Re: USAGE: Abugidas

On Thursday, January 29, 2004, at 05:07  PM, Joe wrote:
> jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM wrote:
>> Well, if you like.  But the Hebrew Bible is (normally) always written
>> with
>> vowel marks, so does that mean that Biblical Hebrew is no longer
>> written
>> with an abjad?  I would say that an abjad gives greater weight to
>> consonants
>> than vowels, but abstain on the optional vs. required question.
>>
>>
>
> I'd suggest that 'wrting nglish lk ths' qualifies as abjad-oid.
> Were the Dead Sea Scrolls written with vowel marks?
Vowel marks hadn't been invented yet.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were written with an almost gaudy superfluence of
|imot qeri'a| / matres lectionis (=consonants used as vowel
place-holders), compared to the 'standard' Masoretic Hebrew Bible text
that we have.  They even used more vowel place-holders than Modern
Israeli Hebrew does!

So for instance, while the word /qodSExO/ 'your holiness' would be
written |QDShK| in the Masoretic tradition, the Qumranites would
probably write it something like |QVDShKH|, with |v| place-holding for
the /o/ and |h| for the final /a/.


-Stephen (Steg)
  "brooklyn the holy / brooklyn profane
   hearing some yiddish / no habla español..."
      ~ 'bruqlin' by ehud banai (translated)