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Re: Greek Alphebet
Posted:
Nov 12, 2003 1:37 PM
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In article <87wua6atuf.fsf@becket.becket.net>,
Thomas Bushnell, BSG <tb+usenet@becket.net> wrote:
>It is true that the near-eastern "alphabets" are not properly
>alphabets. The real test is whether they represent every phoneme.
>Because the near-eastern scripts leave out vowels, they aren't proper
>alphabets.
>But this is also a matter of degree. The classical Greek alphabet
>does not distinguish long and short alpha, for example, which is a
>phonemic difference. Similarly, until accent marks were invented, it
>did not distinguish different accents, which are also phonemic in
>ancient Greek.
Not many languages, I think, have a distinct representation for each
phoneme. Certainly not English. Maybe some languages with a restricted
set of phonemes. Is the International Phonetic Alphabet the only true
alphabet for the English language?
>However, you are incorrect about there being some natural reason for
>near-eastern scripts to not need vowels but IE languages to need
>them. Fr xmpl, y cn rd ths prtt wll, cnt y? nglsh cn b rlbly rd b
>ppl wtht vwls, mst f th tm. And Hebrew did finally decide to start
>writing in the vowels because things had gotten too hard.
The Hebrew vowel marks (nekudot) were invented for biblical texts,
where for religious reasons it was important to get the pronunciation
right even if you didn't understand the meaning. They are not
generally used in modern Hebrew.
Robert Israel israel@math.ubc.ca
Department of Mathematics http://www.math.ubc.ca/~israel
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
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