John Wall Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hmmm....
>
> You have to remember that AE was largely without
> vowels so I could be Jihn, Juhn, Jehn and you
> could be Timmi, Tummi, Temmi....
>
>
>
> John



John and Tommi:

1. Same with Hebrew.

2. By the way, there are only two basic writing systems in the entire world, now that Egyptian hieroglyphs are long gone. One is the Western alphabet, invented by Egyptians who knew, or previously had been, Semitic Canaanites. Hebrew has a fairly old version of the Western alphabet. Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, German, Russian, French, etc. are all written with variations of the Western alphabet. The only other writing system in the world is Chinese characters, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Western alphabet. Japanese uses a variant of the old Chinese characters. Indeed, a Chinese person can "read" Japanese fairly easily, though without being able to speak even a single word of Japanese, which is an unrelated language system, but which uses some variants of Chinese characters for writing Japanese.

The reason we in the West have the Western alphabet, instead of some version of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Akkadian cuneiform, was precisely so that the otherwise illiterate Semitic Canaanite tent-dwellers in the early 2nd millennium BCE, like the early Hebrews, could learn to read and write names, when they were working as guest workers in Egypt. Hence it would have been easy for a Hebrew to write down all the names in the Patriarchal narratives in the mid-14th century BCE, using the 500-year-old Western alphabet invented at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE by Egyptians in Egypt for use with Semitic Canaanite guest workers in Egypt, even though narrative prose written Hebrew was not invented until centuries later.

Jim Stinehart