Alphabets without vowels

The first Semitic Alphabet was quite important in the development of later alphabets which were based upon it. Like the early Greek alphabet, there were other alphabets which didn't have symbols for vowels until much later on. This is quite difficult for some of us, including the author, who don't have a knowledge of languages with this characteristic. This form of writing is called "consonant writing" or "consonantal writing".

If you refer back to the alphabet tree, the Proto-Semitic script is at the top. The main change from the Proto-Semitic to the Phoenician script was that the latter script became more abstract and the letters less resembled the object upon which the original Proto-Semitic character was based.

(click on this for an image you can actually read - sorry)

An interesting point of comparison between Hebrew, Arabic and English is the use of different symbols for the same "letter" depending upon where the letter appears appears in the word. In English we are used to to using a different shape for the first letter of our alphabet if it occurs as the first letter in the word - i.e. "A" is used as a capital letter and "a" is the lower case letter. Here is our alphabet with the uppercase versions written underneath:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

For this font, the letters CKOSUVWXZ seem to have very similar lower case versions. Hebrew uses different versions of four letters (kap, mem, pe and tsade) - the second version being used if the letter occurs "last" in a word. Or is it "first" given that Hebrew is written right to left?

Arabic is very interesting in that it has three versions of a letter depending upon whether the letter occurs at the beginning, the end or the middle of the word. The use of a specific version of a letter for a particular place in a word is called allography and the letters so used are called allographs.

Now, back to languages which didn't have vowels in them - the so called consonontal writing systems.

Referring back to Boeree's alphabet tree, locate the branch occurring at Canaanite/Phoenician/Early Hebrew, and follow that right hand branch through Aramaic to Hebrew (Square and Modern). The Hebrews adapted the Aramaic script into what has become known as Jewish or square script.

Although we have departed from the branch containing Modern Roman, this serves as a good illustration of how the consonantal Aramaic was adapted to an alphabet containing vowels by using diacritics. By 900 BCE, dots and lines were being added to letters to indicate the presence of a vowel. The following implementation of diacritic use was known as the Tiberian system - Tiberias was a city in Palestine.

This example shows how the letter "b" (bet) was "accented" (using the French equivalent term):







The superscripts on the letter "o" (i.e. bo¹, and bo²) indicate pronunciation variations between dialects.

Around 600AD a group of scribes in Tiberias supplemented the vowel dicaritics with further embellishments which indicated how the texts were to be chanted. This was considered important because the Jewish people were adopting the local languages more and more for everyday use, and the Hebrew was left for religious occasions and texts.

On the map to the left, Tiberias is North East of Nazareth.

But I digress.

The alphabets of India, Buddhist Southeast Asia and Ethiopia also add vowel marks to consonant letters.

Vajda contends that one of the modern day Ethiopian alphabets derives from Phoenecian consonant writing, but this is at variance from Boeree (see his alphabet tree again). The language, Amharic, uses diacritics with consonants the denote vowel sounds and they produce what are called "syllabic letters". I will not go any further into these here but I refer you to Vajda and Omniglot (see References last post) should you want to read further.

It is interesting that Omniglot agrees with Boeree (see Reference last post)about the origins of the Ethiopian language. Just to clarify the situation, there are about 5 languages spoken in Ethiopia, of which Amharic is the most widely spoken. Both Boeree and Omniglot agree that Ethiopian (well, Ahmaric) derives from the Proto-Semitic writing system via the Sabaean writing system. A reference for Sabaean is again at Omniglot Another interesting note is that the now extinct Sabaean was once spoken in Saba in southern Arabia. We know Saba as the biblical name Sheba.

Well, thanks for following this week. Next week I'll come back to the main branch of Boeree which puts us back on track for the Roman Alphabet.

Thanks for reading this week!

Tez


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Discussion/Reflection

describe the research process for that week

Following Boeree's alphabet tree, I continued to look at the consonantal nature of the Phoenician language alphabet. This led onto investigating how the vowels were incorporated into their alphabet without adding any new letters, a process which I found intriguing. Their use of diacritics led me to a brief examination of a similar change that was made to Ancient Hebrew - it uses consonantal alphabet also. I then wondered about accents in French and when/why diacritics are used in English words (e.g. learnèd and Brontë).


document your research findings so far

The consonantal alphabets added special markings to existing "letters" so that vowel sounds could be explicitly incorporated in writing. In the case of speakers of Ancient ("Square") Hebrew, this was done for pragmatic reasons. Local languages were adopted for convenience, and spoken Hebrew was relegated to religious ceremonies. With this relegation came loss of familiarity with the spoken language and the previously "understood" placement of vowel sounds. The diacritics were adopted to maintain the integrity of Hebrew pronunciation for subsequent generations.



include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

I have strayed a little from the predicted research path but have encountered some fascinating facts about how alphabets have evolved and, just as importantly, why? The difficulty this week has been "what to leave out". There is so much amazing material to be read. I have decided to "get back to the Etruscans" but I have enjoyed the journey this week.


share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

The French use diacritics to change the sound of letters.

For French words which have a diacritic on a letter when written in lowercase (eg the e in sales, meaning salted), the diacritic is sometimes omitted when capitals are used. So biscuits saleés (salted crackers) "may" be written BISCUITS SALES on a sign. One problem with this is that "biscuits sales" means dirty crackers, as does BISCUIT SALES! Some people prefer to maintain the diacritic (also known as an accent) when the letter is capitalised, so it is written BISCUIT SALEÉS instead. The practice of leaving out the accent on capitalised letters was a throw back to the times when diacritics could not be represented on early computer keyboards, so their inclusion became optional.

Some French diacritics, eg that used in étude, derives from the Old French estude. It became a habit to omit the "s" following the "e" and the accent on the "e" in étude is used to signify this. So has English done something similar when we write "haven't" when we mean "have not"? The answer is no, but if you are interested see the Trask¹ discussion. In particular you should see his references to learnèd and Brontë.

The Grunert¹ discusses diacritics in French.

The story of the Hebrew language is an interesting one and I recommend Omniglot¹ for further reading.

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References

<sup>Grunert1
Grunert, J 2010, French accent marks, Love To Know Corporation, viewed 8 May 2010, http://french.lovetoknow.com/French_Accent_Marks

Omniglot1
Ager, S 2010,Hebrew,Omniglot: writing systems and languages of the world, viewed 8 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hebrew.htm

Trask1
Trask, L 1997, Diacritics,University of Sussex, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/department/docs/punctuation/node43.html</sup>

Hieroglyhpics and Cuneiform

Here is a graph from Boeree¹ representing the development of our Modern Roman alphabet (also known as the Western, Latin or Roman alphabet).

As you work down through the tree, be aware that the words represent writing systems rather than nationalities, although sometimes they coincide. Also it needs to be said that linguists have been known to disagree on what the major influences have been on a particular writing system.


In South East Asia the Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics gave rise to more recognisable and regular systems of writing.


(click the map for a clearer view)








There is a word, syllabary, which linguists use to describe sets of characters or symbols which represent syllables and which effectively fulfil the role of alphabets. A syllable often consists of a consonant plus a vowel. Two examples of syllabaries which a still uin se are the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana (Omniglot¹). Around 2500 BCE the Sumerians of Mesopotamia were using their cuneiform writing (a syllabary) and the Egyptians were using hieroglyphics

(click the map for a clearer view)











The images below show examples of Egyptian and Sumerian writing.

Egyptian












Sumerian



















This second example shows more clearly how the characters were formed. The word cuneiform, describing the writing used by the Sumerians at this time, comes from the Latin word, cuneus, meaning wedge.






These syllabaries did not often have a predictable link between the character and its sound and the individual needed to learn sometimes thousands of characters. Because this required great skill and tuition, only the elite usually mastered the written language. By 2000 BCE the Akkadians (a Semitic race) had conquered the Sumerians (from Mesopotamia) and they absorbed the cuneiform writing system into their own. In the map below, Akkad is in the green area North West of Ur, and Mesopotamia is North of Akkad.
















One effect of this absorption was that there emerged a more regular correspondence between the character and the sound, and thus a step in the right direction for a more familiar alphabet. This occurred at some time after 1800 BCE, and is significant also for the fact that a single hieroglyphic was selected for each consonant sound, and thereafter it was used for that purpose, regardless of the meaning of the word in which it appeared. Up to that time, a scribe would use a different symbol for the same sound if it occurred in a “word” with a different meaning.

The alphabet so derived was called the Phoenician alphabet, but it is recognised that the Phoenicians themselves didn’t start using it for another 500 years (Vajda¹).

The Phoenician alphabet

The first letter is alef and last letter is taw.








The Modern Hebrew alphabet













Notice how similar the alphabet is to the Modern Hebrew alphabet. Looking at Boeree’s “Evolution of Alphabet” tree this is not so surprising.

Another one of the really interesting consequences of the “one sign, one sound” invention, was that the sounds of any other language could be written in it, even if some alterations to pronunciation were needed (Robson¹).

Eventually the end of Sumerian cuneiform occurred in the last two centuries BCE. But even the Akkadian system was not to last indefinitely:
“Just as Latin lingered on in Europe as a scholarly and liturgical language for many centuries after it was last spoken as a mother tongue, hymns were still composed in Sumerian until at least 200 BC, over 1500 years since it had ceased to be a living language. ... No-one in the world has been brought up as a native Akkadian-speaker for the last two millennia or more.” (ibid)

With both Sumerian and Akkadian writing systems, what started out as an exclusive activity for the religious and elite of society, gradually became more accessible to others when the system was used for accounting and literary purposes. However as long as literacy was expensive or impossible , writing systems continued to be a powerful tool of the wealthy and the upper classes.


Before winding up this post, I thought it interesting to make some notes on the directions in which characters are written (Omniglot²).

This example shows Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics being written in what is called boustrophedon format. The word derives from a Greek word for ox, and the writing direction follows that of an ox ploughing a field – it ploughs in one direction then turns around and ploughs back in the opposite direction when it gets to the end of a row.









The situation could be more complicated than that, however, as the Egyptians would write in any direction they thought appropriate. The one clue given to the reader is that the animals and people always look towards the beginning of the line!

Phoenician was written right to left, horizontal as this Hebrew example shows:









Next time we will examine what had been occurring with the Greek language and find out the answer to “Who were the Etruscans?”.






















Thanks for reading!



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Discussion/Reflection

describe the research process for that week

It was clear from work done for the second post, that the topic is a lot broader than first imagined, and so I proceeded to gather as much information as I could on alphabets and writing systems (see difficulties experienced below).

document your research findings so far and include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

One of my greatest challenges has been keeping to the questions posed in the first post. This has hampered my progress. Question 4 [How is it that Asian languages and those based on the Cyrillic alphabet have characters which are so different from the 26 letter “Western” alphabet?] prompted me to try to answer another unposed question which was Question 5 [How is it that the Chinese form of writing has not been influenced in the way other forms of writing were influenced around the world at the same time?]. It then emerged that I should have been concentrating on writing systems rather than alphabets, a term which includes the East-Asian forms as well. Having established a firmer footing, I felt better prepared to attack the so called “easier” questions of the first post.


share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

Some interesting things I have discovered this week include:
• The Chinese writing system is not as old as I first thought. The agreed upon “first example” of Chinese writing were the oracle bones (http://www.logoi.com/notes/chinese_origins.html), which date from 1200 BCE . The 2003 evidence at Jiahu, dating back to 6600 B.C.E., is still disputed. Thus the dates of the beginnings of written Chinese are not too dissimilar to western writing systems.
• The similarity of Phoenician and Modern Hebrew is remarkable, although Boeree’s “tree” shows that they are related through Aramaic and Square Hebrew.
• That linguistics is a very, very complex area of study but thoroughly fascinating! A casual perusal of Omniglot is recommended.


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References


Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 25 April 2010, < http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html>.

Omniglot¹
Agar, S 2010, Syllabaries, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 25 April 2010, <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/syllabaries.htm>.


Omniglot²
Agar, S 2010, Writing direction index, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 25 April 2010, <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/direction.htm>. .

Robson¹
Robson, E 2009 ,Cuneiform script and the Sumerian and Akkadian languages, Knowledge and Power, Higher Education Academy, viewed 25 April 2010, <http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing3.htm>.

The Story of Alphabet by O. F, Ege

This week's post is about my reading of a classic reference on alphabets by Ege¹, and my first reading about the Rosetta stone.

The relevance of this post is that it deals with part of Question 2: " To what extent were the Greeks and the Phoenicians responsible for laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages?"

Ege¹ contends that the transformation of a race from a barbaric one to a civilised one is due, in large part, to the invention/adoption of an alphabet. There were no practical alphabets in the world for 3000 years until hieroglyphics and other writing systems were discovered around 2000 BCE.


The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone¹ is a stone with writing on it in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek). It was carved in 196 BCE and is so called because it was found in a small town near the Nile Delta called Rashid (or El-Rashid), which the French called Rosette, and the English Rosetta.

It is written in three scripts because when it was written, there were three scripts being used in Egypt. The first was hieroglyphic which was the script used for important or religious documents. The second script was written in demotic which was the most common script used in Egypt at the time. Finally, Greek was used as it was the language used by the leaders in Egypt at the time.

Although the Rosetta stone was discovered by Napoleon's soldiers in 1799, it had to wait for over 100 years before its content could be decoded. Apart from its discovery being quite fortuitous, if it hadn't been for the right scholars viewing it at the right time it is possible that its meaning may have remained a secret for even longer.

The importance of the discovery and its value to linguists will be discussed more in a later post. However it will become evident that a knowledge of many languages and their origins are essential to the work of a professional in this field.

This also gives us a motivation for studying, in some depth, the origins of our alphabet.


After a brief introduction, Ege¹ describes the origins of the modern English/Western/Latin alphabet characters. It is a fascinating read and well worth the effort.

Here is a summary of Ege¹ in graphic-organiser / mind mapping form:
* click the image to enlarge it
* for an interactive image click here
* FreeMind was used to draw it.















Thanks for reading!


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Reflection/Discussion

describe the research process for that week
After what seemed like an eternity scanning websites of ancient writing and history, I finally decided to concentrate on one or two sites and "jump in". The site by Boeree¹ is an excellent starting point, though it is written by a professional linguist and contains serious content for the interested amateur.

A chance stumbling upon the Ege¹ text provided my first in-depth study on alphabets. I did not know how to record my reading in such a way that I could return to my notes and retrieve material easily in the future. I had used graphic organisers before and managed to find a free one FreeMind¹. The rest of the week I spent creating a "mind map" content.

document your research findings so far

It is clear that the Rosetta Stone played an important part in the decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics. What I didn't know, was that it was discovered so recently, that a physicist identified the word Ptolemy in several places, and that the stage was then set for another to complete the translation.

The only reference to Chinese I have found, so far, is that it provided characters for the Japanese and Korean languages.

The Caananite, Phoenician and Early Hebrew writing systems were very important in the development of our alphabet.


include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced
I felt that I could have spent longer collecting information which may prove useful. The difficulty has been finding a suitable entry point, but I think I have found one in the Bouree¹ site. I was also lucky to find a "scrap booking" tool - Google Notebooks - into which I could place web site fragments and my own observations. I feel that that the project may be coming together at last.


share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

Google Notebooks¹ for keeping website material together - simply select the images/text and right-click add to note. It is no longer supported by Google though it may be obtained from http://www.google.com/notebook . I believe you will need to be using the Firefox browser with a Google Notebooks Add-On installed.

Don't copy and paste from Word into Blogger! I always prepared the Post in Word first, together with images, then tried to copy/paste into Blogger. Word attaches HTML code to your typing which Blogger can't handle. If you get a "Meta tags not handled" error in Blogger, that's the reason. If you must type into Word first, then copy/paste into Notepad, then copy paste into Blogger.




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References

Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 25 April 2010, < http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html>.


Ege¹
Ege, O F 1921,The story of alphabet, Norman T A Munder & Co., Baltimore, Maryland
available at <http://www.archive.org/details/storyofalphabet00egeorich>.

Google Notebooks¹
Anonymous [eHow Contributing Writer] 2010, How to download browser extension for Google Notebook, eHow Inc., viewed 26 April 2010,
<http://www.ehow.com/how_2318524_download-browser-extension-google-notebook.html>.

Rosetta¹
Strachan, RA & Roetzel, KA 1997, Ancient peoples: a hypertext view, Minnesota State University at Mankato, viewed 26 April 2010, <http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/egypt/hieroglyphics/rosettastone.html>.