Why did the earliest alphabets (e.g. Phoenician) only use consonants?
You'd think that if you have the bright idea of writing sounds down the simplest approach would be to write them all down instead of a subset, yet it seems no one did that until hundreds of years later.
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People are lazy
Vowels are unnecessary. >90% of the time it is obvious from the context which word is indicated.
Semitic languages such as Phoenician and the Egyptian language they copied their alphabet from don't have fixed vowels in words, the vowel you use depends on the case. Semitic dictionaries list the "roots" of the words, without vowels.
A lot of the information we gain by distinguishing vowels in writing doesn't actually represent what's spoken. In spoken English vowels that aren't emphasized get blended into the same 'uh' kind of sound anyways. It's still useful for making written words more identifiable.
You sad little retard
I always thought I was retarded for sometimes not being able to pin down vowels in words I forget how to spell.
I found this in my new house and it is a wooden box with hand carved drago motives. Im not sure where its from because i live in Austria and there no such things here. If anyone has any idea on the origin of this please do tell.
Thank you
The morphology of Semitic languages is very special. It actually makes sense to leave the vowels out.
en.wikipedia.org
Most Semitic languages have limited vowel registers that don't generally need to be written. When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, you'll notice that they made the letters of the gutteral sounds into vowels
Chinese Arc of the Covenant given to Mo-Xeis
Early writing systems (e.g. Phoenician, Sinaitic, Egyptian) were made for Afro-Asiatic languages which to this day are written without vowells.
In the case of Mayan which is more similar to Indo-European languages phonosyntactically (though not at all related to them) uses a syllabic system which is probably what Indo-European languages would use had they not imported writing from the Near East.
Y sd lttl rtrd
>Why did the earliest alphabets (e.g. Phoenician) only use consonants?
Because we speak in syllables, not in spell out each letter individually.
If you reverse audio recording of one's speech, it will reverse the order of syllables not letters
Creating an abstraction of letters actually needs additional effort to atomise common syllables we naturally speak into smaller units.
P s fggt
classical arabic had 3 vowels
>U lut uf thu unfurmutuon wu guin by dustungushung vuwuls un wrutung dusn't uctullu ruprusunt whut's spukun. Un spukun Unglush vuwuls thut urun't umphusuzud gut blundud untu thu sum 'uh' kund of sund unywuys. Ut's stull usuful fur mukung wruttun wurds muru uduntufublu.
I dunnu....
Because it made sense based on Semitic grammar.
Modern Arabic is the same. They don't really have vowels written down (except for one). Everything is based off triconsontal roots.
So for example, "kataba" (Arabic for 'he wrote') would be written in Arabic as ktb. No vowels.
Aside from the reasons everyone else has said, it's important to note the difference between vowels and consonants.
In a basic sense, consonants are where you produce a blockage of free airflow with your throat, mouth, or tongue. Consonants are pretty definite things, they are defined by a few different things, the main two being:
>the place of articulation
Where the sound is produced, anywhere from you Adam's apple to your mouth/nose.
>the manner of articulation
How you are blocking and releasing air.
There isn't much variation in consonants, and they can be described pretty easily. Vowels are not so well defined, on the other hand. Vowels are basically just how you hold your tongue and mouth while the air flows through.
You could think of it like playing jugs of different shapes and sizes, compared with a guitar for consonants. You could make a jug play endless variations with tiny incremental changes to the size and shape of the jug, but the guitar has solid points of reference in the way of the frets.
So, you can see why it would be easier to represent consonants than vowels. Even when they did get added, it wasn't all at once. Then once you do add them, who's vowels are you using? They can vary a lot between dialects and accents, and much of the differences in English are down to the vowels.
h sn't wrng, y cn tll ntr sntncs sl wtht vwls, m mn
Its hilarious the asians had vowels while Euros were going Crysf LMBVS. Seriously how the hell did they pronounce those consonant cluster words.
rekt
Reminds me of Europa Barbarorum.
There's a unit of Numidian cavalrymen belonging to the Numidian subjects of the Phoenician Carthaginians. They were simply called "Gldgmtk" in the Phoenician alphabet.