Re: Invention of the Alphabet

Dennis wrote:
>
> 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.

If you don't transcribe your "notes" within a few days, you can't read
them. This has nothing to do with omitted vowels, however.

> 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

If you're going to do this silly exercise, don't leave out notation for
initial vowels (and don't use digraphs):

@mSrycn@ndrstndDs.

> 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.

Persian and Urdu are written with the Arabic script, which marks the
ends of words by means other than additional space.

What, though, is a word?

Do you have any trouble reading Thai or Chinese? No word divisions in
either script.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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