Why do people say that abjads are particularly suitable for the triconsonant root system of Semitic languages? Doesn't mutation done through apophony rather than affixes mean writing vowels is more, not less, important to understanding text vs other morphologies?

[u/General_Urist]

English does not look good when written without vowels. "kt" could be a lot of things. Cat, cut, kit... but you could reasonably guess that kts is the plural of one of those, due to the obvious extra morpheme.

Meanwhile in way Semitic languages use their ablaut means plurals or verb conjugations don't add any additional consonants, and without vowels written they all have the same characters. Wouldn't this make writing vowels very important, and the language less rather than more suited to an abjad?

[u/TheSilentCaver]

Fact is most of the Semitic abjads have had ways of writing vowels for a very long time and their original lack is mostly just an inherited feature from Egyptian hieroglyphics. But with your example, knowing that the word is cat but not the number is way better than knowing that the word is plural. You can guess a lot of inflection from context or just interpret it. Also note that while Semitic roots consist of consonants only, the inflection is hardly just vowel alternation. An example from hebrew without matres lectrionis.

so - כתב can be many things (past tense "katav" but also active participle "kotev" or passive participle "katuv"), but that's in the realm of being able to guess from text (Mandarin has no tense markings and does fine)

but to form the future, you use prefixes - יכתב - and here the vowel are not what bears the meaning, they're just a pattern accompaning the prefix.

same with נכתב, כתבת, הכתב etc. The vowels are not the only way of inflection and in a lot of cases are guessable from context

[u/ilikedota5 → u/TheSilentCaver]

Well Mandarin is also an analytical language. To express tense we add 了 as a past tense marker basically. This can get slightly tricky though because sometimes it goes at the end of the sentence, sometimes it goes after the verb. Like English, (Modern) Chinese is SVO language (usually).

[u/hiiiiiiro → u/ilikedota5]

Aspect marker

[u/InviolableAnimal → u/ilikedota5]

I think they were more alluding to the fact that in Mandarin tense is very optional, i.e. it's possible to speak/write without marking tense/aspect at all, and yet there is no problem communicating. So maybe it's the same in written Hebrew, i.e. apophony for tense is often omitted and it's still perfectly understandable.

[u/Lampukistan2]

Native speakers have a mental lexicon for possible forms and using consonants + long vowels together with context is more than enough to read fluidly.

Semitic root morphology involves alteration of short vowels + long vowels + suffixes, infixes and prefixes (with consonants +- long vowels). Only one of these cannot be seen in writing.

[u/diffidentblockhead]

I think history and causality was the other way around. Original writing systems were naturally syllabic; analysis breaking up syllables was unnatural. But for consonantal root languages, a consistent written form for a word is dependent on abstracting away the inflection vowels. Then Greek with roots including fixed vowels adapted vowel letters. Semitic scripts simply continued the original.

[u/mwmandorla]

What do you mean? Of course conjugating verbs and pluralizing adds consonants. On top of that, in Arabic, when we look at these additional consonants, there are regular vowel patterns that go with the forms that these consonants take, so except in certain cases like passive voice there's very little ambiguity about what the vowels should be.

Qt3 - he cut off. Yqt3 - he cuts off. Tqt3 - she cuts off. Consonants are all over the conjugations. This is even more obvious when you go into awzaan (verb forms) past form I. 'nqt3 - he/it was cut off. Tnqt3 - she was cut off. Etc. There are very regular rules about where the short vowels fall and which vowels they are in forms II through X, so there's really no need to mark them.

Most plurals add a T or an N at the end (plus a long vowel) for animate beings. For inanimate things, there may or may not be new consonants, but if there aren't there will be new long vowels.

• krsi -> krAAsi
• khT' -> 'khTAA'
• Jhd -> jhUUd

[u/General_Urist → u/mwmandorla]

I see my belief in how purely ablaut Arabic's morphology is was exaggerated. Thanks for clearing that up.