{"id":197,"date":"2017-01-14T21:59:40","date_gmt":"2017-01-14T13:59:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/?p=197"},"modified":"2018-09-12T17:01:10","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T09:01:10","slug":"section-3-of-the-origin-of-the-greek-alphabet-a-new-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/2017\/01\/14\/section-3-of-the-origin-of-the-greek-alphabet-a-new-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Section 3 of The Origin of the Greek Alphabet : A New Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

3\u00a0 Phoenician signs seen from the Phoenicians\u2019 perspective <\/strong><\/p>\n

If asked about the nature of their Phoenician signs, a Phoenician would probably explain in non-technical terms that a Phoenician sign had several \u201csounds\u201d<\/strong>. To illustrate his point, he might read out all the possible \u201csounds\u201d of a certain sign, say, <_n>. These \u201csounds\u201d would be transcribed today as \/na\/, \/ni\/, \/nu\/, \/na:\/, \/ni:\/, \/nu:\/, \/ne:\/, and \/no:\/. Of these eight \u201csounds\u201d, three are short and five are long.[1]<\/a> To write any of these eight \u201csounds\u201d, he would use the same sign <_n>. When reading the sign <_n> used in actual writing, he would know which of the eight \u201csounds\u201d it stood for.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The multiple sounds of a Phoenician sign would not pose much of a problem for the Phoenician in reading because he would not read sign by sign, but would take in a group of signs that formed a meaningful unit at one time. He knew which sound of a sign to read in a written word once he understood the meaning of the word from its context. A sign used in actual writing is in fact unlike a sign taken out of its context: the former had only one sound while the latter had multiple ones. Writing Phoenician with Phoenician signs was even easier for a Phoenician. In writing the spoken words in his language, he would break them down into the smallest sounds possible and use a sign for each sound. For any of the eight related \u201csounds\u201d, he would use the same sign. To write all the possible sounds in Phoenician, he needed only twenty-two signs.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0It must be noted that what the Phoenician meant by a \u201csound\u201d above is, in today\u2019s linguistic parlance, a syllable. To a Phoenician, a syllable was the smallest analysable unit of sound in Phoenician speech (Powell 2009:171). A Phoenician sign, therefore, stood for several related syllables. Today, it can be said that a Phoenician sign stood for a set of CV syllables with a common onset followed by different rhymes. However, this description applies only to a Phoenician sign taken out of its context. In actual writing, it stood for one and only one syllable. Take for example the Phoenician sign <_n>. It stood for \/na\/, \/ni\/, \/nu\/, \/na:\/, \/ni:\/, \/nu:\/, \/ne:\/, or<\/em> \/no:\/ in actual writing. Each of these syllables begins with a common \/n\/ and ends with a different rhyme. Thus it can rightly be said that <_n> is a syllabic sign, even though it has multiple sound values.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Some linguists hold that in a purely syllabic system a single symbol represents one syllable (Simpson 1994:5055). It might be argued on this ground that strictly speaking a Phoenician sign is not a syllabic sign because it represents several syllables. However, it should be noted that in a segmental writing system like English, it is quite common for a letter to have multiple sound values. Take for example the letter <a>. In the following sentence, each <a<\/em>> represents a different vowel sound in a British accent called Received Pronunciation: \u2018The villa<\/em>ge school ma<\/em>ster wa<\/em>shed his fa<\/em>ce a<\/em>nd ha<\/em>nds.\u2019 That <a> represents multiple sounds does not prevent it from being called a vowel letter.[2]<\/a> By the same token, that a Phoenician sign represents several syllables should not prevent it from being called a syllabic sign either. As can be seen from the English sentence above, the presence of a sign with multiple sound values does not affect the normal operation of a writing system. It is in fact quite common for a sign to have multiple sound values in many writing systems.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Many linguists think that a Phoenician sign represents the consonantal value of a syllable while ignoring the vocalic element (Olson 2003:1028). If a modern linguist were to explain this view to a Phoenician, the Phoenician would not understand what he or she said at first. It would take the linguist a long time to make the Phoenician understand that the sounds of a Phoenician sign, say, <_n>, could be written as NA, N\u0100, NI, N\u012a, NU, N\u016a, N\u0112, and N\u014c, and that the letter N denotes an unvarying consonant whereas the other letters denote different vowels. The linguist might say that the Phoenician <_n> sign could be regarded as the letter N, which denotes a consonant only without indicating a vowel. The Phoenician would probably think this way of looking at the Phoenician signs unnecessarily complicated because their writing did not operate in this way<\/strong>. The multiple sounds of a Phoenician sign did not affect in any important way how they used the sign in writing and in reading.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0 The three short \u201csounds\u201d \/na\/, \/ni\/, and \/nu\/ are basic. The five long \u201csounds\u201d are derived from the three basic \u201csounds\u201d mainly as follows: \/na\/+\/\u0241a\/ \u02c3\/na:\/; \/ni\/+\/ji\/ \u02c3\/ni:\/; \/nu\/+\/wu\/ \u02c3\/nu:\/; \/na\/+\/ji\/ \u02c3\/nai\/\u02c3\/ne:\/; \/na\/+\/wu\/ \u02c3\/nau\/\u02c3\/no:\/.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0 A vowel or consonant sound will be referred to simply as a vowel or consonant<\/em> in this treatise, while a vowel or consonant letter will always be referred to as a vowel or consonant letter<\/em>, not simply as a vowel or consonant<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"transliteration-and-conversion-tables-for-section-3-of-tootga\"<\/p>\n

25 December 2016<\/p>\n

Views: 504<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3\u00a0 Phoenician signs seen from the Phoenicians\u2019 perspective If asked about the nature of their Phoenician signs, a Phoenician would probably explain in non-technical terms that a Phoenician sign had several \u201csounds\u201d. To illustrate his point, he might read out all the possible \u201csounds\u201d of a certain sign, say, <_n>. These \u201csounds\u201d would be transcribed … Continue reading “Section 3 of The Origin of the Greek Alphabet : A New Perspective”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,24],"tags":[97,45],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-articles","category-the-origin-of-the-greek-alphabet","tag-origin-of-greek-alphabet","tag-phoenician-signs-seen-from-the-phoenicians-perspective"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}