Words without vowels: how much you can read from “bt”, from written Arabic and from Romanian shorthand

Your own text, without vowels#

The text stays on your phone or computer: it is not sent anywhere.

Is Arabic written without vowels? What is actually missing from مكتوب#

The word مكتوب (maktūb) means “written”. Five letters are on the page, read from right to left: mīm, kāf, tāʾ, wāw, bāʾ. Three of them, k, t and b, form the root that Arabic links to writing. The mīm at the start belongs to the shape of the word. The wāw is not a consonant here: it writes the long vowel ū.

What is usually missing are the short vowels. They have small signs of their own, placed above and below the letters, and they appear in textbooks for beginners, where a word could be read two ways, and in the text of the Quran. Not every sign is a vowel: the little circle called sukūn shows precisely that no vowel follows the consonant.

One root in 319 places in the Quran#

The Quranic Arabic Corpus, a word-by-word annotation of the Quran made at the University of Leeds, finds the root K–T–B in 319 places. Each square below is one of them, in the order of the text. Tap one to see the form, the place and the gloss.

The root appears in 57 different written forms, with article, prefixes and endings. The meaning moves with the context too: the corpus renders it in English as “Book”, “Scripture”, “record”, “prescribed” or “decreed”. Knowing the root helps; it does not tell you on its own what the word means in its sentence.

How Romanian shorthand writes vowels#

Shorthand is not a language, nor the alphabet of one. It is a technique for writing as fast as someone speaks. In Romania, Henric Stahl published a “Complete course of shorthand with vowels” in 1909. In 1943 the teacher Petre D. Albu described it like this: vowels at the start of a word are written, those in the middle and at the end are usually left out, and some are put back when the reading would be uncertain.

What a vowel dot looks like can be seen in a version simplified by Aurel Boia and taught by Mona Bernhardt-Lörinczi in her lesson “Învățați stenografia – o practică uitată” (Learn shorthand, a forgotten practice). You write the consonants first. Then you put a dot beside them: to the right for A or Ă, to the left for O or U, above or below for E or I. Beside a straight stroke, the dot for E or I sits at the ends.

The lesson also uses abbreviations you cannot guess from letters: a P above the first consonant for “peste” (over), FR for “foarte” (very). They are learnt like any vocabulary. Henri Stahl said on the radio in 1932 that knowing the signs is not enough to take down a speech: it takes practice.

That is why “prlmnt” at the top of the page is not the shorthand for “parliament”. It is only what is left after the vowels are removed. Shorthand has its own signs, its own conventions and a reader who has learnt them.

A Semitic language written with every vowel: Maltese#

Maltese belongs to the Semitic branch, alongside Arabic, and is the only Semitic written language in Europe. It uses a Latin-based alphabet. A Maltese word has its vowels on the page, like an English one.

Side by side: مكتوب maktūb in Arabic and miktub in Maltese, both “written”. The same three consonants; in Maltese the vowels are on the page.

The family a language belongs to does not decide how it is written: the same branch has one language written in Arabic letters, where short vowels are usually left out, and one written in Latin letters, where all of them show.

Romanian did not change language when it changed letters either: between 1860 and 1862 it moved from Cyrillic to Latin script, sometimes on the same page. The switch is taken apart letter by letter in The transition alphabet.

What helped you read?#

The letters at the top stayed the same. Choose what made the difference:

Three things that are easily confused

“prlmnt”, the root K–T–B and a page of shorthand all leave something unwritten. The first is letters deleted, the second is part of Arabic grammar, the third is a learnt technique. What differs is what the reader must know to fill the gap.

Frequently asked questions#

Sources#

• Quranic Arabic Corpus, Quran dictionary, root kāf-tā-bā (accessed 4 November 2026)
• Quranic Arabic Corpus, terms of use (Kais Dukes, University of Leeds; licence GNU GPL)
• Quranic Arabic Corpus, word analysis of 7:157:8 (maktūban)
• Karin C. Ryding, A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic, ch. 2, Phonology and script (Cambridge, 2005)
• Karin C. Ryding, Arabic: A Linguistic Introduction, ch. 6, the root–pattern system (Cambridge, 2014)
• Unicode Standard 16.0, ch. 9: Middle East scripts
• Romanian Academy Library, Modern Romanian Bibliography: Stahl, Curs complect de stenografie cu vocale (1909)
• Henri Stahl, radio talk on shorthand, 20 February 1932 (Radio România)
• Petre D. Albu, „Stenografia, scrisul viitorului”, Informațiuni, year I, no. 6–7 (1943), p. 6 (BCU Cluj)
• Mona Bernhardt-Lörinczi, „Învățați stenografia – o practică uitată”, the Stahl system as simplified by Aurel Boia (Calaméo, 2014), pp. 10–11 and 15
• Mona Bernhardt-Lörinczi, blog post about the lesson (June 2010)
• University of Bremen, Malta Centre: The Maltese language
• John J. Camilleri, A Computational Grammar and Lexicon for Maltese (thesis, Chalmers, 2013), p. 23: miktub from kiteb
• John J. Camilleri, Features of the Maltese Language (presentation, Grammatical Framework Summer School, 2009): K-T-B, kiteb, ktieb, miktub

The Arabic forms, transliterations and English glosses in the root scene are taken unchanged from the Quranic Arabic Corpus (corpus.quran.com), with the attribution its terms require. The vowel-dot rules are those of the Stahl–Boia version in Mona Bernhardt-Lörinczi’s lesson, not of the 1909 manual, whose alphabet could not be consulted in a facsimile. The drawings are original.