5 ms·

The most common use is probably as a determinative. Ancient Egyptian, much like many Semitic languages, omits the vowels in a word in writing. Determinatives ar

The most common use is probably as a determinative. Ancient Egyptian, much like many Semitic languages, omits the vowels in a word in writing. Determinatives are ideograms that disambiguate between several words with the same consonants but different meanings. That's an interesting fact. As someone with no knowledge of how languages are formed it makes me wonder why have a written language that purposefully omits vowels if other characters would need to be introduced in their place for disambiguation? What was the point of removing vowels?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jrochkind1 8y ago
They didn't remove em, it just never occured to them to have them. There's still an interesting question about why old languages from that region didn't have vowels, if this is true of other ancient written languages from other regions, when vowels were added/why/etc.
- irrational 8y ago
  They didn't need them. If you remove the vowels from your sentence you will find that you will probably still be able to read it. Modern Hebrew and Arabic get along just fine without vowels. Children's books in Hebrew do have the vowels since the kids don't know yet how to pronounce the words, but gradually they kids grow up and the vowels are gradually dropped out until they can read without them just like adults.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Still strange, given the rebus principle of phonetic hieroglyph use mentioned above: why would I use a pictures of a bee and a rock to form the sound baroque? Why not a bar and a rock (or a ba, whatever that would be)? If you take existing, drawable words you implicitly get the vowels with the consonants, unless explicitly ruled out by convention. Maybe the answer is dialects, that there was much wider consensus over the spoken consonants than over the spoken vowels. Lacking audio recordings we will never find out (it's crazy enough that we can reconstruct those languages to the point where so many translations turn out somewhat plausible)
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    I'm not sure what is obvious or implicit to you was obvious or implicit to people speaking/writing ancient egyptian languages. Hebrew still (mostly) lacks vowels (and Arabic has a few, but is missing some we'd expect as important to pronunciation), to this day. I wonder if we asked a contemporary Hebrew speaker if "you implicitly get the vowels with the consonants" when you combine phonetic representations, if they would agree. In any event, it's usually a mistake to assume you know what was obvious or implicit or straightforward to people living thousands of years ago. Different things were.
    - usrusr 8y ago
      When you have a symbol representing a word, it represents all the defined (by convention) properties of the word. All the semantics, all the the vocalization. The defined part, that is. You don't get any undefined parts, e.g. if you had separate symbols for "read (past tense)" and "read (present tense)" they would "naturally" include relative speed but not relative pitch. If vowels are significant at one point in the language's use, but the rebus principle allows for mismatching substitutions it would be a strong indication that at some earlier point they were not, either because they had regionally differing conventions (while still mutually understood) or because they were just filled in ad-hoc based on context (e.g. how pitch is decided upon when speaking a language where it is not significant: just make it sound pleasant and/or communicate macro structure). Of course, over time weird things do happen and you might end up with a mess like english where the relationship between phonetic encoding and actual vocalization is incredibly weak and serves only as a hint for narrowing down the actual encoding+context to semantics to vocalization lookup chain.
  - jhbadger 8y ago
    Actually in ancient Egyptian in many cases there are multiple ways to write a given word as multiple characters could yield the same sounds.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Chinese writing to this day doesn't indicate the sound of the word at all. A fortiori, it doesn't indicate vowels. The first written Semitic language, Akkadian, _does_ indicate vowels, because doing so is mandatory in the writing system Akkadian used, the cuneiform originally developed for Sumerian. (Egyptian is closely related to the Semitic languages, but not quite closely enough that it's called Semitic. Instead both are grouped together in the larger category of "afroasiatic" languages, also including other south-Mediterranean languages.) It may never have occurred to the Egyptians to include vowels in their writing, but omitting vowels from Phoenician can only have been a purposeful choice, as the existing systems (except Egyptian) did have them.
  - jrochkind1 8y ago
    Thanks for the more information! I may not have known what I thought I knew. However, some googling leaves me still unsure. This web page suggests that the earliest known written languages were all vowel-less, including the ancient Egyptian alphabet, Proto-Canaanite, Phoenician, and South Arabian. It doesn't mention Akkadian though. https://www.ancient.eu/alphabet/ https://www.ancient.eu/alphabet/ Other googling suggests Phoenician developed from Proto-Canaanite. Even if other written languages with vowels were around at the time it developed, I don't know if that means it was a _purposeful choice_ exactly. Just based on how languages works, it seems plausible it just evolved from Proto-Canaanite by people who knew how to write Proto-Canaanite, which doesn't necessarily mean they thought "Gee, should we add in vowels like those Akkadians?" I don't know if we have any way of knowing? But you may know more about it than me, or what I found on google.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      That page does mention Akkadian in passing, by referring to "Cuneiform". It accurately notes that there are many more cuneiform signs than there are sounds being represented, and so it's not really right to call cuneiform an "alphabet". However, it is still true that (particularly by that point) cuneiform writing obligatorily indicated vowels. A fun fact that I particularly like: the form "Ra" for the old Egyptian sun deity is a transcription convention which transcribes an Egyptian consonant as the vowel "a". The Egyptians generally did not include a vowel in their writings of the name. However, we actually do know the vowel used in the god's name, because he is mentioned in diplomatic correspondence, written in Akkadian. The vowel is [i] (as in the English word "bee"), occurring between the R and the "A" (which is actually one of those back-of-throat consonants that modern Egyptians are so proud of).
Radim 8y ago
They didn't "remove vowels" as much as started out without them! We're talking times when writing itself was utter novelty, a curiosity performed by a handful of scribes primarily for accounting purposes, and of no great importance to daily life at all. By contrast, cuneiform (of Sumer origin -- a traditional rival power to ancient Egypt) did have vowels. A surprising amount of history—writing, speaking, war, splitting the world into objects, naming them, whatever—is pure chance, turned tradition, turned myth and legend. That's the power of beginnings.
- irrational 8y ago
  When were the Sumerians a rival power to the Egyptians? The civilizations that followed the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (e.g., Assyrians, Babylonians, etc.) were definitely competitors with Egypt, but I don't recall ever reading about the Sumerians competing with Egypt. Do you have a source for that?
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > By contrast, cuneiform (of Sumer origin -- a traditional rival power to ancient Egypt) did have vowels. One caveat: As I understand things, Sumerian started out without vowels (or consonants), much like Chinese, but developed phonetic usage over time (unlike Chinese :( ). This has resulted in early texts being much harder to read than later texts.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    Chinese did develop phonetic usage. Most characters are phono-semantic compounds, where part of the character is a character whose meaning is related (e.g. 驴 [lǘ] (donkey) contains 马 [mǎ] (horse)) and the other part has a similar pronunciation (e.g. 吗 [ma] (auxiliary word marking questions) also contains 马). Unfortunately, those characters are mostly pretty old and the pronunciations have diverged. So the situation is a bit similar to that of English, where the orthography is a good guide to Middle English pronunciation, but confusing for modern people. Linguists love that it enables them to reconstruct ancient pronunciations, of course.
    - 8y ago
rogerbinns 8y ago
> no knowledge of how languages are formed I recommend reading this article. The problem he is solving is representing text in ASCII. For example an e with an accent can be replaced with a plain e. But what about languages not using the base Roman alphabet? You get a fascinating tour of Divehi and the final result - the unidecode module - works rather well. http://interglacial.com/tpj/22/ http://interglacial.com/tpj/22/
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  > "I am rather sure, however, that it cannot be done with a mere regular expression, and that is not something I say lightly!" This sounds like a challenge.
TheDong 8y ago
In the same way their written language couldn't express vowels, the english written language cannot adequately express the full range of tones and pauses we have when speaking. People have attempted to convey some portions of spoken tone with thing like the "<sarcasm>" tag, and commas/ellipses/etc all convey some level of pauses, but they are not substitutes for the full nuance of spoken english. Asking "Why did their written language not convey the full range of spoken sounds by default" is like asking "Why doesn't written English contain volume cues to indicate when the speaking tone should be louder". All written languages that are created to represent a spoken language are inherently lossy.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  An even more direct comparison might be something like "I read that book," which has two different meanings that are pronounced differently but spelled the same.
- PhantomGremlin 8y ago
  they are not substitutes for the full nuance of spoken english. A good illustration of this can be found in live speeches or interviews. A transcript often seems confusing or disjointed. When you view the actual speech itself it's cohesive and easily understood.
Retra 8y ago
I imagine it's a bit like early music notations which left out the rhythm. The idea being that you'd probably have heard the music already, so the rhythm part would be passed verbally and didn't need to be written. Likewise with vowels...
ardy42 8y ago
> That's an interesting fact. As someone with no knowledge of how languages are formed it makes me wonder why have a written language that purposefully omits vowels if other characters would need to be introduced in their place for disambiguation? What was the point of removing vowels? My understanding is the Semitic languages don't use vowels the same way that Indo-European languages do, and they can be typically inferred from context. Also, they didn't "remove" vowels, but rather Indo-Europeans added them. Specifically when the Greeks adopted the Phonetician alphabet, they took a bunch of the letters that stood for consonants they didn't use and re-purposed them to represent the vowels that they needed to intelligibly write their language.
nickm12 8y ago
I'm not sure how accurate this is, but one thing I have read is that ancient writing was in some ways used as an aid to memory, rather than a means of communication. Imagine you have your cultural sagas and songs that are memorized and passed down from generation to generation. When writing arises, you use it as a way to make it easier to recite. You might not really care much about the "missing" vowels and you save parchment. Once you start down this path, you might go quite far before it occurs to someone to add vowels.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jrochkind1 8y ago

They didn't remove em, it just never occured to them to have them. There's still an interesting question about why old languages from that region didn't have vowels, if this is true of other ancient written languages from other regions, when vowels were added/why/etc.

irrational 8y ago
They didn't need them. If you remove the vowels from your sentence you will find that you will probably still be able to read it. Modern Hebrew and Arabic get along just fine without vowels. Children's books in Hebrew do have the vowels since the kids don't know yet how to pronounce the words, but gradually they kids grow up and the vowels are gradually dropped out until they can read without them just like adults.
usrusr 8y ago
Still strange, given the rebus principle of phonetic hieroglyph use mentioned above: why would I use a pictures of a bee and a rock to form the sound baroque? Why not a bar and a rock (or a ba, whatever that would be)? If you take existing, drawable words you implicitly get the vowels with the consonants, unless explicitly ruled out by convention. Maybe the answer is dialects, that there was much wider consensus over the spoken consonants than over the spoken vowels. Lacking audio recordings we will never find out (it's crazy enough that we can reconstruct those languages to the point where so many translations turn out somewhat plausible)
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  I'm not sure what is obvious or implicit to you was obvious or implicit to people speaking/writing ancient egyptian languages. Hebrew still (mostly) lacks vowels (and Arabic has a few, but is missing some we'd expect as important to pronunciation), to this day. I wonder if we asked a contemporary Hebrew speaker if "you implicitly get the vowels with the consonants" when you combine phonetic representations, if they would agree. In any event, it's usually a mistake to assume you know what was obvious or implicit or straightforward to people living thousands of years ago. Different things were.
  - usrusr 8y ago
    When you have a symbol representing a word, it represents all the defined (by convention) properties of the word. All the semantics, all the the vocalization. The defined part, that is. You don't get any undefined parts, e.g. if you had separate symbols for "read (past tense)" and "read (present tense)" they would "naturally" include relative speed but not relative pitch. If vowels are significant at one point in the language's use, but the rebus principle allows for mismatching substitutions it would be a strong indication that at some earlier point they were not, either because they had regionally differing conventions (while still mutually understood) or because they were just filled in ad-hoc based on context (e.g. how pitch is decided upon when speaking a language where it is not significant: just make it sound pleasant and/or communicate macro structure). Of course, over time weird things do happen and you might end up with a mess like english where the relationship between phonetic encoding and actual vocalization is incredibly weak and serves only as a hint for narrowing down the actual encoding+context to semantics to vocalization lookup chain.
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Actually in ancient Egyptian in many cases there are multiple ways to write a given word as multiple characters could yield the same sounds.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
Chinese writing to this day doesn't indicate the sound of the word at all. A fortiori, it doesn't indicate vowels. The first written Semitic language, Akkadian, _does_ indicate vowels, because doing so is mandatory in the writing system Akkadian used, the cuneiform originally developed for Sumerian. (Egyptian is closely related to the Semitic languages, but not quite closely enough that it's called Semitic. Instead both are grouped together in the larger category of "afroasiatic" languages, also including other south-Mediterranean languages.) It may never have occurred to the Egyptians to include vowels in their writing, but omitting vowels from Phoenician can only have been a purposeful choice, as the existing systems (except Egyptian) did have them.
- jrochkind1 8y ago
  Thanks for the more information! I may not have known what I thought I knew. However, some googling leaves me still unsure. This web page suggests that the earliest known written languages were all vowel-less, including the ancient Egyptian alphabet, Proto-Canaanite, Phoenician, and South Arabian. It doesn't mention Akkadian though. https://www.ancient.eu/alphabet/ https://www.ancient.eu/alphabet/ Other googling suggests Phoenician developed from Proto-Canaanite. Even if other written languages with vowels were around at the time it developed, I don't know if that means it was a _purposeful choice_ exactly. Just based on how languages works, it seems plausible it just evolved from Proto-Canaanite by people who knew how to write Proto-Canaanite, which doesn't necessarily mean they thought "Gee, should we add in vowels like those Akkadians?" I don't know if we have any way of knowing? But you may know more about it than me, or what I found on google.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    That page does mention Akkadian in passing, by referring to "Cuneiform". It accurately notes that there are many more cuneiform signs than there are sounds being represented, and so it's not really right to call cuneiform an "alphabet". However, it is still true that (particularly by that point) cuneiform writing obligatorily indicated vowels. A fun fact that I particularly like: the form "Ra" for the old Egyptian sun deity is a transcription convention which transcribes an Egyptian consonant as the vowel "a". The Egyptians generally did not include a vowel in their writings of the name. However, we actually do know the vowel used in the god's name, because he is mentioned in diplomatic correspondence, written in Akkadian. The vowel is [i] (as in the English word "bee"), occurring between the R and the "A" (which is actually one of those back-of-throat consonants that modern Egyptians are so proud of).

Radim 8y ago

They didn't "remove vowels" as much as started out without them! We're talking times when writing itself was utter novelty, a curiosity performed by a handful of scribes primarily for accounting purposes, and of no great importance to daily life at all. By contrast, cuneiform (of Sumer origin -- a traditional rival power to ancient Egypt) did have vowels. A surprising amount of history—writing, speaking, war, splitting the world into objects, naming them, whatever—is pure chance, turned tradition, turned myth and legend. That's the power of beginnings.

irrational 8y ago
When were the Sumerians a rival power to the Egyptians? The civilizations that followed the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (e.g., Assyrians, Babylonians, etc.) were definitely competitors with Egypt, but I don't recall ever reading about the Sumerians competing with Egypt. Do you have a source for that?
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> By contrast, cuneiform (of Sumer origin -- a traditional rival power to ancient Egypt) did have vowels. One caveat: As I understand things, Sumerian started out without vowels (or consonants), much like Chinese, but developed phonetic usage over time (unlike Chinese :( ). This has resulted in early texts being much harder to read than later texts.
- yorwba 8y ago
  Chinese did develop phonetic usage. Most characters are phono-semantic compounds, where part of the character is a character whose meaning is related (e.g. 驴 [lǘ] (donkey) contains 马 [mǎ] (horse)) and the other part has a similar pronunciation (e.g. 吗 [ma] (auxiliary word marking questions) also contains 马). Unfortunately, those characters are mostly pretty old and the pronunciations have diverged. So the situation is a bit similar to that of English, where the orthography is a good guide to Middle English pronunciation, but confusing for modern people. Linguists love that it enables them to reconstruct ancient pronunciations, of course.
  - 8y ago

rogerbinns 8y ago

> no knowledge of how languages are formed I recommend reading this article. The problem he is solving is representing text in ASCII. For example an e with an accent can be replaced with a plain e. But what about languages not using the base Roman alphabet? You get a fascinating tour of Divehi and the final result - the unidecode module - works rather well. http://interglacial.com/tpj/22/ http://interglacial.com/tpj/22/

logfromblammo 8y ago
> "I am rather sure, however, that it cannot be done with a mere regular expression, and that is not something I say lightly!" This sounds like a challenge.

TheDong 8y ago

In the same way their written language couldn't express vowels, the english written language cannot adequately express the full range of tones and pauses we have when speaking. People have attempted to convey some portions of spoken tone with thing like the "<sarcasm>" tag, and commas/ellipses/etc all convey some level of pauses, but they are not substitutes for the full nuance of spoken english. Asking "Why did their written language not convey the full range of spoken sounds by default" is like asking "Why doesn't written English contain volume cues to indicate when the speaking tone should be louder". All written languages that are created to represent a spoken language are inherently lossy.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago
An even more direct comparison might be something like "I read that book," which has two different meanings that are pronounced differently but spelled the same.
PhantomGremlin 8y ago
they are not substitutes for the full nuance of spoken english. A good illustration of this can be found in live speeches or interviews. A transcript often seems confusing or disjointed. When you view the actual speech itself it's cohesive and easily understood.

Retra 8y ago

I imagine it's a bit like early music notations which left out the rhythm. The idea being that you'd probably have heard the music already, so the rhythm part would be passed verbally and didn't need to be written. Likewise with vowels...

ardy42 8y ago

> That's an interesting fact. As someone with no knowledge of how languages are formed it makes me wonder why have a written language that purposefully omits vowels if other characters would need to be introduced in their place for disambiguation? What was the point of removing vowels? My understanding is the Semitic languages don't use vowels the same way that Indo-European languages do, and they can be typically inferred from context. Also, they didn't "remove" vowels, but rather Indo-Europeans added them. Specifically when the Greeks adopted the Phonetician alphabet, they took a bunch of the letters that stood for consonants they didn't use and re-purposed them to represent the vowels that they needed to intelligibly write their language.

nickm12 8y ago

I'm not sure how accurate this is, but one thing I have read is that ancient writing was in some ways used as an aid to memory, rather than a means of communication. Imagine you have your cultural sagas and songs that are memorized and passed down from generation to generation. When writing arises, you use it as a way to make it easier to recite. You might not really care much about the "missing" vowels and you save parchment. Once you start down this path, you might go quite far before it occurs to someone to add vowels.