Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

This is very fascinating stuff, but it's not really that relevant for the question posed in the title. Our Latin letters got their shapes from the Greek alphabet, by way of Etruscan. Greek in turn is based on the Semitic abjads (consonantal alphabets) which in turn likely go back to Hieroglyphics. B comes from Beta, from Beth/Bayt in Semitic languages, going back to a Hieroglyph for "house". Of course beth also means house in Hebrew, as in Bethlehem.

This is not a mystery, and since the modern letters ultimately got their shapes from pictographic drawings, there is no real connection between shape and sound anymore. At most it may have influenced how the letters have been simplified over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_(letter)

View on HN

I believe the letter “b” it traces back to the hieroglyph for “foot”, not the one for a “house.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(hieroglyph)

It even looks like a foot, which is fun. I took my daughter to the Met this weekend looked at some Egyptian artifacts and was watching some videos about hieroglyphs after, so I don’t actually know much about them, but they happened to have mentioned this on one of the lectures.

No, this is something different. This glyph may be a "B", but not in the same sense that our Latin B is a B, or even in the same sense that Hebrew bayt is a B.

Remember, most Hieroglyphs had two or three consonants, and there was no Ancient Egyptian "alphabet", that is something they made up for tattoo's and tourists. When you wrote something in Egyptian, you didn't just combine a bunch of characters that each had a single consonant sound, that was an innovation of the semites. Then later the Greeks come up with the concept of vowels.

Apart from being shaped vaguely like a house, another clue is in the name. Semitic B's have a name that means house.

Hmm, take a look at minute 3:40 from this video: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/wonders-ancient-egypt/hiero...

I don't know too much about this, so I definitely could be mistaken, but the professor seems to say this hieroglyphic may be connected with our current letter "B". Also, I think he said something about "house" on another video and I believe it was different.

The connection between the letter beth and the house character (which beth means) is pretty well established, it's by no means my theory. It might not be 100% certain, but it's the only one I've heard over the years.

When it comes to that video, surely the professor would be aware that lowercase letters are a late invention, b is just a version of the original B, so the lowercase shape per se is irrelevant. Furthermore, I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that B comes from semitic beth, so whatever you do, you need to compare THAT shape to Hieroglyphs.

𐤁 in Phoenician, ב‎ in Hebrew.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_(letter) and scroll down to the comparison between Egyptian and the Semitic languages.

And again, there's also the name of the letter, which means house, not leg.

I agree, any connection between the Egyptian "foot" hieroglyph and the lower case "b" seems irrelevant, but it seems that the Phoenician letter bet looks kind of like the Egyptian "foot" too, so perhaps that's where the connection lies.

The Wikipedia article for "b" seems to list both the "foot" and the "house" hieroglyphs in the development on the sidebar... not that Wikipedia is always correct.

I think the professor in that video is quite well known and has written several books on Egyptology, so I doubt he would be completely off base on something so basic. In any event, you're absolutely right that there the house hieroglyphs is related. I was wrong to question that. But it seems that the "foot" hieroglyph maybe has some relation too. If you find anything more about this, I'd be curious to hear what it is.

You're right, they do show the leg glyph in the sidebar, but then in the text they write:

"The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨ Leg glyph ⟩, but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨ Bet ⟩ probably adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ Per ⟩ meaning "house"."

It doesn't seem from this that they are claiming that B comes from the leg glyph. so it's very strange they put it in the side-bar, if it's etymologically unrelated.

Also, if you look at the Aleph article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph, they have a sub-section with some Hieroglyphs that are pronounced as aleph, without mentioning any historical connection, which seems very strange. The rest of the article talks about letters that are historically related, so why bring up the vulture glyph? In the article for a they don't show the vulture though, only the ox.

I think part of the reason people say things like this is that they are so strongly inclined to see writing systems as alphabets, so they just have to find "the letter b in Egyptian", even though that makes no sense at all. Egyptian didn't have a letter b, they had a number of glyphs that represented 1, 2 or 3 consonants.

Btw I'm sure the professor knows his Egyptology, so the preceding wasn't referring to him, but maybe he didn't study the origin of the Semitic writing systems. That's not really Egyptology.

This is why I semi-seriously propose that the animal which has been portrayed the most times would be the bull, as the capital A letter derives from a hieroglyph depicting a bull's head, which was turned upside down at some point, and even today you can still sort of recognize the shape. There might be hundreds of millions of cat photos, but there are probably at least a trillion A's out there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A

Also "bayt" means house in arabic as well.

Yeah, in most, if not all Semitic languages. Most letter names are very similar across the Semitic languages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com