A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
universityofcalifornia.edu
universityofcalifornia.edu
One that presumably did not succeed, and was superseded by proto-Sinaitic?
Or perhaps influenced / led to proto-Sinaitic?
Usually it is assumed that a script is alphabetic instead of being syllabic when the total number of distinct symbols is small, but this is not foolproof, because there are languages with a relatively small number of distinct syllables, like Japanese, so there is an overlap in the number of distinct symbols between alphabetic scripts for languages with a great number of phonemes and syllabic scripts for languages with a small number of syllables.
However, in this case it appears that the total amount of recovered text is quite small, so it would contain a small number of distinct symbols even if the original writing system had a greater number of distinct symbols, which did not happen to be recorded here.
Because the small total number of distinct symbols may be an accident in this case, it would not be enough to prove that this is an alphabetic script.
One should not forget that already since its origin, millennia before this, the Egyptian writing system had contained as a subset a set of symbols equivalent with the later Semitic alphabets, i.e. where each symbol was used for a single consonant.
However the Egyptian writing system has never used its alphabetic subset alone (except sometimes for transcribing foreign names), but together with many other symbols used for writing multiple consonants.
The invention of the Semitic alphabets did not add anything new, but it greatly simplified the Egyptian writing system by deleting all symbols used for multiple consonants and using exclusively the small number of symbols denoting a single consonant.
Because the alphabetic script has been invented by trying to apply the principles of the Egyptian writing to a non-Egyptian language, it could have been inspired by an already existing practice of using the alphabetic subset of the Egyptian writing for the transcription of foreign words.
All the many writing systems that have been invented independently of the Egyptian writing have used symbols denoting either syllables or words. Only the Egyptian writing had the peculiar characteristic of denoting only the consonants of the speech, independently of the vowels, which is what has enabled the development of alphabetic writing systems from it.
I'm honestly amazed at how you know so much about everything
Astute observation.
That's some worthwhile reading.
I would say that some people can make use of natural intelligence better than others can do with the artificial stuff.
Hangul was developed independently of Egyptian script and is purely alphabetic.
Japanese has around 50 syllabic symbols, depending on how you count - include both sets of kana? include more archaic kana? etc
What would be a more typical number of syllabic symbols? I tried googling it to get an idea, but couldn't find much useful information. I guess Arabic has 28?
So, in terms of "possible sound combinations" I think Japanese would likely be on the lower side given that the number of sounds are also pretty low. Alright, thank you for that reply; the point in the original post I replied to makes more sense to me now.
Yes. I noticed this too, upon reading. Symbols, yes. Alphabet rather than proto-writing? that's a claim!
- Teacher
- Advisor
- Faculty
The answer is to stop digging. It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil, without destroying all that evidence that future generations might be able to use. Of course that means disrupting the dig-to-museum/auction/television pipeline that funds the field.
Who understands that? It's very interesting. Is there somewhere in archaeology where it's discussed? Is there a paper or article? It might be interesting for HN's front page.
I almost get the sense that people are interpreting abjad as "lesser-than" an alphabet. It's just a distinction, it's not a value judgement.
Until recently the term "alphabet" was used for any writing system where the symbols correspond approximately with phonemes, regardless whether both consonants and vowels are written as in all alphabets derived from or inspired by the Greek alphabet, or only the consonants are written, like in other writing systems derived from the old Semitic alphabet, without passing through the Greek alphabet.
Then the term "abjad" has been created, and also the term "abugida" (for alphabets where the base symbols are for consonants and the vowels are added as diacritic marks around the consonants), and the sense of "alphabet" has been restricted, in order to distinguish these 3 kinds of alphabets, but "alphabet" in the older wider sense can still be encountered frequently, either in the older literature or in informal speech, so one should be able to recognize both the stricter and the wider meanings.
In TFA, "alphabet" is used in the old wider sense. Moreover, it is not even used correctly in that sense, because they did not find a written "alphabet" like those used in teaching, but they have found a few written texts that are believed to have been written using an alphabetic script.
The oldest actual alphabets that have been found (which show the alphabetic order of the letters) are for the Ugaritic alphabet, which is older than the Phoenician alphabet, but much more recent than the oldest inscriptions that are believed to have been written with an alphabetic script.
Well, the actual scripts were distinguished semantically all along, and "alphabet" is also a word newer than the scripts in question. We should probably just use the words that make most sense to modern english speakers rather than... whomever you're referring to. Or just use "phonetic script" or something.
Without additional conventions, "alphabet" would have been the appropriate name for any writing systems derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which include the majority of the writing systems based on alphabets, abjads or abugidas. The few other such writing systems, which have not passed through the Phoenician alphabet, are those derived from the Ancient South Arabian script, which for some reason had a different alphabetic order of the letters than the Northern Semitic alphabets, so it did not start with Alep and Bet.
I just think it's useful to distinguish consonantal scripts from those with full vowel inclusion. Why not use alphabet/abjad for this? There's already a broad understanding of this meaning; why not lean into it?
I'll also admit this gets more complicated when I see people referring to an "abjad alphabet", but this leaves us with no way to describe an alphabet with consonants and vowels as opposed to a consonantal one.
You're doing a lot of equivocating between identity and ancestry. (e.g. saying that "alphabet" is composed of the names of two Phoenician letters rather than two Greek ones.)
In that framework, can we actually say that Ugaritic script is older than Phoenician script? My impression was that all of our knowledge of Ugaritic arises by coincidence, just that we happened to excavate a tell that turned out to keep records in what is as far as we know a script unique to it. Do we have reason to believe that someone wasn't using a proto-Phoenician script at the same time and we just haven't excavated them?
For reference, "abjad" was introduced in 1990, so it's 35 years old. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to start using 35 year old terms to accurately describe academic subjects.
"Abjad" seems to be a more specific term than "alphabet". Sometimes it is used as a subcategory of "alphabet" (as in "abjad alphabet") and sometimes the terms are mutually exclusive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Semitic-speaking_peo...
In German they still talk about Hamito-Semitic languages, but we call those Afroasiatic now.
It is very weird that in the phrase "anti-Semitic" most people understand Semitic to refer to Israelis, while today most of the Semites are Arabs.
The term "Semitic" is not at all appropriate as a linguistic term, but nobody has succeeded to find any acceptable replacement.
In the Bible, the populations were divided in 3 groups, sons of Japheth (hence the American word "Caucasian", because Japheth is a term for Caucasus), sons of Shem and sons of Ham. From Shem and Ham, the linguistic terms "Semitic" and "Hamitic" have been derived.
However the use of these words for classifying languages has been based on a misunderstanding of the Bible. In that classification of the populations from the Bible, the division did not have anything to do with their descendance from ancestors speaking a common language, but it was completely determined by the political dependence of the territories by the time when the Genesis was composed.
The so-called sons of Ham where those who lived in territories dominated by Egypt ("Ham" is related to the native name of Egypt; Egypt is a Greek word), while the so-called sons of Shem were those who lived in territories dominated by Babylon or Assyria ("Shem" may be related to "Sumer").
As one of the examples that demonstrate that the Genesis classification was political, not linguistic, the Phoenicians were sons of Ham, not sons of Shem, like the Arabs and Hebrews, despite the fact that the Phoenician language was a Semitic language almost identical to Hebrew (the main difference between Phoenicians and Hebrews was in religion). The Phoenicians were sons of Ham, because at that time most Phoenician cities accepted the suzerainty of Egypt, even if they had a certain autonomy.