Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yigal Levin" <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>]

> Do you suppose that when Phoenician and
> Aramaic adopted the 22 character Hebrew
> alphabet, that they adopted it unchanged
> because they shared the same set of
> consonantal phonemes at that time? (That’s
> just a throw out question, I don’t intend
> to discuss it at length.)
>
> Karl W. Randolph.
>


But an interesting one. What makes you think that "Phoenician and Aramaic
adopted the 22 character Hebrew alphabet"? Didn't Aramaic and Hebrew adopt
the Canaanite/Phoenician alphabet? The question is, how and why an approx.
30 letter "proto-Canaanite alphabet (not to mention a 30 letter Ugaritic
alphabet) get cut down to 22 letters? "Hebrew" obviously retained the
differnt pronounciations of (Ayin and Ghayin, Shin and Sin and probably
more, but the alphabet the adopted didn;t have enough characters. Why didn't
they "invent" some of their own?

Yigal