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I agree that the post is severely underspecified. I think the point is the last paragraph of the linked section: > Phoenician had long-term effects on the soci

I agree that the post is severely underspecified. I think the point is the last paragraph of the linked section: > Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations which came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script. Its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of writing systems only being learned and employed by members of the royal and religious hierarchies of society, who used writing as an instrument of power to control access to information by the larger population.[11] The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms such as Assyria, Babylonia and Adiabene would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into the Common Era. That is, Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. That being the rather tenuous link back to the original idea of teaching reading based on phonetics. Of course, there is a bit of a gap here, in that English phonetics are notoriously unstandardized across the lexicon.

thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. The cuneiform of the time was, at heart, a syllabic script; while a phonetic script is arguably simpler, it's not much simpler. The real problem with cuneiform is not that it was syllabic instead of alphabetic, it's that you had plenty of options other than syllabic representation, as well. (And written Egyptian, the parent system of the Phoenician alphabet, was already genuinely phonetic! It didn't have vowels, but neither did the Phoenician script.) All that said, that sort of shortcut-encrustation seems to develop naturally within all writing systems. If I send someone "have a good day" and get back "u 2", that's exactly the kind of shortcut that we blast ancient writing systems for using. But that shortcut, in modern English, actually represents a very high literacy rate, and use of the writing system by someone who can't be bothered to observe its formal conventions. Under low-literacy conditions, educated people tend to scrupulously observe whatever weird conventions their writing system might have. That's how you know they're educated.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  I'm assuming by Egyptian you mean Hieroglyphics. (They also used Hieratic and later Demotic.) Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system. Even on the phonetic side, there are many ways to spell the same set of consonants, thanks to the existence of digraphs and trigraphs and repetition. The vowels probably differed, but those aren't written. The spelling for a particular word was usually fixed, though. Wikipedia has an excellent example using nfr in its determinatives section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determinatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determina... So, Hieroglyphics had phonetic components, but it was far from being a phonetic abjad like Phoenician. (An abjad is an alphabet without vowel markers.)
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system in the same way that English is a mixed phonetic-logographic system, where the second person pronoun can be represented by "you" or by the logograph u. How much is that hurting our literacy rate?
    - jdmichal 10y ago
      "u" and "you" have exactly the same pronunciation /ju/. "2" and "two" and "to" and "too" all have exactly the same pronunciation /tu/. That is, phonetically there is no difference -- again, English has terribly inconsistent phonetics. These shortcuts arose due to texting applying negative pressure to the length of words, both in maximum message size and ease of input. Compare this to Hieroglyphics, where the glyph representive of a loaf of bread could mean either an actual loaf of bread or the abstract phoneme /t/. Specifically, a logogram represents an idea regardless of its pronunciation. This is not what we see in "text-speak", where words were replaced with shorter methods of achieving the same phonetics. Or, in other words, reading the text "u 2" is /ju tu/, which is exactly the same as what you would read with "you too". The matched phonetics are an integral part of this replacement.
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> Phoenician was the first wide-spread phonetic script. That, in turn, had major effects on civilizations as it was simple enough for commoners to learn. The cuneiform of the time was, at heart, a syllabic script; while a phonetic script is arguably simpler, it's not much simpler. The real problem with cuneiform is not that it was syllabic instead of alphabetic, it's that you had plenty of options other than syllabic representation, as well. (And written Egyptian, the parent system of the Phoenician alphabet, was already genuinely phonetic! It didn't have vowels, but neither did the Phoenician script.) All that said, that sort of shortcut-encrustation seems to develop naturally within all writing systems. If I send someone "have a good day" and get back "u 2", that's exactly the kind of shortcut that we blast ancient writing systems for using. But that shortcut, in modern English, actually represents a very high literacy rate, and use of the writing system by someone who can't be bothered to observe its formal conventions. Under low-literacy conditions, educated people tend to scrupulously observe whatever weird conventions their writing system might have. That's how you know they're educated.

jdmichal 10y ago
I'm assuming by Egyptian you mean Hieroglyphics. (They also used Hieratic and later Demotic.) Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system. Even on the phonetic side, there are many ways to spell the same set of consonants, thanks to the existence of digraphs and trigraphs and repetition. The vowels probably differed, but those aren't written. The spelling for a particular word was usually fixed, though. Wikipedia has an excellent example using nfr in its determinatives section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determinatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Determina... So, Hieroglyphics had phonetic components, but it was far from being a phonetic abjad like Phoenician. (An abjad is an alphabet without vowel markers.)
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  Hieroglyphics are a mixed phonetic-logographic system in the same way that English is a mixed phonetic-logographic system, where the second person pronoun can be represented by "you" or by the logograph u. How much is that hurting our literacy rate?
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    "u" and "you" have exactly the same pronunciation /ju/. "2" and "two" and "to" and "too" all have exactly the same pronunciation /tu/. That is, phonetically there is no difference -- again, English has terribly inconsistent phonetics. These shortcuts arose due to texting applying negative pressure to the length of words, both in maximum message size and ease of input. Compare this to Hieroglyphics, where the glyph representive of a loaf of bread could mean either an actual loaf of bread or the abstract phoneme /t/. Specifically, a logogram represents an idea regardless of its pronunciation. This is not what we see in "text-speak", where words were replaced with shorter methods of achieving the same phonetics. Or, in other words, reading the text "u 2" is /ju tu/, which is exactly the same as what you would read with "you too". The matched phonetics are an integral part of this replacement.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago