Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet dates from around 1000 BC and is derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. It was used by the Phoenicians to write Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language. Modern alphabets thought to have descended from the Phoenician include Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), and Cyrillic. Like Proto-Canaanite, Arabic and Hebrew, Phoenician is a consonantal alphabet (an abjad), and contains no symbols for vowel sounds, which had to be deduced from context.

Derived alphabets

The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, used to write early Hebrew, is nearly identical to the Phoenician one. The Samaritan alphabet, used by the Samaritans, is a version of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.

Related Topics:
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet - Hebrew - Samaritan alphabet - Samaritans

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The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic, is another descendant. Aramaic being the lingua franca of the Middle East, it was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including the modern Hebrew alphabet, the Syriac alphabet, and the Nabatean alphabet, a highly cursive form that was the origin of the Arabic alphabet.

Related Topics:
Aramaic alphabet - Aramaic - Lingua franca - Hebrew alphabet - Syriac alphabet - Nabatean alphabet - Arabic alphabet

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The Greek alphabet is thought to have developed either directly from the Phoenician alphabet, or to share a common parent in Proto-Canaanite. The Greeks kept most of the sounds of the symbols, but used some letters which represented sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. This was particularly important as Greek, an Indo-European language, is much less consonant-dominated than most Semitic languages.

Related Topics:
Greek alphabet - Vowel - Greek - Indo-European - Semitic

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The Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets are derived from the Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters are based on Glagolitic forms, which were influenced by the Hebrew alphabet. Also, the old runes were likely derived from an early form of the Latin alphabet.

Related Topics:
Latin - Cyrillic alphabet - Greek alphabet - Glagolitic - Runes

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Many historians believe that the Brahmi script and the subsequent Indic alphabets are derived from this script as well, which would make it the ancestor of almost all major writing systems in use today, with the exception of the Chinese script and its derivatives.

Related Topics:
Brahmi script - Indic alphabets - Chinese script

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