Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 03/11/2005 23:22, Kevin Riley wrote:

> You notice I said "seem to fit".  We do have a few late inscriptions
> written in both Roman and Greek script, and apart from a possible
> development of 'kaph' to 'khaph' indicating maybe a development of begad
> kepat forms it seems that the consonants do fit the script.  Perhaps it is
> safer to say that as yet there is not much evidence to suggest that they don
> t.  Internal evidence suggests that Akkadian, Ugaritic and Aramaic were not
> phonemic, and external evidence is available for those languages and Hebrew.
> I would not be surprised if Phoenician was not phonemic, but in that case
> it is odd that the script fits [with the exception of sin/shin] the language
> that [we presume] developed later in Israel and also fits the known
> pronunciation of standard Aramaic.  It seems better to take that as
> indicating that Phoenician was developed for a language with 22 consonants
> until we find evidence against that position.  The problem with the sin/shin
> distinction is that neither Roman nor Greek scripts can distinguish these
> sounds.
>  

Fair enough. But we are really only presuming that Phoenician didn't 
have a sin/shin distinction, and there is also the question of the 
ayin/ghayin distinction, the one between the two hets, and some other 
distinctions which survive in Arabic but not in Hebrew or Aramaic. Few 
of these would be clearly distinguished in Greek or Latin transcription. 
But then it does seem probable that there was some NW Semitic language, 
probably at least similar to Phoenician, which has a 22 consonant 
inventory and which formed the basis of the rather widespread 22 letter 
alphabet.

> By "witness of history" I meant simply that a few ancient writers credited
> the Phoenicians with inventing the alphabet, and there is no alternative
> claim in historical writings.  No such claim is made for the Hebrews having
> invented the script, so I prefer to have as a working hypothesis that it was
> a Phoenician 'invention'.  Reality is usually messier than history suggests,
> but surely it is better to go with a theory that has a long history than one
> which has no evidence at all?
>
>  
Well, possibly, but I would hardly trust early Greek sources to 
distinguish the Phoenicians clearly from other peoples of the eastern 
Mediterranean coast. Anyway, there is clear although patchy evidence for 
alphabets earlier than the well known Phoenician one, some in Egypt 
(Wadi el-Hol) dating back as early as 1800 BCE. While of course this 
does not rule out the people later known as Phoenicians as the 
inventors, and that the Greek sources of more than a millennium later 
had remembered this, it seems more likely to me that the Greeks simply 
assumed that the alphabet had been invented by the people from whom they 
borrowed it.

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