardly more
wrong. Without ideas, there is no reason to write. He continues, “Writing
has to involve the sounds of the language” which rules out the oldest, most
basic of Chinese, for example.

Yitzhak Sapir

On another issue he wrote, “ It’s simply a fact that the syllable is the
smallest piece of speech that you can naturally break a word down into, and,
in fact, it was syllables that people in the modern world wrote down when
they invented scripts for their own language.” If this is the case for
modern invented writing systems and Korean, this is also how I and some
others on this list understand the invention of Hebrew writing. This is why
we think it included only the consonants. Even in late Hebrew, the only way
to close a syllable with a consonant is to add another character. But if
each character originally stood for a syllable, adding a closing character
would also add another vowel. So if Hebrew was originally a syllabary, as I
think it was, then the evidence within Hebrew indicates that Hebrew
originally was a CV language.

Yitzhak, thanks for the link. It was interesting.

Karl W. Randolph.