- all vowels seem to derive from kamatz through syntactical accentI ignore this because it is not a fact but another baseless speculation.
elongation and stress-shift shortening
Baseless? Is not it too much for a coincidence that Hebrew vowels "exactly"
match the pattern of syntactical accent elongation and stress shift
shortening?
If we had gdilah instead of gdulah, I would have no argument. But shuruk
derived from complex vowel holam, which lost stress.
If we had godal instead of gadol, I would have no argument. Yet we see
elongation of kamatz exactly on the place of syntactical accent. Same for
tzere in verbs.
Patah in haial appears exactly where stress shifted away from kamatz in
closed syllable.
...
I see. So the language appeared fully formed with all seven (32, by other
accounts) binyans and plenty of mishkals? Or would you accept that earliest
speaking humans - just like Adam - first needed to name the objects? Look at
hieroglyphs, how many grammatical forms are there, in the developed
language?
...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 mean no such thing. What I say, is that Semitic alphabet, though invented
for the developed language with various flexions and vowels, inherited the
writing tradition of much earlier single-vowel proto-language. Perhaps, this
concept was preserved by Egyptians.
...Indeed. Vowelless script was sufficient for ancient Egyptian and for ancient Semitic languages, just as it is for modern Semitic languages (and, as Bill has shown, almost true of English). But that by no means implies that the ancient languages were pronounced without vowels, any more than that is true of the modern languages.
We use machines for transporting stones, they used labor. Ancients wrote the
language, and we write it. But they used more primitive descriptory system,
syllabary, as they used more primitive means of transportation. This does
not imply that their means were inadequate - they were as sufficient as
ours. The vowelless alphabet had to be sufficient for the current language
when it was invented - perhaps by Egyptians.
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