Posted: Apr 29, 2013 3:36 am
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?