Re-reading the
vowelless text above I'd guess four consonants will usually suffice, even three in most cases.
al-idgham, assimilation: The encounter of a vowelless consonant with a vocalized consonant (bi-harfayni sakinin fa-mutaharrikin) of the same place of articulation (min makhrajin wahidin), the first consonant is assimilated by the second (Qastallani, Lata'if Idgham); this can be either consecutive, within the same word (muttasilatun fi kalimatin wahida) or separated between two words (munfasilatun fi kalimatayn) (Daani, Taysir, al-idgham al-kablr).
Another section is the case of the vowelless hamza; most of the Reciters preserve the vowelless hamza, except Warsh, Abu 'Amr, Hisham and Hamza; these latter Reciters have their own methods; e.g.
"To help restore a little (in)sanity and balance to the odd/even paradox,/took on the perilous task of making sentences and other lipograms from the
vowelless even letters (b d f h j I n p r t v x z).
In the OSPD, the only
vowelless three-letter words are CWM, PHT and NTH.
Hasselbach concludes that the prefix conjugation is a result of a combination of vowelless prefixes, originally personal pronouns, and some variant of the verbal form *prVs.
Following Hasselbach's idea that the prefixes of the prefix conjugation should be reconstructed as vowelless, we must assume the following as the original form:
Since all seven vowels are odd-numbered letters, larger PNs' letters will be virtually
vowelless, hence wordless.
227-30) that there were four distinct orthographic systems used among the Tamil-Brahmi (TB) and related scripts with regard to the notation of vowelless consonants, as follows:
TB-II: An unmarked consonant represents either the vowelless consonant, as in TB-I, or the consonant plus a as in standard Brahmi, with the correct reading to be determined according to the reader's judgment or intuition.
Exceptions to this are the occurrences of the prefix vowel [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in West Syriac I-' roots with the theme vowel [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], (4) the prefix vowel [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in roots I-y and the vowelless prefix of roots II-w and II-y.
Testen assumes that this merger reflects an underlying [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] vowel in the prefix of stative verbs, *yi-wCaC > *yi-yCaC, as opposed to an underlying [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] vowel in the prefix of active verbs *yuCiC, which he derives from a vowelless prefix *y + wCiC > *yuCiC > uCiC.
Even so, I have admitted a number of
vowelless words entered in dictionaries.
100: Among the weak verbs, one notices the retention of originally
vowelless [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Pe-Aleph verbs, whereas in other dialects it is usually dropped, e.g., [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" pl.
His solution is somewhat ad hoc, but nevertheless ingenious, and gives rise to a host of interrelated solutions in later chapters which provide much of the support for its being proposed, viz., to posit a
vowelless [[blank].sup.*]l- as the proto-form of la- and related particles in other Semitic languages.
