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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 o

by 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.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    I'm familiar with the Chinese writing system. :p It's not similar to English at all. Compare this translator's note from https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-Text/dp/0691169314/ https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-Text/dp/0691169314/ : > The other feature of this translation that warrants comment is the handling of rhymed lines. The Xunzi contains numerous rhymed passages... Both Watson and Knoblock often overlook them, as do many translations of the Xunzi into modern Chinese and Japanese and Korean... I consider the presence of these rhymes a feature of the text that is sufficiently noteworth to deserve being reflected conspicuously in the translation. Since the rhyming sections can easily be overlooked... I have chosen to make them conspicuous by translating rhymed passages in Chinese with rhymed sections of English... > The identification of the rhymes in the Chinese text requires detailed knowledge of ancient phonology that I lack, and so I have relied on published studies of rhymes in the Xunzi by other scholars. Since their analyses may have missed some of the rhyming passages, and since there is ongoing scholarly debate about how to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Chinese in the first place, I do not claim to have identified every instance of rhyme in the text... So: - In Old Chinese, before the pronunciation divergence you mention, the form of a character is not a guide to its pronunciation. (Rather, the pronunciation of another character is often used as inspiration when inventing a new character. But the relationship of a new character to its component parts is not regular or predictable.) - By inspection of text, it isn't possible even to tell the difference between text that rhymes and text that doesn't rhyme, much less to tell what the words sounded like. - A scholar who is competent to translate text written in Old Chinese is completely incompetent to determine whether Old Chinese text rhymes or doesn't rhyme. That's an entirely different field of study. - Even when a scholar has published a book devoted to identifying rhymes within a very famous text, it is considered likely that that book will have just plain overlooked a number of rhymed passages. These are not symptoms of a writing system that reflects the sounds of the language. The information conveyed by the writing about the sound of Chinese is so close to zero that the difference is immaterial. Go look at some English rhyming poetry, and ask yourself how easy it would be, if you didn't know English, to tell the difference between that and unrhymed prose.
    - PeterisP 8y ago
PhantomGremlin 8y ago
That's the power of beginnings. A great illustration of this is alphabets. Look at the Latin Alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet Most ancient words are "foreign" (heh-heh), but most letters are quite recognizable. Also quite a few of the ancient Greek letters are still in today's English alphabet (via Latin).

by Radim 8y ago

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.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  I'm familiar with the Chinese writing system. :p It's not similar to English at all. Compare this translator's note from https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-Text/dp/0691169314/ https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-Text/dp/0691169314/ : > The other feature of this translation that warrants comment is the handling of rhymed lines. The Xunzi contains numerous rhymed passages... Both Watson and Knoblock often overlook them, as do many translations of the Xunzi into modern Chinese and Japanese and Korean... I consider the presence of these rhymes a feature of the text that is sufficiently noteworth to deserve being reflected conspicuously in the translation. Since the rhyming sections can easily be overlooked... I have chosen to make them conspicuous by translating rhymed passages in Chinese with rhymed sections of English... > The identification of the rhymes in the Chinese text requires detailed knowledge of ancient phonology that I lack, and so I have relied on published studies of rhymes in the Xunzi by other scholars. Since their analyses may have missed some of the rhyming passages, and since there is ongoing scholarly debate about how to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Chinese in the first place, I do not claim to have identified every instance of rhyme in the text... So: - In Old Chinese, before the pronunciation divergence you mention, the form of a character is not a guide to its pronunciation. (Rather, the pronunciation of another character is often used as inspiration when inventing a new character. But the relationship of a new character to its component parts is not regular or predictable.) - By inspection of text, it isn't possible even to tell the difference between text that rhymes and text that doesn't rhyme, much less to tell what the words sounded like. - A scholar who is competent to translate text written in Old Chinese is completely incompetent to determine whether Old Chinese text rhymes or doesn't rhyme. That's an entirely different field of study. - Even when a scholar has published a book devoted to identifying rhymes within a very famous text, it is considered likely that that book will have just plain overlooked a number of rhymed passages. These are not symptoms of a writing system that reflects the sounds of the language. The information conveyed by the writing about the sound of Chinese is so close to zero that the difference is immaterial. Go look at some English rhyming poetry, and ask yourself how easy it would be, if you didn't know English, to tell the difference between that and unrhymed prose.
  - PeterisP 8y ago

PhantomGremlin 8y ago

That's the power of beginnings. A great illustration of this is alphabets. Look at the Latin Alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet Most ancient words are "foreign" (heh-heh), but most letters are quite recognizable. Also quite a few of the ancient Greek letters are still in today's English alphabet (via Latin).