Sorry, this title is click bait. I’m not going to talk about psychology or the meaning of life but about linguistics.
In my study of various languages, early on it became obvious that we must be very careful not to be tricked by a language’s writing system — their “orthography“. This will be the first of a few posts on what I call “Fooled by Orthography” — one of the many ways our minds can trick us.
Hidden Vowels
The other day I was at a party where another guest claimed that the Czech language (a Slavic language, which she had dabbled in) is very difficult and that some Czech words don’t even have any vowels. She was right on both counts. However, my inner nerd jumped out and I added to her statement that “large clusters of consonants in Slavic languages have hidden vowels or they’d be too hard to pronounce. That is, it is not the case that there are no vowels sounds in those words, but that the vowels sounds are not written.” The group sighed, “here he goes”.
For example, the Czech word for “death” is written “smrt” — no vowels — Yes, Czeck uses the Roman alphabet, not the Cyrillic alphabet like Russian. Sure, “smrt” has no vowels, but in Czeck the schwa vowel sound (the sound of the “u” in the English word “but”) is often not written. The linguist symbol for the schwa sound is [ə]. So if I wrote the Czeck word were written with the hidden schwa it would be smərt.
So don’t be fooled by Slavic orthography, though the written Slavic words may not contain a vowel symbol, — it is just that sometimes they are just hidden. Other examples include: Strč (put), Prst (finger), Skrz (through), and Krk (neck). In fact, they words are use in a Czech tongue twister: “Strč prst skrz krk” (Stick your finger through your neck). It is a tongue twister because of not only the similar consonants, but because even the hidden schwa vowel is soft and short.
Many languages have these hidden vowels. In English, the only non-vowel word I know of is “cwm” which means “valley” and comes from Welsh. The “w” in cwm is the vowel and pronounce like its old use “a double u”. Note, “y” is also considered a vowel in English.
Hindi also has hidden vowels in their orthography. The English word “karma” comes from the same Sanskrit and Hindi word which is written कर्म. In their orthography, there are only three consonants, “krm”, but in their orthography rules, the pronunciation contains 2 hidden schwas: “kərmə”. But in English we transliterate this as “karma” and Americans mistakenly pronounce the “a” as in “father” not as the “u” in “but” (like a schwa is pronounced). Similarly, in Yoga circles (and this drives me crazy), the Hindi/Sanskrit word चक्र, which is “chkr” is transliterated as chakra with the same issue. I’ll let you figure out the true pronunciation of chakra.
Stay tuned for the next Orthographic Deception post on “one sound or two”.
Triangulations 
Nice article. In some languages, such as Arabic and Farsi, most vowels are ignored, and one should know them by learning. However, Qurans for non-Arabs are modified by diacritics in order to be read easily. Rarely in Persian, some diacritics are used to help a word be read or to insist on the polite version of words that are similar to each other without vowels, with one of them being impolite.
Hello “-“, Yes, I studied Urdu (written in Arabic script like Farsi) and that was a great challenge for me. Indeed, it seemed a very strange option in the evolution from only spoken to a written language. Theories differ on this — some think those semitic languages are based on Egyptians hieroglypics (also without vowels), some feel Phoenician is the mother of these instead. Also, semitic words are based on the tri-consonant bases and rarely is there confusion, as you mentioned so it was only later as the language became more sophisticated that the diacritics were added to avoid unnecessary confusion. It was a matter of mimimal sufficiency vs. maximum sufficiency balance with easy and aesthetics, perhaps.
Japanese is written without space between words. This is no problems for native speakers, because (like native semitic speakers), they learn the spoken language before they learn to read and therefore the hidden vowels jump out for the native speaker when learning to read, but to the second-language learner, they usually start reading well before having a significant vocabulary base (as in my case), and therefore can’t guess the vowels often.
But to the main emphasis of my post, I’ve never seen a new learner “tricked” by the absence of vowels. I’ve never heard someone say, “It’s amazing how Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi have no vowels”. To me, I was interested in the false assumptions we make due to our limited experiences.
Thanx for contributing ! (albeit anonymously)