...
My mistake about Egyptian. But, then, how much do we really know about the
Ancient Egyptian vowels? All we know, I think, is mere guesswork. Egyptian
also seems close to Semitic in the root system.
And many languages including English omit semantically
significant data - even Russian, which normally fails to distinguish in
the orthography e.g. muka "flour" from muka "torment" (a stress
difference), and vsye "all (plural)" from vsyo "all (neuter singular)".
The Russian examples are incorrect, ...
... but I accept your point that otherJust as in Semitic languages vowels are meaningful but usually inessential, because they can be derived from the context. Orthographies make the distinctions which are necessary for clear understanding, but sometimes do not make inessential distinctions.
languages omit semantically significant stress. A likely explanation for
this, in my opinion, is that stress differentiated based on syntactical
usage. Thus, English speaker cannot confuse recOrd and rEcord even with
wrong stress because of the syntactical difference. So, stress is meaningful
but usually unessential.
I would say that two vowels in Abkhaz are really allophones, originally one
vowel. ...
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