tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 30 09:54:18 2002
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Re: Alphabet
On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 11:46:39PM -0600, Russ Perry Jr wrote:
> Actually, are there any modern abjads that don't even bother with the
> diacritic vowels?
Well, depending on what you mean by "don't even bother", yes.
Hebrew has vowel points, but they generally only appear in teaching
materials (for schoolchildren or for adults learning to read the
language); the everyday form of the language (as found in Israeli
newspapers, for instance) leaves them off. This works in Hebrew
because in most words the consonant pattern is unique: changing the
vowels gets you either a grammatical variant of the same word or a
non-word, but rarely a completely different word. It wouldn't work
as well in Klingon, because there are many words that differ only in
the vowels (which is not surprising in a language where most words
are monosyllables). Context would perhaps be enough to compensate,
as it can in English (whch s wh y cn rd ths sntnc vn wtht vwls),
but a consonant-only writing system doesn't seem to be a natural
fit to tlhIngan Hol.
-- marqoS