Phoenician was prolific. Many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, so ultimately to
Egyptian hieroglyphs. The
Latin,
Cyrillic,
Armenian and
Georgian scripts are derived from the
Greek alphabet, which evolved from Phoenician; the
Aramaic alphabet, also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the
Arabic and
Hebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that the
Brahmi and subsequent
Brahmic scripts of the
Indian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed.
Early Semitic scripts The
Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet was used to write early
Hebrew. It developed in parallel, being a slight regional variant of the Phoenician script. The
Samaritan alphabet is a direct development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC. The
South Arabian script may be derived from a stage of the
Proto-Sinaitic script predating the mature development of the Phoenician alphabet proper. The
Geʽez script developed from South Arabian.
Samaritan alphabet The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by the
Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day. A comparison of the earliest Samaritan inscriptions and the medieval and modern Samaritan manuscripts clearly indicates that the Samaritan script is a static script which was used mainly as a
book hand.
Aramaic-derived The Aramaic alphabet, used to write
Aramaic, is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the
lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including
Hebrew,
Syriac, and
Nabataean, the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of the
Arabic alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the
Second Temple period, from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician / Old Hebrew mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from the
Qumran Caves, such as the
Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC. By the 5th century BC, among Jews the Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the
Aramaic alphabet as officially used in the
Persian empire (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The "
Jewish square-script" variant now known simply as the
Hebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about the 3rd century BC (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century AD). The
Kharosthi script is an Aramaic-derived alphasyllabary used in the
Indo-Greek Kingdom in the 3rd century BC. The
Syriac alphabet is the derived form of Aramaic used in the early Christian period. The
Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac. It is in turn an ancestor of the
Old Uyghur. The
Manichaean alphabet is a further derivation from Sogdian. The
Arabic script is a medieval cursive variant of
Nabataean, itself an offshoot of Aramaic.
Brahmic scripts It has been proposed, notably by Georg Bühler (1898), that the
Brahmi script of India (and by extension the derived
Indic alphabets) was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today, with the notable exception of
hangul. It is certain that the Aramaic-derived
Kharosthi script was present in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the link from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Bühler's suggestion is still entertained in mainstream scholarship, but it has never been proven conclusively, and no definitive scholarly consensus exists.
Greek-derived The
Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician. With a different phonology, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script to represent their own sounds, including the vowels absent in Phoenician. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on
consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in the
Indo-European Greek. However,
Akkadian cuneiform, which wrote a related Semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the Phoenicians simply accepted the model of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. In any case, the Greeks repurposed the Phoenician letters of consonant sounds not present in Greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its leading consonant, and the letter took the value of the now-leading vowel. For example,
ʾāleph, which designated a
glottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel ;
he became ,
ḥet became (a long vowel),
ʿayin became (because the
pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants
wau and
yod became the corresponding high vowels, and . (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess and , continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.) The
Alphabets of Asia Minor are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet. The
Latin alphabet was derived from
Old Italic (originally derived from a form of the Greek alphabet), used for
Etruscan and other languages. The origin of the
Runic alphabet is disputed: the main theories are that it evolved either from the Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts, or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet. The
Coptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the
Hellenistic period, with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on the
Demotic script. The
Cyrillic script was derived from the late (medieval) Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters (generally for sounds not in medieval Greek) are based on
Glagolitic forms.
Paleohispanic scripts These were an indigenous set of genetically related
semisyllabaries, which suited the phonological characteristics of the
Tartessian,
Iberian and
Celtiberian languages. They were deciphered in 1922 by
Manuel Gómez-Moreno but their content is almost impossible to understand because they are not related to any living languages. While Gómez-Moreno first pointed to a joined Phoenician-Greek origin, following authors consider that their genesis has no relation to Greek. The most remote script of the group is the
Tartessian or Southwest script which could be one or several different scripts. The main bulk of PH inscriptions use, by far, the
Northeastern Iberian script, which serves to write Iberian in the levantine coast North of
Contestania and in the valle of the river
Ebro (Hiber). The Iberic language is also recorded using two other scripts: the
Southeastern Iberian script, which is more similar to the Southwest script than to Northeastern Iberian; and a variant of the Ionic Greek Alphabet called the
Greco-Iberian alphabet. Finally, the
Celtiberian script registers the language of the Celtiberians with a script derived from Northeastern Iberian, an interesting feature is that it was used and developed in times of the Roman conquest, in opposition to the Latin alphabet. Among the distinctive features of Paleohispanic scripts are: • Semi-syllabism. Half of the signs represent syllables made of
occlusive consonants (k g b d t) and the other half represent simple phonemes such as vowels (a e i o u) and
continuant consonants (l n r ŕ s ś). • Duality. Appears on the earliest Iberian and Celtiberian inscriptions and refers to how the signs can serve a double use by being modified with an extra stroke that transforms, for example
ge with a stroke becomes
ke . In later stages the scripts were simplified and duality vanishes from inscriptions. • Redundancy. A feature that appears only in the script of the Southwest, vowels are repeated after each syllabic sign. ==Unicode==