4 ms·

This quote is wrong > "The older alphabet has not been preserved, but we know some things about it because there have been a few other alphabets derived from"

This quote is wrong > "The older alphabet has not been preserved, but we know some things about it because there have been a few other alphabets derived from" The predecessor is preserved and seems to be based on an creative re-interpretation from some of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script > "According to common theory, Canaanites who spoke a Semitic language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. The script is attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, dating to the Middle Bronze Age (1900–1850BC)"

adrian_b 5y ago
No, the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are not well understood and they give only partial information about the initial Semitic alphabet. From those inscriptions it was not possible to determine the complete list of signs, their phonetic values and their alphabetic order, things that we know only about later derived alphabets, e.g. the Ugaritic alphabet and the South-Arabic alphabet. Even if the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions would have never been found, starting from the derived alphabets we could have guessed about the original alphabet about the same things that we know now. The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions have provided a confirmation for such guesses and they have also provided a more constrained time frame for the development of the original Semitic alphabet, but they did not add much other information. This might change in the future only if additional inscriptions would be found or if someone would be able to make an improved analysis of the existing inscriptions to better determine the meaning of the signs, as for now the exact correspondence with the later alphabets is not clear.

4 ms·

This quote is wrong > "The older alphabet has not been preserved, but we know some things about it because there have been a few other alphabets derived from"

by janandonly 5y ago

adrian_b 5y ago
No, the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are not well understood and they give only partial information about the initial Semitic alphabet. From those inscriptions it was not possible to determine the complete list of signs, their phonetic values and their alphabetic order, things that we know only about later derived alphabets, e.g. the Ugaritic alphabet and the South-Arabic alphabet. Even if the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions would have never been found, starting from the derived alphabets we could have guessed about the original alphabet about the same things that we know now. The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions have provided a confirmation for such guesses and they have also provided a more constrained time frame for the development of the original Semitic alphabet, but they did not add much other information. This might change in the future only if additional inscriptions would be found or if someone would be able to make an improved analysis of the existing inscriptions to better determine the meaning of the signs, as for now the exact correspondence with the later alphabets is not clear.