Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 03/11/2005 17:29, Karl Randolph wrote:

> ...  
> The proposition that the ancients did not know enough to 
> write a phonetic alphabet is laughable, examples include 
> apparently Tiffineg (originated in Scandinavia, there used 
> apparently about 18th century BC) ...

??? Tifinagh is a script used in northern Africa in modern times, not an 
ancient Scandinavian script. If something like this was used in ancient 
Scandinavia, we have no way of knowing how phonetic or otherwise it 
might have been.

> ... and Ugaritic from the 
> 14th century BC if the earlier dates are correct. ...

Here we have exactly the same issues as with Phoenician. The corpus may 
be larger, but all we know about the language is based on the assumption 
that the script is phonetic, which means that it is methodologically 
impossible to prove that the script is phonetic.

I don't say that the ancients could not have used a phonetic script. All 
we can say is that there are scripts which we know were not phonetic, 
and scripts concerning which we cannot know whether they were phonetic 
or not, but none that we actually know were phonetic.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/