4 ms·

I always wonder if this "no one wrote down vowels" thing was really because these languages were spoken without vowels. The insertion could just be projection o

• ubernostrum 10y ago
  I always wonder if this "no one wrote down vowels" thing was really because these languages were spoken without vowels. The issue with your theory is the numerous counterexamples of languages from the same region which did not (and in fact still do not in plenty of cases) include vowel indicators in their writing systems, but nonetheless spoke and still speak the vowels. Also, Egyptian is known to have included "determinative" hieroglyphs for cases where the reading would otherwise be ambiguous; the determinative allowed words with the same consonant structure but different vowels to be distinguished from each other (though the determinative itself did not encode a vowel; instead it indicated what type or category of thing the preceding word was, which allowed the reader to choose the correct option). Plus your example of a vowel-less word is from a language which does have vowels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxalk_language#Vowels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuxalk_language#Vowels
  • mchaver 10y ago
    Right, it is not correct to say that Nuxalk has no vowels, but it does have many words with fricatives as syllable nuclei.
  • stephengillie 10y ago
    So it's similar to shortening sentences with abbreviations - "Cn y txt yr sstr?"
• mchaver 10y ago
  A lot of Afro-Asiatic languages like Arabic and Semitic also have the "write no vowels" pattern. That being said, there are other Afro-Asiatic languages like Berber that have those long consonant strings. I am not too familiar with these languages, but I wonder if there is some schwa epenthesis happening in those clusters. It does seems that Nuxalk (Bella Coola) has lots of consonants stringed together. You can listen to some here. http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/BLC/blc.html http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/BLC/blc.html