24 Facts About Phoenician alphabet

Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.

Phoenician alphabet is called the Early Linear script, because it is an early development of the Proto- or Old Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script, into a linear, purely alphabetic script, marking the transfer from a multi-directional writing system, where a variety of writing directions occurred, to a regulated horizontal, right-to-left script.

Phoenician alphabet was used to write the Early Iron Age Canaanite languages, subcategorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as well as Old Aramaic.

The Phoenician alphabet proper remained in use in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, while elsewhere it diversified into numerous national alphabets, including the Aramaic and Samaritan, several Anatolian scripts, and the early Greek alphabets.

Phoenician alphabet was usually written right to left, though some texts alternate directions.

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Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the "Proto-Canaanite" script of the Bronze Age collapse period.

German philologist Max Muller believed that the Phoenician alphabet was derived from the Ancient South Arabian script during the 9th-century BC rule of the Minaeans over parts of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Phoenician alphabet inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician alphabet cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos and Carthage in North Africa.

The appearance of Phoenician alphabet disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene, would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era.

Phoenician alphabet estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time.

Phoenician alphabet was known to the Jewish sages of the Second Temple era, who called it the "Old Hebrew" script.

Conventional date of 1050 BC for the emergence of the Phoenician alphabet script was chosen because there is a gap in the epigraphic record; there are not actually any Phoenician alphabet inscriptions securely dated to the 11th century.

Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthelemy, but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century.

Runic Phoenician alphabet is derived from Italic, the Cyrillic Phoenician alphabet from medieval Greek.

Phoenician alphabet 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.

Phoenician alphabet is well prolific in terms of writing systems derived from it, as many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, and consequently Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Samaritan Phoenician alphabet is a development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC.

Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by the Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages.

The Hebrew Phoenician alphabet emerges in the Second Temple period, from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic Phoenician alphabet used in the Persian empire.

The "Jewish square-script" variant now known simply as the Hebrew Phoenician alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about the 3rd century BCE.

The Syriac Phoenician alphabet is the derived form of Aramaic used in the early Christian period.

For example, ?aleph, which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician alphabet, was repurposed to represent the vowel ; he became, het became, ?ayin became (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, and.

Latin Phoenician alphabet was derived from Old Italic, used for Etruscan and other languages.

Coptic Phoenician alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek Phoenician alphabet of the Hellenistic period, with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time.