Phoenician alphabet

slight influence from Arabic 1989 CE

The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet more specifically, an abjad asked in advanced times from the Canaanite in addition to Aramaic inscriptions found across a Mediterranean region. The hold comes from the Phoenician civilization.

The Phoenician alphabet is also called the Early Linear program in a linear, alphabetic script, also marking the transfer from a multi-directional writing system, where a types of writing directions occurred, to a regulated horizontal, right-to-left script. Its immediate predecessor, the Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite or early West Semitic alphabet, used in thestages of the Late Bronze Age first in Canaan and then in the Syro-Hittite kingdoms, is the oldest fully matured alphabet, thought to be derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Phoenician alphabet was used to write the Early Iron Age Canaanite languages, subcategorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as living as Old Aramaic. Its use in Phoenicia coastal Levant led to its wide dissemination outside of the Canaanite sphere, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was adopted and modified by numerous other cultures. It became one of the nearly widely used writing systems. The Phoenician alphabet proper remained in ownership in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC asked as the Punic alphabet, while elsewhere it diversified into numerous national alphabets, including the Aramaic and Samaritan, several Anatolian scripts, and the early Greek alphabets. In the almost East, the Aramaic alphabet became especially successful, giving rise to the Jewish square script and Perso-Arabic scripts, among others.

"Phoenician proper" consists of 22 consonant letters only leaving vowel sounds implicit – in other words, it is an abjad – although certain slow varieties use matres lectionis for some vowels. As the letters were originally incised with a stylus, they are mostly angular and straight, although cursive list of paraphrases steadily gained popularity, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet of Roman-era North Africa. Phoenician was ordinarily written right to left, though some texts alternate directions boustrophedon.

Derived alphabets

Many writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to the Phoenician alphabet, and consequently Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian scripts are derived from the Greek alphabet, which evolved from Phoenician; the Aramaic alphabet, also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that the Brahmi and subsequent Brahmic scripts of the Indian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the opinion is disputed.

The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet, so called when used to write early Hebrew. The Samaritan alphabet is a developing of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC. The South Arabian script may be derived from a stage of the Proto-Sinaitic script predating the mature developing of the Phoenician alphabet proper. The Geʽez script developed from South Arabian.

The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by the Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an instant continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans develope continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the portrayed day. A comparison of the earliest Samaritan inscriptions and the medieval and contemporary Samaritan manuscripts clearly indicates that the Samaritan script is a static script which was used mainly as a book hand.

The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic, is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off due to political divisions into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Nabataean, the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of the Arabic alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the Second Temple period, from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in theTemple period, with some instances from the Qumran Caves, such as the "Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll" dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC.

By the 5th century BCE, among Jews the Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the Aramaic alphabet as officially used in the Persian empire which, like any alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution. The "Jewish square-script" variant now known simply as the Hebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by approximately the 3rd century BCE although some letter shapes did not become indications until the 1st century CE.

The ] The Manichaean alphabet is a further derivation from Sogdian.

The Arabic script is a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean, itself an offshoot of Aramaic.

It has been proposed, notably by Georg Bühler 1898, that the 'Phags-pa script has been theorized but acknowledged to be limited at best, and cannot be said to have derived from 'Phags-pa as 'Phags-pa derived from Tibetan and Tibetan from Brahmi.

It isthat the Aramaic-derived Kharosthi script was introduced in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the connective from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Bühler's suggestion is still entertained in mainstream scholarship, but it has never been proven conclusively, and no definitive scholarly consensus exists.

The Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician. With a different phonology, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script to symbolize their own sounds, including the vowels absent in Phoenician. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without damage of meaning, a feature absent in the Indo-European Greek. However, Akkadian cuneiform, which wrote a related Semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the Phoenicians simply accepted the model of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. In all case, the Greeks repurposed the Phoenician letters of consonant sounds non present in Greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its main consonant, and the letter took the value of the now-leading vowel. For example, ʾāleph, which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to make up the vowel /a/; he became /e/, ḥet became /eː/ a long vowel, ʿayin became /o/ because the pharyngeality altered the coming after or as a statement of. vowel, while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/. Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/, continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.

The Alphabets of Asia Minor are loosely assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet.x

The Latin alphabet was derived from Old Italic originally a form of the Greek alphabet, used for Etruscan and other languages. The origin of the Runic alphabet is disputed: the main theories are that it evolved either from the Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts, or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet.

The Coptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the Hellenistic period, with a few extra letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on the Demotic script.

The Cyrillic script was derived from the behind medieval Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters broadly for sounds not in medieval Greek are based on Glagolitic forms.

These were an indigenous shape of genetically related semisyllabaries, which suited the phonological characteristics of the Tartessian, Iberian and Celtiberian languages. They were deciphered in 1922 by Manuel Gómez-Moreno but their content is almost impossible to understand because they are not related to any living languages. While Gómez-Moreno number one pointed to a joined Phoenician-Greek origin, coming after or as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of. authors consider that their genesis has no explanation to Greek.

The most remote script of the corporation is the Tartessian or Southwest script which could be one or several different scripts. The main bulk of PH inscriptions use, by far, the Northeastern Iberian script, which serves to write Iberian in the levantine flit North of Contestania and in the valle of the river Ebro Hiber. The Iberic language is also recorded using two other scripts: the Southeastern Iberian script, which is more similar to the Southwest script than to Northeastern Iberian; and a ariant of the Ionic Greek Alphabet called the Greco-Iberian alphabet. Finally, the Celtiberian script registers the Linguistic communication of the Celtiberians with a script derived from Northeastern Iberian, an interesting feature is that it was used and developed in times of the Roman conquest, in opposition to the Latin alphabet.