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Your post shows exactly why it would be useful to write vowels in Semitic languages: to distinguish among the different tenses, passive/active, nominalizations etc.---in other words, to distinguish the various words that happen to be based on a single root.

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True, but Arabic and Hebrew use a large number of implicit vowels. Only some of the vowels are actually written (except in school books in the early grades).

I don't really understand how they can leave out so many vowels and still figure out that "this is past tense", "this is a noun", etc.

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