So did these fags just never write down vowels ANYWHERE? EVER? Surely somewhere under sone rspeape slum in Caito there's a tablet for teaching priests or something
>>18602881Vowels are pronounced depending on your accent but consonants stay mostly the same
>>18602881Historical Afro-Asiatic languages tended to have a few written vowels here and there, just not many. This kind of defective spelling is intuitive for languages where there's lots of vowel alternations as part of the grammar and the vowels can be inferred through context.Early orthographies after the pictographic stage seem to be split between abjads and syllabaries. There were probably times when literate elites were wondering what type of script they should use: abjad or syllabary. They both have their drawbacks. If one wanted explicit vowels, the choice must have been a syllabary. Proper alphabets hadn't been invented yet, and syllabaries are not lightweight like abjads.
>>18602881Egyptian pronunciation changed over time. So even if the way words were written remained the exact same, the pronunciation of those words completely changed over the millennia.
man I sure wish we had some sort of Rosetta stone for understanding these things
