It's a class of script. A language with a script that omits vowels is called a "(pure) abjad(ic)" language. Egyptian (arguably, I'm not a linguist) and Arabic are examples of "impure abjad" languages. Usually they have diacritics that hint at vowel sounds but are otherwise devoid of explicit vowel glyphs, so I'm not sure if Egyptian strictly fits that bill - maybe someone else does. Point is, it's perhaps a bit foreign to latin-language speakers but there's a whole class of languages that do this, or something similar.

There are a few purely abjadic languages, one that comes to mind I believe is Phonician.

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foobarian 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Ancient Hebrew (as found in Torah scrolls) also comes to mind. Though they added vowel hints at some point

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wongarsu 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The idea of leaving out most vwls isn't evn that frgn to latin scrpts. It's just not the default mode and only permissible with good reasons

	▲	junon 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, definitely. Austrian German is a good example of this. When I first visited I thought I was buying counterfeit goods because it looked like all the familiar products were "misspelled". Turns out they omit vowels pretty frequently.

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bandrami 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The writing of vowels also varied greatly over time so any sweeping statement somebody makes can attract a chorus of "yes but"