This treatise strives to give a clear account of how ancient Greek alphabetic writing could naturally evolve into the world’s first segmental writing system, in which vowel and consonant letters are used to represent vowels and consonants respectively.
Current mainstream view has it that Greek alphabetic writing originated from Phoenician consonantal writing. After learning the Phoenician alphabet from the Phoenicians, the Greeks were able to use the Phoenician signs to denote the Greek consonants. All that was wanting were the vowel signs for denoting the Greek vowels. When some of the Phoenician signs turned into vowel letters, Greek segmental writing was born. Some letters in the Greek alphabet denoted vowels, and the others conconants.
The above view is questionable because Phoenician writing is in effect not consonantal. To the Phoenicians, a Phoenician sign had several sounds, which today can technically be described as several CV syllables with a common onset. So strictly speaking, a Phoenician sign is a syllabic sign with multiple sound values, not a consonant letter. The concept of consonant would be alien to the Phoenicians, who would not use their signs to denote consonants. The Phoenicians would write syllable by syllable, not consonant by consonant.
As a Phoenician sign had several sounds, the Phoenicians would be obliged to use a mater after it to denote the intended sound when writing an unfamiliar foreign name, such as a Greek name. When the Greeks exploited the Phoenician method of writing Greek names with matres to write the Greek language, an embryonic form of Greek alphabetic writing would emerge. This treatise will explain in great detail how this embryonic form would ultimately evolve into a fully-fledged Greek segmental writing system.
The mainstream view on the genesis of the Greek alphabet simply takes for granted that consonant letters already existed in ancient Semitic alphabetic writings. This treatise, however, strives to give a comprehensive account of how consonant and vowel letters came into being in ancient Greek alphabetic writings without assuming the prior existence of consonant letters.
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