The Phoenician Alphabet and Language (Article) -- Ancient History Encyclopedia

Article

The Phoenician Alphabet and Language

by Thamis
published on 18 January 2012

Phoenician is a Canaanite language closely related to Hebrew. Very little is known about the Canaanite language, except what can be gathered from the El-Amarna letters written by Canaanite kings to Pharaohs Amenhopis III (1402-1364 BC) and Akhenaton (1364-1347 BC). It appears that Phoenician language, culture, and writing was strongly influenced by Egypt (which controlled Phoenicia for a long time), as king Rib-Adda of Byblos admits in one of his letters to the pharaoh.

Our knowledge of the Phoenician language is based on the few extant written texts in Phoenician. Before circa 1000 BC Phoenician was written using cuneiform symbols that were common across Mesopotamia. The first signs of the Phoenician alphabet found at Byblos are clearly derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and not from cuneiform. The twenty-two Phoenician letters are simplifications of Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols, which took on a standardized form at the end of the 12th century BC. Like Hebrew and Arabic, Phoenician was written from right to left, and vowels were omitted (which makes deciphering Phoenician even harder).

By 1000 BC the Phoenician and Hebrew languages had become distinct from Aramaic, which was spoken in Canaan. To give a few examples, the "ha-" prefix is used in both Phoenician and Hebrew to indicate a determinate noun, while in Aramaic the "-a" suffix is used. The pronoun for the first person is "ānōkī" while in Aramaic it is "anā" (as it is in modern Arabic). The word for "son" is "bar" in Aramaic but "ben" is Phoenician and Hebrew. Nonetheless there are differences between Hebrew and Phoenician: The verbs for "to be" and "to do" differ and the long "a" sound in Hebrew is pronounced "o" in Phoenician, for example.

The Phoenician writing system is, by virtue of being an alphabet, simple and easy to learn, and also very adaptable to other languages, quite unlike cuneiform or hieroglyphics. In the 9th century the Aramaeans had adopted the Phoenician alphabet, added symbols for the initial "aleph" and for long vowels. This Aramaic alphabet eventually turned into modern Arabic. By the 8th century BC, texts written in the Phoenician alphabet whose authors were probably not Phoenician appeared in Cilicia in southern Asia Minor and in northern Syria. Eventually the Greeks, who were in close trading contact with the Levant, adopted the Phoenician alphabet, added vowel sounds, and thus created the Greek alphabet (upon which our modern Latin alphabet is based).

Written by Thamis, published on 18 January 2012 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms.

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