Illiterate signs

Nice trick!

The invention of the Hebrew alphabet relied on this brilliant trick: the Pharaoh's signs were now mapped not onto a word but onto a sound, an atom of sound ... a stage cue to prepare the mouth to explode in sound, to explode a consonant propelled by a vowel. Yet, Hebrew had no vowels. This very vowellessness is a sign of the primitive ingenious leap in technology, the primitiveness of the Hebrew inventors, slaves not yet clever enough to conceive of vowels. And the letters invented - the first real letters - were, from an Egyptian perspective, signs of illiteracy. These first real letters were themselves unable to be read. Illiterate signs.