After reading about the development of a written language in a couple of different places, I’m surprised that in every case, vowels were introduced to the alphabet after the consonants. Why is this? Certainly a person writing the word “run” would know there’s a sound that differentiates it from “ran” and that “rn” isn’t descriptive enough.
I’ve heard (in a lecture) that in Semitic languages the meaning of the word is tied primarily to its sequence of consonants, and the vowels are variable depending on the part of speech. So as we find “send,” “sending,” “sends,” etc. in the same dictionary entry, they might have several words that look very different to us but actually mean the same thing because the sequence of consonants is the same.
What do you mean in every case? Certainly Latin and Greek had alphabet symbols for vowels from the beginning of their writing. The same symbol was used form both I/ J and U/V originally in Latin, but they had a symbol and A E O had their own symbol.
I was referring to the organic creation of a written language from scratch; something that has happened only a few times in history. The Latin and Greek alphabet were derived from previous examples.
T’s cmmn fr Nglsh spkrs t shrtn wrds b tkng t th vwls.
I mean, it’s common for English speakers to shorten words by taking out the vowels. For text messaging, as an example. They don’t seem as critcally necessary as consonants. Of course, there are not so many vowels, and many words use a sort of grunting vowel sound that hardly differentiates most vowel usages.
Dang. Now “vowel” has turned into a completely unfamiliar and pathologically weird looking word. How long will it take THIS one to go away?
I, too, question “in every case.” As pointed out above, the Semitic languages have a grammar where that practice makes sense.
Chinese didn’t write vowels OR consonants, or, to put it another way, they wrote both vowels and consonants, just not phonetically.
Many scripts that arose in Asia are syllabic, meaning that they are consonant + vowel. True, the consonants seem to be primary, but both are written.
I’ve always been under the impression that the alphabet evolved independently only once, actually. And given that the Phonecian language was Semitic, and that most (if not all) Semitic languages use the system of consonantal roots that mwbrooks alluded to. So it makes sense that vowels wouldn’t have been added until later.