Oliver said:
I don't know about Hebrew, but I'd imagine it *does* have vowel sounds,
even if you do not explicitly write them.
In modern Hebrew, a couple of now-unused consonants are employed as
vowels, and other vowels are indicated by diacritics (as in Tengwar).
Ancient Hebrew, in common with other West Semitic languages, did not
write vowels because large amounts of West Semitic grammar are handled
by ablaut (like English "sing", "sang", "sung"), so that it is possible
to get a good idea of the meaning of any sentence when it is written
with only the consonants. This was, in fact, of crucial importance in
the evolution of the alphabet. The West Semitic languages received
writing in the form of a syllabary, like Cherokee or Japanese kana, in
which every symbol represented a syllable: ba, be, bi, bo, bu, ga, ge,
gi, go, gu, da, de, di, do, du, and so forth. Because of not needing to
write the vowels, they were able to cut down the number of characters to
a mere twenty-odd, which vastly reduced the amount of memorization
needed to learn to read and write. When the Greeks picked up the West
Semitic alphabet from the Phoenicians, they found that they needed to
write the vowels for their language, so picked a few consonants that
they didn't need to use as vowels instead, created variations on a few
more letters, and then they were ready to go. The Latin and Cyrillic
alphabets, and many more, derive from the Greek.
See the really cool animations at
<URL:
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html>.
