Re: Invention of the Alphabet

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

       I just updated my website on the Invention of the Alphabet:

http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/alphabet/index.html

although it's still a bit ragged.  I made use of recent
remarks made here.  I would appreciate any comments!


You seem not to have ever read anything I've written, or you couldn't
include the spurious commonplace "The Greek language cannot be
represented nearly as well without vowels as the Semitic languages can,
so it may have been done out of necessity." If that were true, how would
it be possible for Persian (and many other Iranian languages) to be
written with varieties of Aramaic scripts?

True. It's also true that many shorthand systems leave out vowels.

However, I question how well, and whether, one could write Greek, or English, without vowels if also one did not write word divisions, as was the custom at first.

	I'm sure you can understand this.

	M sr y cn ndrstnd ths

	Msrycnndrstndths

I think Greek would be rather like English in that regard, with about the same sort of consonant cluster sizes. How about Ukrainian? This site is an example of what can go wrong if one leaves out both vowels and word divisions there.

http://home.att.net/~oko/home.htm

Is Persian written without word divisions? How about Urdu? I doubt it, though I don't know.

Dennis

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Invention of the Alphabet
    ... >> represented nearly as well without vowels as the Semitic languages can, ... This has nothing to do with omitted vowels, ... > wrong if one leaves out both vowels and word divisions there. ... Persian and Urdu are written with the Arabic script, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Are Linguistic Changes Accelerated by...
    ... >>> Two reasons that languages might change are to increase the perceptual ... >>> articulatory difficulty of particular sounds or sequences of sounds. ... > lots of vowels have to make use of the periphery of the vowel space ... A certain amount of ambiguity is tolerated, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: BBC does it again
    ... phoneme, and that long vowels are a sequence of two short vowels. ... Does this mean you don't agree that there are such languages? ... orthographies are already used to writing English, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: BBC does it again
    ... >> phoneme, and that long vowels are a sequence of two short vowels. ... Does this mean you don't agree that there are such languages? ... phonemic orthography is an ideal orthography. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Is Unicode character a vowel?
    ... So, basically, the look-up algorithm is fine for the Italian language. ... Obviously in languages where a glyph represents a whole syllable, you cannot classify symbols into vowels and consonants - so that's most of the unicode code points out for a start :-) ... Quite generally the concept of a "vowel" is related to sounds rather than letters. ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.mfc)