Macnerd wrote:I know that consonantal roots are unique to the Semitic languages.
You start mentioning Semitic languages, so even though I know nothing about Hebrew I think I could contribute with my experience with Arabic.
Macnerd wrote:It's intriguing. By adding vowels as prefixes, infixes & suffixes, the meaning of the word is changed.
There's also prefixes/infixes/suffixes involving consonants though, such as Arabic i
staCCaCa (used in derived verbs), iC
taCaCa (used in other derived verbs) and -uuna (used in many masculine plurals).
My main question is: how does one pronounce a word that is all consonants? It would seem unpronounceable to me. It seems to me that a word must have vowels in order to be pronounceable.
Arabic speakers simply get used to dealing with a writing system that's very ambiguous for what the vowels are like. Do you remember what texting in English on flipphones was like in the 2000s? Back then people used to write things like "gt" (get, got), "wh" (what) or "whr" (where) all the time. So Arabic is something like that (and Hebrew too).
That said, there's various languages in the world that do have a lot of words without vowels, such as
Nuxalk (an indigenous language from Canada), where you can find words such as
[st͡sʼqʰ] 'animal fat' (it does sound the way it looks like), or
[tʰt͡sʰ] 'little boy'.
In the Hebrew part of a Hebrew-English dictionary, are all of the words shown as consonants only?
For example, the consonantal root "k-t-b" ( I found it on wikipedia), has to do with writing. Is "k-t-b" found in the Hebrew part of a Hebrew-English dictionary as "k-t-b" ? How would one, who is learning Hebrew, pronounce "k-t-b" ?
Practice among dictionaries varies. In Arabic-English dictionaries it's common to either show just the consonants along with a
romanization of the word (like this: لعاب
lu`aab n. saliva), or to use the
optional small marks that specify vowels (like this: لُعَاب n. saliva). The optional vowel marks are called Harakaat in Arabic, and niqqud in Hebrew.
The organization of words also varies among dictionaries. Some Arabic-English dictionaries organize everything by the root, so you'd find a section for k-t-b that inside would contain kataba 'to write', kitaab 'book', kaatib 'writer', maktab 'desk', etc. following a certain order. Some Arabic-English dictionaries that use romanization prefer to just do it by pronunciation, so that all words starting with the sound m- would be found under the letter M, regardless if the m- is a prefix (like the m- in maktab, root k-t-b) or a part of a root m-C-C (like the m in maHaara 'oyster', root m-H-r).