Definitions of writing systems: abjads and Arabic

[Pamela Toman]

>> Of course the vowels have to be "recovered" somehow.  ... I have no idea
how the words are recognized if they might share consonants but differ in
their vowels.   How are Arabic verb forms/tenses recognized without explicit
vowels?
 
You automatically recognize them from the context.   Everything that gets
left out can be deduced from what is explicit within the word itself and
from the surrounding syntax.  You can read this way easily because Arabic
voweling is systematic.  
 
To slightly oversimplify -- if you see a word with yABC (like yktb, he
writes), where ABC are random consonants, you know that it's a present tense
form of the verb with root ABC (where ABC is a broad concept, like "writing"
when ABC = ktb).  Because you know yktb is present tense 3rd person masc.
sing., you know what the missing vowels are.  If you see ABCuuaa (ktbuuaa,
they wrote) where a verb should be, you know it's past tense "they" and what
the missing vowels are.  If you see AaaBC (kaatb, writer), you know it's
someone who does ABC, and along with that, the missing vowel.  These
patterns reoccur again and again in a lot of different words -- the same
short vowels are always left out and the same long vowels and non-root
consonants are always written, whether it's verbs or nouns or verbal nouns
or whatever else.  When you see a certain pattern of long vowels and
non-root consonants, you can deduce the vowels (even if you don't know what
the word itself means...).
 
Sometimes, though two different words share the same written consonants --
the written ktb, for instance, could be kataba ("he wrote") or kutub
("books").  However, this situation is actually pretty uncommon, and the
intended word is almost always clear from context -- you can easily tell
from the syntax whether ktb is being used as a verb or a noun, for instance,
and from there derive the correct vowels.
 
Y cn lmst d t wth nglsh, except it's much harder because vowels in English
don't follow any regular patterns.
 
Pam
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