Phoenician alphabet

pre-deletion version of Phoenician alphabet

intro

Phoenician alphabet
Script type	Abjad
Time period	c. 1200–150 BC Unicode range	U+10900–U+1091F
This page contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

History of the alphabet
Graphical descent from Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian hieroglyphs 32nd c. BCE Hieratic 32nd c. BCE Demotic 7th c. BCE Meroitic 3rd c. BCE Proto-Sinaitic 19th c. BCE Ugaritic 15th c. BCE Epigraphic South Arabian 9th c. BCE Geʽez 5–6th c. BCE Phoenician 12th c. BCE Paleo-Hebrew 10th c. BCE Samaritan 6th c. BCE Aramaic 8th c. BCE Kharosthi 3rd c. BCE Brahmi 3rd c. BCE Brahmic family (see) Pallava 4th c. CE Cham 4th c. CE Dhives Akuru 6th c. CE Khmer 611 CE Tibetan 7th c. CE Phagspa 1269 CE Devanagari 10th c. CE Canadian Aboriginal 1840 Hebrew 3rd c. BCE Square Aramaic Alphabet 2007 Pahlavi 3rd c. BCE Avestan 4th c. CE Palmyrene 2nd c. BCE Nabataean 2nd c. BCE Arabic 4th c. CE N'Ko 1949 CE Syriac 2nd c. BCE Sogdian 2nd c. BCE Orkhon (old Turkic) 6th c. CE Old Hungarian c. 650 CE Old Uyghur Mongolian 1204 CE Mandaic 2nd c. CE Greek 8th c. BCE Etruscan 8th c. BCE Latin 7th c. BCE Cherokee (syllabary; letter forms only) c. 1820 CE Vai (syllabary) c. 1832 CE Deseret 1854 CE Great Lakes Algonquian 19th c. CE Blackfoot (influence from Canadian) 1888 CE Fraser (Old Lisu) 1915 CE Saanich 1978 CE Osage 2006 CE Runic 2nd c. CE Ogham (origin uncertain) 4th c. CE Lycian 5th c. BCE Coptic (influence from Demotic) 3rd c. CE Gothic 3rd c. CE Armenian 405 CE Caucasian Albanian (origin uncertain) c. 420 CE Georgian (origin uncertain) c. 430 CE Glagolitic 862 CE Cyrillic c. 940 CE Old Permic 1372 CE Libyco-Berber 10th c. BCE Tifinagh 4th c. CE Neo-Tifinagh 1970 CE Paleohispanic (semi-syllabic) 7th c. BCE
Graphically independent Hangul 1443 CE (proposed connection to Phagspa) Thaana c. 1601 CE Adlam 1989 CE
v t e

The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified

The Phoenician alphabet, which the Phoenicians adapted from the early West Semitic alphabet,

Coptic

) also derives from the Phoenician.

As the letters were originally incised with a

Roman-era

North Africa.

Phoenician was usually written right to left, though some texts alternate directions (boustrophedon).

History

Origin

The earliest known alphabetic (or "proto-alphabetic") inscriptions are the so-called

in the 13th and 12th centuries BC.

The Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the "Proto-Canaanite" script of the

Spread of the alphabet and its social effects

Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, including

Another reason for its success was the

The alphabet had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed its easy adaptation to multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of literacy as an exclusive achievement of royal and religious elites,

.

Modern rediscovery

The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, but up to the 19th century its origin was unknown. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of

was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs.

The Phoenician alphabet was known by the

Hebrew nation

, or else by one of his descendants.

Development

The Phoenician letter forms shown here are idealized: actual Phoenician writing was cruder and less uniform, with significant variations by era and region.

When alphabetic writing began in

The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets. The sound values also changed significantly, both at the initial creation of new alphabets and from gradual pronunciation changes which did not immediately lead to spelling changes.[18]

		Labial	Dental	Alveolar		Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
				Plain	Emphatic
Nasal		m		n
Stop	Voiceless	p		t			k	q		ʔ
	Voiced	b		d			ɡ
Affricate	Voiceless			t͡s
	Voiced			d͡z
Fricative	Voiceless		θ	s		ʃ	x			h
	Voiced								ʕ
Trill				r
Approximant				l		j	w

Letter names

Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters: a word was chosen with each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value.^[20] For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for "house" was bet; hence the Phoenician letter was called bet and had the sound value b.

According to a 1904 theory by Theodor Nöldeke, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script.^{[dubious – discuss]} This includes:

• gaml "throwing stick" to gimel "camel"
• digg "fish" to dalet "door"
• hll "jubilation" to he "window"
• ziqq "manacle" to zayin "weapon"
• naḥš "snake" to nun "fish"
• piʾt "corner" to pe "mouth"
• šimš "sun" to šin "tooth"

Yigael Yadin (1963) went to great lengths to prove that there was actual battle equipment similar to some of the original letter forms.^[21]

Numerals

The Phoenician numeral system consisted of separate symbols for 1, 10, 20, and 100. The sign for 1 was a simple vertical stroke (𐤖). Other numbers up to 9 were formed by adding the appropriate number of such strokes, arranged in groups of three. The symbol for 10 was a horizontal line or tack (𐤗‎). The sign for 20 (𐤘) could come in different glyph variants, one of them being a combination of two 10-tacks, approximately Z-shaped. Larger multiples of ten were formed by grouping the appropriate number of 20s and 10s. There existed several glyph variants for 100 (𐤙). The 100 symbol could be multiplied by a preceding numeral, e.g. the combination of "4" and "100" yielded 400.

Unicode

Unicode character block

Phoenician
Range	U+10900..U+1091F (32 code points)
Plane	SMP
Scripts	Phoenician
Assigned	29 code points
Unused	3 reserved code points
Unicode version history
5.0 (2006)	27 (+27)
5.2 (2009)	29 (+2)
Unicode documentation
Code chart ∣ Web page
Note: [24][25]

The Phoenician alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of Hebrew was turned down. (See PDF summary.)

The Unicode block for Phoenician is U+10900–U+1091F. It is intended for the representation of text in Palaeo-Hebrew, Archaic Phoenician, Phoenician, Early Aramaic, Late Phoenician cursive, Phoenician papyri, Siloam Hebrew, Hebrew seals, Ammonite, Moabite, and Punic.

The letters are encoded U+10900 𐤀‎ aleph through to U+10915 𐤕‎ taw, U+10916 𐤖‎, U+10917 𐤗‎, U+10918 𐤘‎ and U+10919 𐤙‎ encode the numerals 1, 10, 20 and 100 respectively and U+1091F 𐤟‎ is the word separator.

Block

Phoenician[1][2] Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

U+1090x

𐤀‎

𐤁‎

𐤂‎

𐤃‎

𐤄‎

𐤅‎

𐤆‎

𐤇‎

𐤈‎

𐤉‎

𐤊‎

𐤋‎

𐤌‎

𐤍‎

𐤎‎

𐤏‎

U+1091x

𐤐‎

𐤑‎

𐤒‎

𐤓‎

𐤔‎

𐤕‎

𐤖‎

𐤗‎

𐤘‎

𐤙‎

𐤚‎

𐤛‎

𐤟‎

Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 15.1 2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Phoenician block:

Version	Final code points[a]	Count	L2 ID	WG2 ID	Document
5.0	U+10900..10919, 1091F	27		N1579	Everson, Michael (1997-05-27), Proposal for encoding the Phoenician script
			L2/97-288	N1603	Umamaheswaran, V. S. (1997-10-24), "8.24.1", Unconfirmed Meeting Minutes, WG 2 Meeting # 33, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 20 June – 4 July 1997
			L2/99-013	N1932	Everson, Michael (1998-11-23), Revised proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in the UCS
			L2/99-224	N2097, N2025-2	Röllig, W. (1999-07-23), Comments on proposals for the Universal Multiple-Octed Coded Character Set
				N2133	Response to comments on the question of encoding Old Semitic scripts in the UCS (N2097), 1999-10-04
			L2/00-010	N2103	Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2000-01-05), "10.4", Minutes of WG 2 meeting 37, Copenhagen, Denmark: 1999-09-13—16
			L2/04-149		Kass, James; Anderson, Deborah W.; Snyder, Dean; Lehmann, Reinhard G.; Cowie, Paul James; Kirk, Peter; Cowan, John; Khalaf, S. George; Richmond, Bob (2004-05-25), Miscellaneous Input on Phoenician Encoding Proposal
			L2/04-141R2	N2746R2	Everson, Michael (2004-05-29), Final proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in the UCS
			L2/04-177		Anderson, Deborah (2004-05-31), Expert Feedback on Phoenician
			L2/04-178	N2772	Anderson, Deborah (2004-06-04), Additional Support for Phoenician
			L2/04-181		Keown, Elaine (2004-06-04), REBUTTAL to “Final proposal for encoding the Phoenician script in the UCS”
			L2/04-190	N2787	Everson, Michael (2004-06-06), Additional examples of the Phoenician script in use
			L2/04-187		McGowan, Rick (2004-06-07), Phoenician Recommendation
			L2/04-206	N2793	Kirk, Peter (2004-06-07), Response to the revised "Final proposal for encoding the Phoenician script" (L2/04-141R2)
			L2/04-213		Rosenne, Jony (2004-06-07), Responses to Several Hebrew Related Items
			L2/04-217R		Keown, Elaine (2004-06-07), Proposal to add Archaic Mediterranean Script block to ISO 10646
			L2/04-226		Durusau, Patrick (2004-06-07), Statement of the Society of Biblical Literature on WG2 N2746R2
			L2/04-218	N2792	Snyder, Dean (2004-06-08), Response to the Proposal to Encode Phoenician in Unicode
			L2/05-009	N2909	Anderson, Deborah (2005-01-19), Letters in support of Phoenician
5.2	U+1091A..1091B	2		N3353 (pdf, doc)	Umamaheswaran, V. S. (2007-10-10), "M51.14", Unconfirmed minutes of WG 2 meeting 51 Hanzhou, China; 2007-04-24/27
			L2/07-206	N3284	Everson, Michael (2007-07-25), Proposal to add two numbers for the Phoenician script
			L2/07-225		Moore, Lisa (2007-08-21), "Phoenician", UTC #112 Minutes
^ Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names

Derived alphabets

Middle Eastern descendants

The

, itself a descendant of the Phoenician script.

The Aramaic alphabet, used to write

region, as well as in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries.

The

script.

The Arabic script is a descendant of Phoenician via Aramaic.

The

, still used in Egypt for writing the Christian liturgical language Coptic (descended from Ancient Egyptian), is mostly based on the Greek alphabet, but with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on Demotic script.

Derived European scripts

According to Herodotus,^[26] the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—phoinikeia grammata, "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet, which was later introduced to the rest of Europe. Herodotus estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 BC, and claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus.^[27]

Modern historians agree that

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

Brahmic scripts

Many Western scholars believe that the

However, due to an indigenous-origin hypothesis of Brahmic scripts, no definitive scholarly consensus exists.

Surviving examples

• Ahiram sarcophagus
• Bodashtart
• Çineköy inscription
• Cippi of Melqart
• Eshmunazar
• Karatepe
• Kilamuwa Stela
• Nora Stone
• Pyrgi Tablets
• Temple of Eshmun

See also

• Arabic alphabet
• Aramaic alphabet
• Armenian alphabet
• Avestan alphabet
• Greek alphabet
• Hebrew alphabet
• Old Turkic script
• Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
• Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll
• Tanakh at Qumran
• Tifinagh
• Ugaritic alphabet

References

Sources

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Phoenician alphabet.

• ISBN 2-914266-04-9
• Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, London, 2001.
• Daniels, Peter T., et al. eds. The World's Writing Systems Oxford. (1996).
• Jensen, Hans, Sign, Symbol, and Script, G.P. Putman's Sons, New York, 1969.
• Coulmas, Florian, Writing Systems of the World, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, 1989.
• Hock, Hans H. and Joseph, Brian D., Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship, Mouton de Gruyter, New York, 1996.
• Fischer, Steven R., A History of Writing, Reaktion Books, 1999.
• Markoe, Glenn E., Phoenicians. University of California Press.
  ISBN 0-520-22613-5
  (2000) (hardback)
• Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic on Coins, reading and transliterating Proto-Hebrew, online edition. (Judaea Coin Archive)

External links

• Ancient Scripts.com (Phoenician)
• Omniglot.com (Phoenician alphabet)
• official Unicode standards document for Phoenician (PDF file)
• [1] Free-Libre GPL2 Licensed Unicode Phoenician Font
• GNU FreeFont Unicode font family with Phoenician range in its serif face.
• [2] Phönizisch TTF-Font.