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.

The Alphabet

The original Proto-Sinatic letters had been pictograms, derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some of the name meanings had changed by the time of Phoenician. For example, the character gimel may have originally been the image of a throwing stick. In the chart below:

Related Topics:
Proto-Sinatic - Pictogram - Egyptian hieroglyph

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• The meanings given are of the letter names in Phoenician. The Phoenician letter names are not directly attested and were reconstructed by Theodor Nöldeke in 1904.
• As the letters were originally carved into stone, most are square and straight, like characters from the runic alphabet, although more cursive versions are increasingly attested in later times, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet of Roman-era North Africa.
• Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are some texts written in boustrophedon (consecutive lines in alternate directions ? literally, as the ox turns, a reference to the way an ox turns at the end ploughing a furrow and carries on the next furrow in the opposite direction).
• Various letters have alternative representations: e.g. the taw can be written more like a '+' than like a 'x', the heth can have two cross bars.
• The Greek letters given in brackets are archaic and may not render in some fonts (see Greek alphabet for details).
• The Latin letter X derives from a western Greek pronunciation of chi, and not directly from the samekh-inspired letter xi. However chi itself is probably a secondary derivation of Phoenician samekh.

Encoding

The Phoenician script has been accepted for encoding in Unicode 5.0 in the range U+10900 to U+1091F. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of Hebrew was turned down. (See PDF summary.) The letters will be encoded U+10900 𐤀 aleph through to U+10916 𐤖 taw,

Related Topics:
Unicode - Hebrew

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U+10917 𐤗,

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U+10918 𐤘,

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U+10919 𐤙 and

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U+1091A 𐤚 will encode the numerals 1, 10, 20 and 100 respectively and

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U+1091F 𐤟 the word separator.

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