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ISBN: 978-2-487055-04-9 e-ISBN: 978-2-487055-05-6 Download (NOT THERE YET) | Semitic Writings and Short Vowels: Alternative Hypotheses in a Renewed View of the Analytics of Writing Joseph Dichy Download (173.35 kB) Abstract. The fact that Semitic writings do not note short vowels in the body of words is an ancient question, which has been repeatedly asked in works on the history of writing, from Marcel Cohen’s, James Février’s, I.J. Gelb’s... onwards, as well as in the field of Semitic studies (G.R. Driver, D. Diringer...). A first answer—still repeatedly reproduced—mentions the weight of tradition, and assumes that vowels were just not conceptualised, which resulted in what was described, in a factually improper wording, as “consonantal writings”. The latter have been considered as a step in the “history of writing”, i.e., in the “development of the invention of writing” (M. Cohen), the ultimate result of which would have been the ancient Greek alphabet. Such a view can no longer be held, because: (1) Semitic writings had noted long vowels at the end, then in the body of words from the 13th century B.C. onwards, and (2) the now prevalent idea is that every writing system is related to the language and culture in which it emerges and develops. Another ancient hypothesis (Février; M. Cohen), widely taken up by Arab linguists, suggests that Semitic morphological patterns make up for the lack of vowels. We show here that this hypothesis, which only covers a percentage of words, cannot be retained either. Another hypothesis (Dichy 2017) is discussed: short vowels being subject to dialectal variation, their omission in standard script may result, in a form of partially ‘robust’ writing, featuring a level of abstraction (Vendryes, 1923) that allows it to be shared by a variety of dialects or a-kin languages. This hypothesis should not be considered teleologically: it is a consequence of writing structures, and not a feature Semitic writing systems could have been “devised for”. In assumes in addition that the writing system is a writing-to-sounds process, which is a mistaken view of reading. General alternative hypotheses are summed up in a renewed conceptual frame. They have been developed in Dichy (1990, 2017, 2019). The general concept is that of the Analytics of writing. According to it, the emergence of a writing system stems from the way in which a given culture analyses the structures of its own language in a way that produces:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-dich Joseph Dichy (2022), “Semitic Writings and Short Vowels: Alternative Hypotheses in a Renewed View of the Analytics of Writing,” in Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022 (Yannis Haralambous, Ed.), Grapholinguistics and Its Applications, Vol. 9, Brest: Fluxus Editions, 377–390.
@INPROCEEDINGS{gla9-dich, AUTHOR = {Joseph Dichy}, EDITOR = {Haralambous, Yannis}, TITLE = {{Semitic Writings and Short Vowels: Alternative Hypotheses in a Renewed View of the Analytics of Writing}}, BOOKTITLE = {{Proceedings of Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, 2022}}, SERIES = {{Grapholinguistics and Its Applications}}, VOLUME = {9}, PUBLISHER = {Fluxus Editions}, ADDRESS = {Brest}, YEAR = {2022}, PAGES = {377--390}, DOI = {https://doi.org/10.36824/2022-graf-dich}, } |