timelets: (Default)
[personal profile] timelets
Several of the Phoenician consonants encoded sounds not used in Greek, and at some point an unknown genius took a momentous step: he or she converted these unneeded letters into vowels. The new Greek vowels eliminated nearly all the ambiguity of a consonant-only script and thus enabled mastery of the alphabet by children as young as five or six.

- William J. Bernstein. Masters of the Word (2014).


===
An alphabet with vowels is more "free monoidable" than one without them.

Profile

timelets: (Default)
timelets

April 2026

S M T W T F S
    12 34
5 6 7891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Apr. 8th, 2026 07:41 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios