While this is cute, it’s not really analogous. Modern English has developed WITH vowels being critical to the language. Hebrew developed with vowels NOT being critical to the language: most words have a base (usually three, sometimes two) consonants, and that base-word is unique (or pretty much so.) You add consonants to make a noun plural, to change verb tense, etc.
Example: In English, written without vowels, the letters “brk” are not understandable. I could mean “brook” or “break” or “bark,” just to name a few. In Hebrew, the letters B-R-Kh always mean “bless” (or equivalent forms, liked “blessed” etc.) So, the “reading without vowels” is not comparable between Hebrew and English.
Think of Chinese today, very similar to ancient pictogrms in the sense that the writing is symbols, you need to memorize lots and lots of them to be able to read. Since the proto-alphabets developed from pictograms, it’s not surprising that there were base recognizable words. Vowels were unneccssary, except for refinements.
Yes, the precursors to the Mayans (some combination, probably, of “proto-Mayan,” “Olmec,” and “proto-Zapotec”) developed the famous system which evolved, like Demotic Egyptian and to some extent Chinese, through the same phases of pictographs –> a few pictographs extended to merely represents their initial sounds. Maya never got much further than this by the time the written culture started to peter out after around 1100 AD, but it did get to the point where at least half of the glyphs on any given text had a significant “phonetic” component to them…so much so that certain Spanish contact-era priests (c. 1500-1550) could mistakenly consider the more common phonetic glyphs to constitute a full-fledged syllabary/alphabet hybrid.
Also there was (are?) some alphabets that were intermediate to pictograph and true alphabet - the syllabics. A “letter” represented a common combination of a consonant and vowel. It’s the logical step from the pictures to the alphabet of individual sounds. But, it’s better suited to the structure of some languages more than others, depending on how many symbols are needed and whether double -vowels are common.
Slowly the idea evolved - the bright idea to turn pictures into “writing”, i.e. a sequence of pictures becomes a narrative sequence of specific words, rather than cues to tell a story around. Then the pictures become simplistic then turned into syllables and eventually individual sounds. Whether the idea occurred spontaneously to several groups, or the idea was borrowed across the globe - who knows?
You don’t have to be literate to understand the idea of literacy “See, this squiggle is the eee sound, this one is the TH sound,…” and pass it on to some bored temple priest on your side of the mountains who might run with the idea.
If we’re arguing literacy and the bible, Moses would likely have been literate, since he was raised in the Pharoah’s court. At least he could read two tablets.
Veggietales did a hilarious take on Jonah about ten years ago. When Jonah tried to run away, he went to the harbor and tried to buy a ticket to Tarshish from a very stereotypical Scotsman.
This is completely off topic so forgive me but since it does mention Abraham there’s at least some semblance of a connection - and I didn’t think this was really worth an MMPS thread.
