Everything about The Proto-canaanite Alphabet totally explained
The
Proto-Canaanite alphabet is an consonantal alphabet of twenty-two
acrophonic glyphs, found in
Levantine texts of the
Late Bronze Age (from ca. the
15th century BC), by convention taken to last until a cut-off date of
1050 BC, after which it's called
Phoenician. About a dozen incriptions written in Proto-Canaanite have been discovered in modern-day Israel and Lebanon.
Relationship with other writing systems
While a descendant script from the
Egyptian hieroglyphs, it's also the parent script of Phoenician, itself the ancestor of nearly every
alphabet in use today, from
Arabic,
Greek,
Hebrew,
Roman and
Berber in the West to
Thai,
Mongol, and perhaps
Hangul in the East. The Hebrew alphabet remains the closest to its predecessor, as only the form of the letters has been modified - unsurprising, since Hebrew is a
Canaanite language and had, in its original pronunciation, roughly the same set of consonants as the dialect that the alphabet was devised for.
Predecessor scripts, possibly still partly
logographic, were discovered in central
Egypt in
1905 and
1999 (see
Wadi El Hol). These early scripts may have had more letters than are found later, and may also have included letter variants (different letters that could be used to express the same phoneme).
Characteristics
The names of the letters, which survive in the Greek, Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, were probably already present. The names are based on the
acrophonic principle, presumably from
Semitic translations of the names of
Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example, Egyptian
nt (water) became Semitic
mem (water), ultimately evolving into Latin
M, while Egyptian
drt (hand) became Semitic
kapp (hand), and ultimately Latin
K.
The alphabetic order is unknown. The related
cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet had two alphabetic orders, an ABGD order similar to that of the
Hebrew,
Greek and
Latin alphabets, and an order attested in the
South Arabian and
Ge'ez alphabets.
One reconstruction of 22 letters, equivalent to the Phoenician alphabet which evolved from it, follows. The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin descendants follow.
Further Information
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