why have vowels and consonants?

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08 Jan 2011, 5:19 pm

Just wondering if anyone knows why we separate vowels from consonants? I mean, what's the use? Why aren't there just letters?

Just an example of people needing to pigeonhole and classify everything.

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Moog
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08 Jan 2011, 5:29 pm

They have different characteristics.

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Booyakasha
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08 Jan 2011, 5:47 pm

MasterJedi wrote:

Blame the Ancient Greeks - they were the first ones that noted each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol and thus enriching the old non-pictographic consonantal Phoenician alphabet (and Semitic before that). Apparently their previous alphabet - i.e. linear B wasn't as efficient to express whatever they wanted to say as it was with the vowels. :shrug:

Apple_in_my_Eye
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08 Jan 2011, 6:10 pm

I don't know anything about linguistics, but there does seem to be some pattern to how vowels and consonants are distributed in words. It seems like the vowels usually in between consonants, more-or-less. Pronouncing "mphthtr" is pretty tough, but "amphitheater" is fine.

Maybe it's because written language isn't properly broken down into the sound groups that make up spoken language. IOW, how come we don't all use shorthand (I mean literal "shorthand" like stenographers use)?

I guess my point is that if the letters of the alphabet were randomly distributed in the words of the language, then there'd be no need to separate the letters into groups because any such groupings would be arbitrarily defined.

Booyakasha
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08 Jan 2011, 7:09 pm

It seems that it has to do with the use and application of vowels which differ in various languages:

Quote:

Vowel signs were originally not used in Semitic alphabets. In the earlier West Semitic family of scripts (Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite etc.), a letter always stood for a consonant in association with an unspecified vowel or no vowel. This did not reduce legibility because words in Semitic languages are based on consonant roots that make meaning clear with only the consonants present, and vowels are clear from context. By contrast, Greek is an Indo-European language, and thus differences in vowels make for vast differences in meanings. Thus, Greek grammarians divided the letters into two categories, vowels and consonants, which had to be accompanied by vowels to create a pronounceable unit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet

For comparison, here's a link to the use of vowels in Semitic alphabet, which is notorious for it's lack of written vowels - for instance, famous JHWH which, of course, is forbidden to pronounce, otherwise you might get stoned.

http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Gramma ... ction.html

Booyakasha
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08 Jan 2011, 7:11 pm

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI[/youtube]

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09 Jan 2011, 7:15 am

MasterJedi wrote:

It's so people can laugh about the letter Y being bi :lol:

I $#cked in English so I don't know but I'm wondering why vowels get to be words when consonants cant. A & I get to be words by themselves. & why is it that I, O, U & Y are words that have to be spelled out; Eye, Oh, You, Why. & Why is E the only vowel that is not a word

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