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Old June 4th 04, 08:25 AM
Holger Dansk
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On Fri, 04 Jun 2004 02:47:02 -0400, Bob LeChevalier
wrote:

Holger Dansk wrote:
On Thu, 3 Jun 2004 10:47:28 -0700, "Circe" wrote:
snip quote which has no relevance to the subject at hand


It is totally relevant. To learn, you will have to do some listening.
Notice the word "vowel" in the paragraph below.

"The North Semitic alphabet was used to represent Aramaic and Hebrew,
and was borrowed by the Phoenicians in approx. 1000 B.C., being passed
on by them to the Greeks, who added vowels, and thence to the Etruscans
in about 800 B.C. The Etruscan alphabet was the source of the Roman
alphabet that has since been adopted for use in many languages around
the world."

You see, it says that the Greeks added vowels.


TO THE ALPHABET.

NOT to the language.


The language was written with the alphabet.

Bob and I *have* stated that vowel sounds are a component of all human
languages and have therefore presumably been present in human language since
its earliest development.


We are talking about vowels in the alphabet, not grunting sounds and
screeches that people made.


Maybe that is what YOU are talking about now, but you originally
talked about adding vowels to the LANGUAGE, which exists whether or
not there is an alphabet.


But the words of the language are written with an alphabet, and the
Greeks added vowels to theirs.

There is *no* exstant human language that does not
consist of both consonant and vowel sounds, whether it was ever committed to
a native writing system by its speakers.


But, for a civilization to make progress, you have to be able to write
your words down and record them. Why can't you get it through your
thick head that we are talking about vowels in an alphabet used in a
language or languages? It's like talking to a fence post.


There is nothing sacred about any particular alphabet. If you write
English in a different alphabet, it may have more vowels or fewer.
Greek can be written in the Greek alphabet, or in the Roman one.
Russian can be written in Cyrillic, or with some difficulty in the
Roman one. The alphabet is not the language.

These are letters that are written, and they should have learned
how to write some letters in the first grade.

And we all learned to say them years before we learned to write them. Ergo,
there is no relationship between *written* vowels and *spoken* ones. Ergo,
you are full of ****.


That may be why black people have trouble with language. Maybe they
don't pay any attention to the way anything is spelled.


Spelling is convention. The Founders of the United States did not pay
much attention to how things were spelled. Shakespeare was even less
consistent - he spelled his name several different ways. Are you
going to say that Shakespeare had trouble with language?

But then, we all knew that already.


Unfortunately, you don't know anything much.


Several times as much as you do, since most of what you "know" is
wrong.

lojbab


Holger

http://www.mindspring.com/~holger1/holger1.htm