Phoenician-alphabet Sentence Examples

While the Phoenician alphabet was thus fertile in developing daughter alphabets in the West, the progress of writing was no less great in the East, first among the Semitic peoples, and through them among other peoples still more remote.

In the Phoenician alphabet a sibilant Zade (Tzaddi) stands between q and p. Hence Q is the nineteenth letter in the Phoenician alphabet, the eighteenth in the Greek numerical alphabet, which alone contains it, the sixteenth (owing to the omission of 8 and E) in the Latin, and (from the addition of J) the seventeenth in the English alphabet.

In the Phoenician alphabet it takes a form closely resembling the English W, and this when moved through an angle of 90 is the ordinary Greek sigma 2.

The resemblances between some Egyptian symbols and some symbols of the Phoenician alphabet are striking; in other cases the differences are no less remarkable.

Egyptologists are at variance on the question whether this alphabet was the original, or had any influence upon the development of the Phoenician alphabet.

On the other hand, Professor Spiegelberg, 3 writing soon after Professor Breasted, says that investigation has not as yet furnished proof that the Phoenician alphabet is of Egyptian origin, though he admits that in some respects the development of the two alphabets, both without vowel signs, is curiously parallel.

As already mentioned, the twenty-two symbols of the Phoenician alphabet indicate consonantal sounds only.

The Phoenician alphabet possessed many more aspirates than were required in Greek, which tended more and more to drop all its aspirates.

The Phoenician alphabet was an alphabet of consonants only, but all Greek alphabets as yet known agree in employing A, E, I, 0, Y as vowels.

In the Phoenician alphabet Zain was the seventh letter, occupying the same position and having the same form approximately (i) as the early Greek Z, while in pronunciation it was a voiced s-sound; Samech () followed the 'symbol for n of and was the ordinary s-sound, though, as we have seen, e it is in different Greek states at the earliest period as well as E; after the symbol for p came Zade (v), which was a strong palatal s, though in name it corresponds to the Greek Nra; while lastly Shin (W) follows the symbol for r, and was an sh-sound.

Latin and the modern Roman alphabet were also adapted from the Phoenician alphabet (and then from the Greek ).

The tablets from Ugarit were found to have been written in an alphabetic cuneiform that might have preceded the Phoenician alphabet.

In the Phoenician alphabet the earliest forms are or more rounded The rounded form appears also in the earliest Aramaic (see ALPHABET).