“[Footnote] The Phoenicians employed an alphabet of twenty-one consonants. They left no literature. You can't be literary without a few vowels.”

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal

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Will Cuppy119

American writer 1884–1949

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“Etymology is a science in which vowels signify nothing at all, and consonants very little.”

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Attributed

“His work, called Aryabhatiya, is composed of three parts, in only the first of which use is made of a special notation of numbers. It is an alphabetical system in which the twenty-five consonants represent 1-25, respectively; other letters stand for 30, 40, …., 100 etc. The other mathematical parts of Aryabhatiya consists of rules without examples. Another alphabetic system prevailed in Southern India, the numbers 1-19 being designated by consonants, etc.”

Aryabhata (476–550) Indian mathematician-astronomer

Florian Cajori in: A History of Mathematical Notations http://books.google.co.in/books?id=_byqAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT961&dq=Notations&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Wz65U5WYDIKulAW1qIGYDA&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Notation&f=false, Courier Dover Publications, 26 September 2013, p. 47.

“In English we have noticed twenty-five consonant and about twenty vowel phonemes. Although individual pronunciations may differ, the phonemic habits of the same group or class will be similar. They will make similar use of heterophony. Words not phonetically separated — that is, homophones — may be separated by function or by experiential context”

John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) English linguist

Source: Speech, 1930, p. 182

“Real peace is won by resolve and sacrifice, while ephemeral peace is all too often concocted only by vowels and consonants.”

Sung-Yoon Lee Korea and East Asia scholar, professor

Context: At the very least, the ill-advised rush to "peace" is a likely candidate for the historical annals of self-destructive appeasement. The great sacrifices made by Americans in the Korean War, the legacy of the close US-South Korea relationship over the past 60 years, and future US strategic interests in and around the Korean Peninsula should not be sacrificed at the altar of diplomatic peace. Real peace is won by resolve and sacrifice, while ephemeral peace is all too often concocted only by vowels and consonants. (talking about a potential peace treaty between North Korea and the U. S., to replace the decades-long armistice signed in 1953)

“The Phoenicians were the Canaanites. Thus Phoenicia… was invaded by the Israelites, who eventually pushed the Phoenicians to the coastal fringe. Subsequently, the Israelites borrowed various cultural elements from the Phoenicians, including the first alphabet. Some groups of Israelites even adopted the god Ba'al and, presumably, the practice of child sacrifice.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

Source: What the Bones Tell Us (1997), Ch. 2