Maybe you’ve heard that Hebrew and Arabic are written entirely in consonants.
Wrong! Here’s why.
You’re back in old Phoenicia, where it turns out the Greeks aren’t the only ones looking
to buy a vowel. Your contact in town is still your merchant frenemy, who reminds you of
how she traded your consonant alphabet across the ancient world. That abjad spread to every
language with even a passing resemblance to Phoenician. Every town from here to Carthage
has some version of her abjad, spot the Egyptians - those stuck-in-their-ways traditionalists.
Initially, these Semitic speakers loved it. They were proud of it. But the days are turning
to years, and that love grows cold.
They grumble that they’re stuck with these consonants. Just consonants! Clamoring for
vowels, they get desperate and grab a few characters to stand in for a long sound. Take
a look. This symbol is originally the stop between a’-a’-a. This one’s a “y”,
a /j/ sound. And this is a /w/.
But they’re about to become not these things thanks to “Major Moments in the History
of Writing”!
This moment hits you twice, because it brings up both an innovation specific to Semitic
scripts and a more general principle that kind of bends the rules of the alphabet game.
First, it’s worth reiterating that abjad writing systems are viable ways to write and
read a language. They work. But with one obvious shortcoming: those missing vowels can create
ambiguous situations. But what if, instead of writing every vowel, we just had a few
helpful hinters that suggested the presence of certain kinds of vowels? Take this letter
/w/ - well, actually, they called it “waw”. Wow! Now imagine that we keep using it in
words that have the sound “w”, but we also extend its use, placing it between consonants
for the similar enough vowel sound /u/. In the old abjad, you’d have to write “soon”
and “son” with the same characters: s plus n. Everything else is vowels, and we
don’t have those. But suddenly our extended “w” comes in handy: “son” doesn’t
have that “oo” sound, so it’s still s+n. But “soon” does, so we add in the
“w”. Do the same thing with /j/, which can double as a long “i”, and this quirky
catch-in-your-throat pause between uh-oh, ’aleph, which can double as a long /a:/,
and you end up with three handy vowel suggesters: the matres lectionis, these helpful “mothers
of reading”, that show up in Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac.
But these “mothers” don’t leave their consonant-ness behind. They still double as
consonants. The abjad traded the ambiguity of a vowelless existence for a new kind of
ambiguity: depending on context, each of these “matres” may be a consonant or it might
be a vowel. One character, multiple sounds. This is a huge trend in alphabets - why invent
new characters when you can reuse an old one?
Repurposing consonants for vowels here and there won’t satisfy everyone. These bickering
scribes aren’t content with matres lectionis. You see, they’re not just trying to tell
son apart from soon. The bickering scribes are bickering over how to read of one of their
most treasured sayings. One says that it’s such a fine point, you wouldn’t understand
unless you were incredibly well versed in his language. But he makes an analogy for
you: write the word “news” in a consonant-only alphabet. It’s “n-w-s”. Fine. Now imagine
that someone comes along with their fancy consonant/vowel hybrids and spells the word
“noose”: “n-w-s”. Hmmm, wait a second.
He shows you a cheat sheet he’s been keeping. “It’s so easy!”, he says, pointing out
the little dots and dashes above and below letters to keep his vowels straight. Put them
here for an “a”, there for an “e”, you can even add them below one of the long
vowel things if you need to distinguish, say, an “i”. Nobody’s confused! That’s
it, he won’t tolerate the vagueness any longer! Effective immediately, in all important
texts where clear reading matters, everyone’s to use this method. And so for generations,
scribes would mark vowels above and below the consonants, writing vowels in what was
once a consonant-only alphabet.
But, as much as the pious and students swear by their dotty vowels, modern Arabic and Hebrew
speakers stick with the simple consonants plus the extended consonant/vowel mothers.
The optional helper dots get thrown in like a life preserver for struggling learners or
careful texts. But grown ups don’t need them anymore.
(Bandits take you!)