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 Be

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