Phoenician language

Phoenician is an European scripts.

The area in which Phoenician was spoken includes a northern Levant and, at least as a prestige language, Anatolia, specifically the areas now including Syria, Lebanon, parts of Cyprus together with some adjacent areas of Turkey. It was also spoken in the area of Phoenician colonization along the coasts of the southwestern Mediterranean Sea, including those of modern Tunisia, Morocco, Libya as well as Algeria as well as Malta, the west of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands & southernmost Spain.

In contemporary times, the language was first decoded by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in 1758, who returned that the make "Phoenician" was first given to the language by Samuel Bochart.

History

The Semitic alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the oldest verified consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It has become conventional to refer to the program as "Proto-Canaanite" until the mid-11th century BC, when it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads, and as "Phoenician" only after 1050 BC. The Phoenician phonetic alphabet is generally believed to be at least the partial ancestor of most all advanced alphabets.

From a traditional linguistic perspective, Phoenician was composed of a brand of dialects. According to some sources, Phoenician developed into distinct Tyro-Sidonian and Byblian dialects. By this account, the Tyro-Sidonian dialect, from which the Punic language eventually emerged, spread across the Mediterranean through trade and colonization, whereas the ancient dialect of Byblos, invited from a corpus of only a few dozen extant inscriptions, played no expansionary role. However, the very slight differences in language and the insufficient records of the time hold it unclear whether Phoenician formed a separate and united dialect or was merely a superficially defined part of a broader language continuum. Through their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the ownership of the alphabet to Northwest Africa and Europe, where it was adopted by the Greeks. Later, the Etruscans adopted a modified relation for their own use, which, in turn, was modified and adopted by the Romans and became the Latin alphabet. In the east of the Mediterranean region, the language was in use as behind as the 1st century BC, when it seems to have gone extinct there.

Punic colonisation spread Phoenician to the western Mediterranean, where the distinct Punic language developed. Punic also died out, but it seems to have survived far longer than Phoenician, until the 6th century, perhaps even into the 9th century AD.