JAL328H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Afroasiatic Languages, Sinai Peninsula, East Semitic Languages
Document Summary
Between egyptian and east seimitic (hieroglyphics and cuneiform on the other side) Coastal areas around the arabian peninsula had trading ports. In this area, a purely phonographic system was favoured over logograms/determinatives because there wasn"t a prestigious empire (not like egyptian with royalty and religion to want to separate) Needed to be accessible to the lay people who didn"t have as much time to learn/write like the scribes. Transferability of writing between language with similar phonologies neighbours with similarities. First segmental scripts (each grapheme represents a segment/phoneme) Egyptian (hieroglyphics) = ancestor only represent consonants. Egyptian wrote foreign words and names with mono-consonantal graphemes. Tri-consonantal roots = commonly used for neighbours too. Easy to understand and borrow writing systems with similar lexemes. Morphology can not be there in writing. Native speakers will easily inject vowels and information by reading the context to determine which pronunciation to use.
