Miguel:
> But that was not the starting point of the discussion. The question
> was whether there is at least one Semitic language where vowels are
> *not* used lexically.
No, that wasn't it either. The point is whether the COMPLETE lack
of lexical vowels is normal or abundant in languages around the
planet. It's definitely not. If it's not abundant or even statistically
relevant, there's no point reconstructing it for IE... and since there
ARE anomalous verbs that don't quite fit the rigid mathematical pattern
in IE, that language must be some sort of... natural language! How odd!
= gLeN