I suggest you read the OP.... here it is ... notice the
FOUR OTHER "reasonings" that you missed.
And it was allegedly given to an Egyptian courtier descended from Sumerians to give to runaway slaves descended from 70 Sumerian men with their mothers and sister after having been slaves in Egypt for 430 years.
OK, so, those four things would apparently be:
1. Moses, receiver of the tablets containing a tiny fraction of the Old Testament, was described as an Egyptian courtier.
B. The Bible says he was descended from Sumerians*.
Я. The Hebrews were described as runaway slaves.
ψ. They were descended from a specific group of Sumerians* (the "70 men" part), which I guess must be a reference back to point B, although I don't know where the number came from or why it matters.
4. Their enslavement in Egypt had lasted for 430 years.
So I guess the idea there must be that these people wouldn't know the writing system that had been used (possibly not even the spoken language), so there was no point in giving it to them in that form, so a real God would have known better than to try. Problems, though:
►Did the Bible ever really even state what language or writing system it was in, or is that a later inference?
►Even if it did, it does stand to reason that a high-ranking Egyptian courtier such as Moses would be familiar with the language and writing system of an Egyptian satellite state, conquered province, or enemy nation, and that he would be aware that that place was where the slaves had come from, especially after he had discovered that he was one of them and taken their side and presumably familiarized himself more with their culture. I'm not saying it actually happened, but, just within the context of the story itself, there's nothing wrong with this element of the story.
►Within the story's context, some of the Hebrew population could have brought knowledge of their own reading & writing with them when they migrated to Egypt in the first place and retained it while they lived in Egypt. I'm not saying that happened, but its plausibility within the context of the story means it can't be the basis for shooting the story down; reasons to disbelieve the story lie elsewhere. (The analogy with African slaves in old European colonies is not necessarily analogous at all.)
►Even if there were zero literate people among them aside from Moses, people can be taught, and the only other relevant choice for a writing system in that place & time was Egyptian, which was much harder to use, especially a for non-Egyptian language.
►The
*Sumerian thing must come from the fact that Moses was supposed to be a descendant of Abram, who came from Ur. But the name of the city in the Bible is actually "Chaldean Ur" or "Ur of the Chaldees". That's a separate city, and it's Canaanite, not Sumerian. The Bible never called them Sumerians.
►I have no idea how the duration of the enslavement is supposed to matter. Maybe it's connected to the African-slaves-in-European-colonies thing, but slaves losing their original language is not a necessary universal result of slavery. For one thing, in that case people from different tribes kept getting thrown together so they had no language in common other then their owners' languages. Also, the jobs they were enslaved for had nothing to do with language or writing, but there have been other slaves in history whose jobs did in fact call for careful conveyance of information. This would be true to some extent of skilled artisans with whom the details of what they were to do needed to be communicated & planned carefully (such as those who would have built what the Bible says the Hebrews built), but even more so of administrative & clerical slaves. In Rome, Greek slaves with the latter kind of job were picked precisely for their Greekness, so their Greekness isn't something their Roman owners would have wanted to strip from them. Without being given more details of the alleged Hebrew enslavement in Egypt, we have no basis for saying that it was the kind of slavery in which we should expect them to have lost all knowledge of their own language & writing.
Pointing out the FACTS about something does not mean struggling with nor disliking that something...
It does if you've been saying there's something horribly wrong with that thing and those "
ꜰᴀᴄᴛꜱ" you've been pointing out are the only thing(s) you've given us to think of as your justification for that assessment. If in fact the reason why this writing system is so awful is something else, it was up to you to say what that other thing was instead of carrying on about something that you now say wasn't it.
It should be noted, however, the these written forms were created by, and for people that knew and spoke the spoken forms of these languages. They knew which vowel sounds to put where.
This is why your your line "I am gng t rspnd t yr bv pst n dtls ltr..." is understandable to most Engish speakers.
For Semitic languages, it works even better and more consistently & easily than that. There really isn't a way to demonstrate it in non-fictional English analogies because the way Semitic words work is so different from ours.
For one thing, the base vowel system for those languages consists of only three vowel sounds, instead of something like a dozen for us. So there are fewer wrong guesses to eliminate. Hebrew's vowel system diversified to more than three more recently, but we're talking about an era before that happened.
More importantly, though, in Semitic languages, context is much better at telling you which sounds belong where, and, even if you had no idea what vowels to guess, the consonants alone would still tell you most of the meaning.
A single Semitic root word is fundamentally defined entirely by its 2-4 consonants (usually 3). Different vowels don't make a different root word; they only put it in different forms for different grammatical functions, like verb conjugation, noun declension, other changes like converting a direct/active verb to a related indirect/passive one or creating a collective/uncountable noun from an individual/countable noun, and conversion between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. And some of those kinds of changes include not just switching vowels around but also adding extra consonants in some cases, and an extra added consonant is a dead give-away which vowels it comes with.
We have a little bit of something loosely like this in English, as in "drink, drank, drunk, drunken, drunkard". That's a few verb conjugations, an adjective, and a noun; more forms than English usually gets out of one word, but
less than usual for a Semitic language. Now just imagine if we had more options for the same root, like "adronek" and "badirnosk" and "darnku" and "yedrinoki" and several more, and they all still pertained to drinking in predictably patterned ways... "a-o-e" means a place to do the thing, so in this case it's a bar... "ba-i-os" means causing/facilitating something to be done, typically by other people, so in this case it's "pour"... "a-u" means equipment with which something is done, so in this case it's a cup/mug... "ye-i-o-i" means it's a collective activity, not an individual one, so in this case it's a party (with booze).
Now imagine having a language in which not just that word is like that, but so are most others throughout the whole language, with the same vowel patterns serving the same functions regardless of which root you apply them to. And imagine reading a sentence with the "vehicle, driving" root and the "farming, harvesting, farmers' market or grocery store" root. If there are any additional consonants snuck in there, you know which vowel patterns go with them, but if there aren't, you can at least eliminate vowel patterns that would have come with such an extra consonant and narrow it down to the ones that are truly just vowels. Then you'd just go with what meanings would make sense. Obviously the author isn't saying "Somebody farms/farmed his/her car" or "Somebody harvests/harvested his/her car". There's no doubt that it's actually "Somebody drives/drove to the farmers' market or grocery store" just from common sense. You don't even need to mentally "hear" the vowels or figure out what they would have sounded like in order to get the meaning from just the root consonants. You don't "sound out" the pronunciation, but you don't need to because you'd "common-sense-out" the meanings before you even mentally got to the vowels. Then the only information you have left to get from context are who the driver is/was and whether it's present, past, or future. And there's practically never any such thing as a context that doesn't tell you enough for that.
And that's not even counting the fact that it's only the short vowels that don't get written anyway. Some letters do double-duty as both a consonant and a long vowel, like English "Y". For the consonant sounds "y" and "w" and their vowel counterparts "u" and "i", this duality is not uncommon in writing systems, because they tend to be thought of as the same thing anyway in some spoken languages. Latin once used "I" and "U" in exactly the same dual way, with no sign that the Romans ever thought there was any point in splitting them up and pretending that what they considered one sound for each of those letters was really somehow two sounds. Greek also once had letters for both "u" and "w" but then dropped the "w" because it was pointless when they could just use "u" or "o" for the same thing, and the fact that they could do the same with "i" was why they never even bothered deriving a separate consonant letter for it in the first place. That covers two of the three Semitic long "vowels" that are really consonants anyway, leaving "a" as the only one assigned to a letter that
didn't already represent essentially the same sound when it's acting as a consonant anyway like "w" and "y" did for "u" and "i". (Its consonant sound is /ʔ/.) And it's not hard to learn when that one lone letter is acting as a consonant or as a vowel, just like we all do with our "y". (Remember, outside of special cases like the very common Arabic prefix "al", the only way it's a vowel is when the root you're using takes a vowel pattern containing long "a", so context tells you whether that vowel pattern makes sense for that root this time or not. If the word doesn't make sense with the grammatical choices that come with a long "a", then it's the consonant instead.)
But wait, there's more! Both Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic actually do have diacritics that can be used to specify the vowels... but those diacritics more often than not go unused. Walk down a street or through a store in a place where they use those alphabets, and you'll see more signs & labels & such without them than with them (especially in Arabic). Why? Because they make no difference so nobody cares; they just aren't worth the bother because they don't add anything that wasn't already there without them. They'd literally already understand what they're reading just by the consonants
before they got around to figuring out the vowels to go with that meaning, and by then there's no need to take the extra step of getting the vowels out anymore once they've already gotten the meaning. The system works so smoothly for these languages that they and their faster, easier, more efficient writing system must have been invented together specially for each other by a god!
