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The Phoenician alphabet[b] is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) [2] used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was the first alphabet ever developed, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script ...
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late ...
The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. [18] However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more ...
Phoenician (/ fəˈniːʃən / fə-NEE-shən; Phoenician: śpt knʿn lit. 'language of Canaan'[2]) is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean ...
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [3] [4] It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [5] and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.
Sarcophagus of Ahiram, which bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet. National Museum of Beirut. Around 1050 BC, [37] the Phoenicians developed a script for writing their own language. The Canaanite-Phoenician alphabet consists of 22 letters, all consonants (and is thus strictly an abjad). [16]
History of the Latin script. The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet. The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. [1] It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English.
Alphabet. An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. [1] Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns ...