Phoenician alphabet

“ In taking the Phœnician letters, the Greeks dropped some, used others for slightly different sounds, and added a few to express sounds that were important to them or that did not exist in the Phœnician. But this was done very gradually. It never has been easy to induce people to change and improve their alphabets.
But there is another reason why men have refused to change the order of letters by inserting a new and useful letter in the place where it naturally belonged. The Greeks and many other peoples used the letters of the alphabet for numerals. ”

“ EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS The Egyptians early developed such an alphabet. Unfortunately they never gave up their older methods of writing and learned to rely upon alphabetic signs alone. Egyptian hieroglyphics [11] are a curious jumble of object- pictures, symbols of ideas, and signs for entire words, separate syllables, and letters. The writing is a museum of all the steps in the development from the picture to the letter.
PHOENICIAN ALPHABET As early, apparently, as the tenth century B.C. we find the Phoenicians of western Asia in possession of an alphabet. ”

“ Is there any other country to which we can turn which possessed a phonetic alphabet in any respect kindred to this Phœnician alphabet? It cannot be the Chinese alphabet, which has more signs than words; it cannot be the cuneiform alphabet of Assyria, with its seven hundred arrow-shaped characters, none of which hear the slightest affinity to the Phœnician letters.
It is a surprising fact that we find in Central America a phonetic alphabet. ”

“ Here too the old Phœnician letter does not in any way resemble an ox, but it bears a very close likeness to the head of a bull, which occupies a prominent place in the Hittite texts. Aleph became the Greek alpha when the Phœnician alphabet was handed on to the Greeks, and in the word alphabet has become part of our own heritage. ”

“ The history of the alphabet among the Hellenes turns essentially on the fact that—assuming the primitive alphabet of 23 letters, that is to say, the Phoenician alphabet vocalized and enlarged by the addition of the -"id:u" —proposals of very various kinds were made to supplement and improve it, and each of these proposals has a history of its own. The most important of these, which it is interesting to keep in view as bearing on the history of Italian writing, are the following:—I. The introduction of special signs for the sounds —"id:xi" —"id:phi" —"id:chi". ”

“ With T we reach the end of the original Phœnician alphabet. The remaining symbols—no fewer than six with us, four in the completed Latin alphabet—are accretions, either modifications of old symbols for greater exactness or old symbols themselves which had fallen out of their proper place and were added again. The first new symbol was needed to represent the important vowel sound u. We have already seen that the Greeks employed the Phœnician symbols for the breaths which they did not want as symbols for the vowels which they did want. ”

“ It is supposed that this language was the source of what is known as the Cypriote syllabary, found in Cyprus, a system of characters of which each does not, like the letters of the alphabet, represent a single sound, but a syllable, and which was probably the language in use among commercial people throughout Asia Minor, until it was superseded by the simpler and more practical Phœnician alphabet. This discovery is exceedingly interesting, as the Hittites belong to the same race of people who perfected, by the alphabet, that greatest of human inventions, a written language. ”

“ The Phœnician alphabet did not altogether suit the writers of Greek and Latin, who altered some letters and made new ones in order to write their languages more perfectly, and thus other nations have made free in adding, dropping, and altering letters and their sounds, to get the means required for each to express its own tongue. ”

“ Putting together, however, what is no longer conjectural, it would seem that the Phœnician alphabet was a compound from various sources, the selection and modification of the several characters being ruled by convenience, and that, primarily and essentially, commercial. Like all business people immersed in many transactions, their method was brevity, and so they aimed as near "shorthand" as they could. ”

“ The discovery of the alphabet is at once the triumph, the instrument and the register of the progress of our race. The oldest abecedarium in existence is a child's alphabet on a little ink-bottle of black ware found on the site of Cere, one of the oldest of the Greek settlements in Central Italy, certainly older than the end of the sixth century B. C. The Phœnician alphabet has been reconstructed from several hundred inscriptions. ”

“ The alphabets of Greece, Rome, and 95 all modern nations are beyond all doubt derived from that of Phœnicia, and it has been generally supposed that this was formed from an abridgment of the hieroglyphics or hieratics of Egypt. But the Minæan inscriptions raise the question whether the Phœnician alphabet itself and the kindred alphabets of Palestine, Syria, and other countries near the Arabian frontier were not derived from Arabia rather than from Egypt. ”

“ This view was generally received by the small band of scholars who knew, or cared to know anything about the subject—its ablest champion being Dr. Isaac Taylor, who, in his great work on "The Alphabet," vol. i, has said about all that can be said in favour of the Egyptian parentage of Semitic letters. Recent discoveries tend to prove (and, I believe, do prove with as much certainty as we can hope to arrive at in a matter of this kind) that the Phœnician alphabet is the sister rather than the parent of the Jewish and Aramean letters. ”

“ For cuneiform appears to be essentially a Semitic script, and the Phœnicians in their contact with other Semitic peoples would, it may be assumed, have retained and adapted some, if not all, of the cuneiform characters long before they became familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic. Granting, however, all that the upholders of M. de Rougé's theory may demand, their inference as to the direct connection between the Greek and other alphabets and the Phœnician alphabet is not necessarily to be accepted. ”

“ At all periods, moreover, hieroglyphic writing was a branch of decorative art, and it may have been that the ancient Egyptian, like the modern Turk, resented too much lucidity, and liked his literary compositions to be veiled in a certain obscurity. The alphabet devised by the Egyptians consisted of twenty-four letters. Egyptologists are at variance on the question whether this alphabet was the original, or had any influence upon the development of the Phoenician alphabet. ”

“ Evans agree that the relics unearthed at Kahun are as old as that city; while, speaking of the signs known to be in use 1200 b.c., in a place occupied by people of the Ægean and Asia Minor, Turseni, Akhaians, Hittites, and others, Professor Flinders Petrie remarks that "it will require a very certain proof of the supposed Arabian source of the Phœnician alphabet before we can venture to deny that we have here the origin of the Mediterranean alphabets." (Ten Years' Digging in Egypt, p. 134.) ”

“ The most numerous inscriptions come from the excavations in Carthage, the ancient colony of Sidon. One general feature characterizes them all, though they differ somewhat in detail. The symbols become longer and thinner; in fact, cease to be the script of monuments and become the script of a busy trading people. While the Phoenician alphabet was thus fertile in developing daughter alphabets in the West, the progress of writing was no less great in the East, first among the Semitic peoples, and through them among other peoples still more remote. ”

“ It will be a true alphabet, the wonderful nature of which may be inferred from the fact that only two, or possibly three, such alphabetic systems are known with absolute certainty to have ever been independently evolved by human ingenuity [112] . From the above exposition we see how inevitably the Phoenician parent of nearly all late alphabets expressed at first the consonantal sounds only, so that the vowels or vowel marks are in all cases later developments, as in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, the Italic group, and the Runes. ”

“ With few, if any exceptions, all the modes of writing in the world originate, directly or indirectly, from the Phœnician.
At a certain period the alphabet of Palestine, Phœnicia, and the neighboring languages of the Semitic tribes, consisted of twenty-two separate and distinct letters.
Now the chances are, that, let a language possess as few elementary articulate sounds as possible, an alphabet of only twenty-two letters will be insufficient. ”

“ The Phœnicians and Hebrews are supposed to have borrowed their alphabet from the Egyptian hieratic writing; and in the transition the irregular character of the markings of the reed pen on papyrus disappeared and monumental regularity took its place, as nearly all of the early Phœnician and Hebrew writing was in the form of inscriptions on stone and metal. But in this transition the letters did not revert to the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbol, but simply became an angular, simplified form of the hieratic, so that the A became a V or caret-like form with a line crossing it. ”

“ Such is the most probable account of the origin of letters. Tradition variously ascribes their invention to Thoth, an Egyptian god, to Cadmus of Phœnicia, to Odin the supreme deity of the Scandinavians, and to others. Of the varied exports of the Phœnicians, their alphabet was the most precious. Wherever their sails were spread, their letters were made known, and all nations sooner or later profited by this great Semitic invention. In the table on page 87 may be traced a decided resemblance between several of the Phœnician characters and the hieroglyphics in which they originated ”

“ After the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, it was seen to be probable that not only were the ancient Egyptians the first inventors of alphabetic writing, but that the Phœnician and Hebrew alphabet was itself borrowed from the Egyptian hieroglyph-alphabet. Mr. Samuel Sharpe made the attempt to bring together the Egyptian hieroglyphs in their pictorial form with the square Hebrew characters. The Vicomte de Rougé's comparison, left for years unpublished, of the Egyptian hieratic characters with the old Phœnician letters, confirms Mr. ”

“ From these names alone, then, even if nothing else were known about the early alphabets, it would be possible to prove the correctness of the Greek legend that they derived their letters from the Phœnicians. A people who themselves invented an alphabet would obviously name the letters with words in their own language, and not with meaningless syllables taken from a foreign speech. ”

“ It is now clear that the same, or nearly the same, alphabet was in use from a very early date over the greater part of Western Asia—in Phoenicia, Moab, Judæa, Samaria, Lycia, Caria, Phrygia, &c.—that it was adopted, with slight alterations only, by the Etruscans and the Greeks, and that from them it was passed on to the nations of modern Europe, and acquired a quasi-universality. ”

“ Such other localized civilizations as those of Phoenicia, Carthage, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Sassanids, in due course waxed and waned, leaving a tremendous imprint on national history, but creating only minor and transitory ripples in the great ocean of civilization. Progress in the elaboration of the details of earlier methods and inventions took place as a matter of course. Some nation, probably the Phoenicians, gave a new impetus to the art of writing by developing a phonetic alphabet; but this achievement, remarkable as it was in itself, added nothing fundamental to human capacity. ”

“ Recollect that the foreigner is in the same predicament with respect to all the words in the language; and for this reason—the letters in our alphabet have no fixed sounds attached to them, nor is the same sound invariably represented by the same combination of letters. Now what we plead for is, some system of printing and writing, in which the same sound has always the same symbol, and the same symbol has always the same sound; and this we call, when printed, Phonotypy, from "fɷnɩ," voice, and "tɩpos," type ”

“ One of the most marvellous inventions for the advancement of mankind is the phonetic alphabet, or a system of signs representing the sounds of human speech. Without it our present civilization could scarcely have been possible.
No solution of the origin of our European alphabet has yet been obtained: we can trace it back from nation to nation, and form to form, until we reach the Egyptians, and the archaic forms of the Phœnicians, Hebrews, and Cushites, but beyond this the light fails us. ”

“ Hottentot rather than Kaffre.
Are all the alphabets, that have ever been used, referable to one single prototype, as their ultimate original, or has the process of analysing a language into its elementary [Pg 521] articulations, and expressing these by symbols, been gone through more than once? The answer to this is, partially a measure of the intellectual influence of the Semitic nations. Great would be that influence, even if only the Greeks and Romans had adopted the alphabet of the Phœnicians. How much greater if the world at large had done so. ”