Speaking of unvoweled Arabic text: though much Arabic text today does not indicate short vowels, it uses dots to distinguish different letters with similar shapes (such as "jim", "ha", and "kha"). But I was surprised to discover in a book on the origins of Arabic script that there was an earlier stage at which even these "points" were not used, and the same shape represented two or three different letters! (It is hard to see how this could have worked.)But what about old Arabic and unvoweled text? The Nabataeans managed to write their language (old Arabic) with 22 characters, and they did not struggle with the definite article, or a lack of consonants.
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