Bill Cosby - NAACP leaders stunned by remarks of prominent comedian

Holger Dansk wrote:
On Thu, 3 Jun 2004 08:25:52 -0700, "Circe"
wrote:

If the writer had simply accurately stated that Semitic languages
didn't have *written* vowels and that the Greeks put vowels into the
*written* language, you might not have been led so far astray. All
the Greeks invented was a method of representing a vowel sound
with a written symbol.

That's what putting vowels in a language is.

No, it isn't, but never mind. Written vowels clearly haven't improved your
capacity either to think or reason

Vowel *sounds*, OTOH, had no need to be invented, since any
month-old infant is quite capable of producing them!

Of course there was every need for vowels.

Of course there is a need for vowels. Every language *has* them. Moreover,
vowels *are* represented in syllabic writing systems: the symbol for the
syllable "ma", for example, is different than the symbol for the syllable
"mu", and therefore, the vowel *does* exist in the written language and *is*
represented.

It gave the Greeks an
advantage because they were able to create new words easier.

Again, pure nonsense. The Greeks had a very large vocabulary, that is true.
The fact that they had individuals symbols for vowels in their written
language has absolutely no relevance to the number of words in the language.
If it did, one would expect Latin, which also has vowels, to have at least
as many words in its vocabulary as Greek. This is not the case. Latin has a
*far* smaller vocabulary then Greek. Word formation has absolutely nothing
to do with written language: words are typically formed in the *spoken*
language and represented in *written* language only when their meaning and
usage becomes accepted in the spoken language. There is no point in
committing a word to paper if no one understands or recognizes that word.

In order
to communicate you have to be able to write words down.

No. To communicate, you only have to get your ideas across to another
person. To preserve and pass communication and learning on into subsequent
generation, you need writing. But communication no more requires writing
than eating requires cooking.

Moreover, languages which do not have symbols with one-to-one correspondence
to vowel and consonant sounds are perfectly capable of communication. Are
you now going to claim that the Hebrew Bible is incapable of communicating
ideas because it is written in a language that had no written vowels at the
time it was committed to paper? That ancient Sanskrit and Egyptian
hieroglyphs communicate nothing to us because they have no vowel symbols?
That modern Chinese does not "write words down" because it is a syllabic
system?

With every post, you show yourself to be several thousand times more foolish
and ignorant than the "savages" you so denigrate.
--
Be well, Barbara

All opinions expressed in this post are well-reasoned and insightful.
Needless to say, they are not those of my Internet Service Provider, its
other subscribers or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a
fight. -- with apologies to Michael Feldman