{"id":406,"date":"2017-01-02T20:12:21","date_gmt":"2017-01-02T12:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/?p=406"},"modified":"2020-04-25T12:02:33","modified_gmt":"2020-04-25T04:02:33","slug":"section-15-of-the-origin-of-the-greek-alphabet-a-new-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/2017\/01\/02\/section-15-of-the-origin-of-the-greek-alphabet-a-new-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Section 15 of The Origin of the Greek Alphabet : A New Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

15\u00a0 <\/strong>Concluding remarks<\/strong><\/p>\n

15.1\u00a0 The <\/strong>importance of writing<\/strong> foreign names in the history of writing<\/strong><\/p>\n

The importance of writing foreign names in the history of writing cannot be exaggerated. The writing of the sounds of the names in a foreign language is basically the writing of the sounds of that foreign language. Usually attention is focussed just on the sound of a name, not its meaning. The form of writing that is built on the writing of foreign sounds may be crude at the outset; however, a fully-fledged writing system may, over time, develop from it. One good example is the birth of Greek alphabetic writing.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The method of writing foreign names in ancient Egyptian and in Phoenician writings plays a pivotal role in the birth of Greek alphabetic writing. Since the ancient Egyptians needed to write foreign names by means of the so-called monoconsonantal signs with multiple sound values, matres<\/em> were created in their writing to specify the sound values of these signs. The Phoenicians probably inherited the Egyptians\u2019 method of using matres<\/em> to write foreign names. When this method was applied to the writing of everyday Greek words, the groundwork for Greek alphabetic writing had been laid.<\/p>\n

15.2\u00a0 The <\/strong>Phoenicians\u2019 role in the writing of Greek names<\/strong> \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The choice of certain Phoenician signs for the representation of some Greek sounds suggests that the Phoenicians probably led the way in writing Greek sounds at the initial stage of Greek alphabetic writing. The Greeks must have followed the Phoenicians\u2019 lead in using <_k> for Greek syllables comprising \/k(h)<\/sup>\/ plus a front vowel and <_q> for Greek syllables comprising \/k(h)<\/sup>\/ plus a back vowel. If the Greeks had taken the initiative in writing their \/k_\/ syllables, they would have used the same sign (probably <_k>) for all of them. That <_z> was chosen to represent \/dz\/ may also suggest the Phoenicians\u2019 role in the writing of Greek. As Phoenician had no such sound, it is little wonder that the Phoenicians would miss the initial [d] sound and perceive \/dz\/ as \/z\/. As the Phoenicians used the sign <_z> for \/z_\/, they would use this sign for the Greek \/dz_\/. If the Greeks had taken the initiative in writing \/dz_\/, they might have chosen different signs.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0As was said earlier, the Phoenicians needed to record Greek in their trading contacts with the Greeks, most likely Greek names. If this was the case, matres <\/em>would be used persistently to write Greek names. The Phoenicians would never dream that their method of writing Greek names could lay the basis for Greek alphabetic writing.<\/p>\n

15.3\u00a0 The current <\/strong>views on the genesis of the Greek alphabet<\/strong><\/p>\n

The genesis of the Greek alphabet has not been satisfactorily explained for a number of reasons, the main ones of which can be summed up as follows.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0First, not a Greek name is attested in the extant Phoenician inscriptions dated to the first quarter of the first millennium BC, nor the use of matres<\/em> for that matter. As a result, nobody knows for certain how Greek names were written in Phoenician in those days. However, it would be too hasty to jump to the conclusion that the Phoenicians did not need to record Greek names in their writing. The above-mentioned Phoenician inscriptions are so few and they are used for such limited purposes that it is not surprising that Greek names written in Phoenician are not attested. We have argued that the Phoenicians were roving traders who would record Greek names with both ordinary signs and matres<\/em> on papyrus for book-keeping. Papyrus being a perishable writing material, these trading records may be lost to us for ever. If one assumes that matres<\/em> were not used in the Phoenician script, one will have great difficulty in explaining the genesis of Greek alphabetic writing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Second, there is no scriptorial evidence of Greek alphabetic writing dating before the second half of the eighth century BC. Consequently, nobody knows for certain how the ancient Greeks wrote in the Phoenician alphabet in the first quarter of the first millennium BC. However, if one assumes that there was no Greek alphabetic writing during this period of time, one will have great difficulty in explaining why the earliest extant Greek alphabetic inscriptions on the Dypilon vase and the Nestor\u2019s Cup dating from the second half of the eighth century BC are such mature pieces of Greek segmental writing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Third, for lack of scriptorial evidence of Greek alphabetic writing of the tenth and ninth centuries BC, nobody knows for certain how Phoenician signs were used to write Greek at the initial stages. The genesis of the Greek alphabet is generally explained nowadays like this. The Phoenician script is a consonantal writing system. A Phoenician sign can thus be regarded as representing a consonant. When the Greeks learned the Phoenician alphabet from the Phoenicians, they learned to regard a Phoenician sign as representing a consonant. So they used the Phoenician signs to represent the Greek consonants. When some Phoenician signs, which could also serve as matres<\/em>, turned into vowel letters through the acrophonic principle, the Greek alphabet became a \u201ctrue\u201d alphabet. Some letters in the Greek alphabet represented Greek vowels, and the others Greek consonants.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0To find out whether the Phoenicians would see the Phoenician signs as representing the Phoenician consonants and how the matres<\/em> actually function in the ancient scripts, we have traced the ancestry of the Phoenician alphabet all the way back to Egyptian hieroglyphic writing in this treatise and come to these conclusions. The Phoenicians would not see a Phoenician sign as representing a Phoenician consonant.\u00a0 Instead, they would see it as having several sounds, which, in linguistic terms, are basically several CV syllables with a common onset followed by different rhymes. As a Phoenician sign had several sounds, the Phoenicians, in writing an unfamiliar foreign name, would use an appropriate mater<\/em> after the Phoenician sign to indicate which one of its sounds was intended. The mater<\/em> required the preceding Phoenician sign to rhyme with it. A mater<\/em> is thus a syllable indicator, not a vowel indicator. A mater<\/em> is not a vowel letter either, as it is mute in its role as a syllable indicator. The Phoenicians probably inherited this method of writing foreign names from the ancient Egyptians.<\/p>\n

15.4\u00a0 The <\/strong>paradigm shift from syllabic writing to segmental writing<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was a great achievement for mankind to be able to break up a syllable into segments termed vowels and consonants today. It took a script like Phoenician to encounter a language like Greek for this to happen. When the Phoenicians used three matres<\/em> to write Greek and when the Greeks developed their writing on this basis with the addition of two more matres<\/em>, the consonant and vowel letters would sooner or later come into being. The concepts of consonant<\/em> and vowel<\/em> seem to have arisen naturally from a series of contingent factors, not from any super-intelligent human design. While syllabic writing was created independently many times in the history of writing, segmental writing was created independently once and once only.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0As a Greek CV syllable was denoted as a norm by two letters in proto-Greek alphabetic writing\u2014a syllabic sign and a mater<\/em>, when the mater<\/em>, which originally specified the sound value of the syllabic sign, turned into a vowel letter, the syllabic sign was reduced to a consonant letter. These two letters gave birth to the concepts of vowel<\/em> and consonant<\/em>. It is only the visual representation of a syllable with two letters that forced the Greeks to consider the real nature of the two letters. Only then could the Greeks begin to understand what a vowel and a consonant were. Paradoxical as it may sound, the concepts of vowel<\/em> and consonant<\/em> can be said to originate from writing, not from phonetic analysis.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0To the best of our knowledge, ours is a new hypothesis about the origin of the Greek alphabet. It can explain how the Greek alphabet naturally evolved from the Phoenician signs, without having to assume the prior existence of consonantal writing before Greek segmental writing was created. That is, it can explain the paradigm shift from a syllabic writing system to a segmental one without having to go through the intermediary stage of a consonantal writing system.<\/p>\n

6 February 2017<\/p>\n

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15\u00a0 Concluding remarks 15.1\u00a0 The importance of writing foreign names in the history of writing The importance of writing foreign names in the history of writing cannot be exaggerated. The writing of the sounds of the names in a foreign language is basically the writing of the sounds of that foreign language. Usually attention is … Continue reading “Section 15 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":[95,89,90,97,92,91,94,93,88],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-articles","category-the-origin-of-the-greek-alphabet","tag-how-the-concepts-of-vowels-and-consonants-came-into-being","tag-method-of-writing-foreign-names-in-egyptian-writing","tag-method-of-writing-greek-names-in-phoenician-writing","tag-origin-of-greek-alphabet","tag-the-fallacy-of-regarding-phoenician-writing-as-consonantal","tag-the-reasons-why-the-birth-of-the-greek-alphabet-has-not-been-satisfactorily-explained","tag-the-role-of-a-mater","tag-the-true-nature-of-phoenician-writing","tag-the-writing-of-foreign-names-in-the-history-of-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","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=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1160,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/1160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingsystemsabc.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}