Proto-Canaanite alphabet

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The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is the linear (i.e., non-Cuneiform) abjad of twenty-plus acrophonic glyphs. It is found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age, by convention until a cut-off date of 1050 BCE. Through its successful Phoenician successor, it became the ancestor of nearly every alphabet in use today, from Roman and Berber to Thai and Mongol — perhaps even Korean.

Predecessors, possibly still partly logographic, were discovered in central Egypt in 1905 and 1999. (See Middle Bronze Age alphabets.) These early scripts may have had more letters than are found later, and may also have included letter variants (different letters that could be used to express the same phoneme).

The names of the letters, which survive in the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, were probably already present. The names are based on an acrophonic principle, presumably from Semitic translations of the names of Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example, Egyptian nt (water) became Semitic mu (water), ultimately evolving into Latin M, while Egyptian drt (hand) became Semitic kapp (hand), and ultimately Latin K.

The alphabetic order is unknown; the related but cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet had two alphabetic orders, an ABCD order similar to our own, and an HLĦM otherwise attested in the South Arabian and Ethiopic alphabets.

One reconstruction of twenty of the letters, based on Proto-Canaanite's better-attested successors Phoenician and South Arabian, follows, along with the Latin descendants,

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History of the Alphabet

Wadi el-Hol 19th c. BC Proto-Canaanite 14th c. BC Ugaritic 13th c. BC Phoenician 11th c. BC Hebrew 9th c. BC Aramaic 9th c. BC Brahmi 3rd c. BC Devanagari 12th c. Thai 13th c. Syriac 2nd c. BC Arabic 4th c. Greek 9th c. BC *Coptic 4th c. Gothic 4th c. Glagolitic 862 Cyrillic 10th c. Old Italic 8th c. BC Latin 7th c. BC Runes 2nd c. South Arabian 9th c. BC
Georgian 5th c. BC
Armenian 405
Orkhon 6th c.
Ogham 6th c.
Hangul 1446

[ʾ] ʾalp "ox" (A)
[b] bet "house" (B)
[g] gaml "throwstick" (C, G)
[d] digg "fish" (D)
[h] haw / hll "jubilation" (E)
[w] waw "hook" (F, U, V, W, Y)
[z] zen /ziqq "manacle" (Z)
[ḥ] ḥet (H)
[y] yad "arm" (I, J)
[k] kap "hand" (K)
[l] lamd "goad" (L)
[m] mem "water" (M)
[n] naḥš "snake" (N)
[ʿ] ʿen "eye" (O)
[p] piʾt "corner" (P)
[ṣ ] ṣad "plant"
[q] qup (Q)
[r] raʾs "head" (R)
[š] šimš "sun, the Uraeus" (S)
[t] taw "signature" (T)

Table of contents

1 Literature
2 See also
3 External links

Literature

Cross, F.M. (1979) The Invention and Development of the Alphabet in Senner, Frank (ed.) The Origins of Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press
Diringer, David and Freeman, Hilda (1983) A History of the Alphabet. Headley: Gresham Books.
Healey, John. (1990) The Early Alphabet. London: British Museum.
Neveh, Joseph. (1982) The Early History of the Alphabet. Leiden: E.J. Brill.