Delvo wrote:I just came here after reading some stuff about ancient ancient Middle-Eastern gods with names like Ba`al, El, An, Ki, Inanna, and Ea. Without written vowels, those would be Bl, L, N, K, Nnn, and nothing at all. I can see how other related languages' cognates with known vowels in later eras, together with some "rules" about sound changes based on adjacent sounds, can help linguists infer the ancient vowels between written consonants in a dead language with living relatives... but where do they get the ones that dangle out at the beginning or end of a word or even are the entire word themselves, especially in a dead isolate? Or is it just not accurate that the vowels were unwritten?
It is true that the vowels (mostly) were unwritten, although at some point in many of these languages a phenomenon called matres lectionis appeared - using certain consonants such as <y> and <h> to mark the presence of a vowel. However, the particular thing with vowels in the beginning of words is not a result of that, as semitic languages genuinely did not allow vowels in the onset of words (with some exceptions, e.g. in Biblical Hebrew, the sequence wa- can sometimes turn into u- in front of certain consonants, but that is the only permitted initial vowel in the entire language!)
This, of course, makes El sound a bit contradictory, how can that be if vowels are not permitted initially? Well, there is an initial consonant that the Hebrews pronounced, but which the Greeks, Romans and English do not have in their language, and thus lost. El would not be just L and An not just N, but they would be something like ʔL and ʔN (or ħN, not sure about that one as I don't know much about Babylonian) (One of these sounds, btw, is present in the forms of English that removes its /t/-sounds in some positions and replaces them with this pause-like sound (technically known as the glottal stop. See, e.g. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSd16tLz-0E[/youtube]. There's some other similar sounds present in these languages, if you want to hear a guy that really pronounces that kind of sound in Hebrew very clearly, listen to [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZkhWPWHqWE[/youtube]) You actually find a transliteration of that consonant in Ba`al, as ` is used for one of those consonants in some transliteration schemes for these languages. The exact sounds used in those languages vary, of course, but usually are rather far back in the mouth - laryngeals, pharyngeals, glottals and so on.
At least in Hebrew and Aramaic, there seems to be some statistical correlation between the consonant and which vowels are likely to follow/precede, so with a word for which no pronunciation tradition have survived, it's still possible to guess with some confidence as well as calculate how confident we can be of the pronunciation. (The correlation probably is a result from sound changes where the following vowel has changed due to the surrounding sounds.)