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>Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet That would be Greek, since the Phoenician script is an abjad.
by jhgb 6y ago
>Phoenician is the main branch, often called the original alphabet
That would be Greek, since the Phoenician script is an abjad.
- rsj_hn 6y agoAll the semitic languages omit vowels (although there are some mater lectionis). The vowel requirement is not required for alphabets, particularly in languages where vowels play a somewhat ambiguous role in the language itself. Even in modern Hebrew, the nikkud pointing system is only used for the Bible, if you read a newspaper or novel, you aint getting any vowels (again, excluding mater lectionis)
- jhgb 6y agoI'm aware of these things, except for the claim that "vowels are not required for alphabets", since capturing vowels has always been the distinguishing feature of alphabets compared to earlier scripts. Or perhaps maybe it works differently in English, who am I to tell.
- mchaver 6y ago> All the semitic languages omit vowels (although there are some mater lectionis). I think it is just most. Maltese uses the Latin alphabet. Amharic and Tigrinya use Ge'ez which encodes vowel information. Also Arabizi, Arabic in Latin alphabet, is popular for writing local variations of Arabic.
- samatman 6y agoThe term "abjad" was introduced in 1990. Phoenician is the ancestor of all alphabets, and does, in fact, begin "alef bet". Whether you consider abjads a type of alphabet or a completely different thing is a matter of taste, but the genealogy is quite clear.
- jhgb 6y agoAnd the term "big bang" was introduced in the 20th century. Does that mean that that thing that happened thirteen billion years ago was not a big bang? At least where I live, the term "alfabeta" refers very specifically to the Greek script, since that's where it comes from.
- samatman 6y agoPhilology isn't physics. Your introduction of a term of art didn't advance knowledge here, and saying that Phoenician, being an abjad, wasn't the first alphabet, is meaningfully wrong in most of the ways that claim could be true.