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Phoenician alphabet
This page is about the meaning, origin and characteristic of the symbol, emblem, seal, sign, logo or flag: Phoenician alphabet.
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1200 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. It is classified as an abjad because it records only consonantal sounds (matres lectionis were used for some vowels in certain late varieties).
Phoenician became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was assimilated by many other cultures and evolved. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of modern Arabic script, while Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Coptic), was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels.
As the letters were originally incised with a stylus, most of the shapes are angular and straight, although more cursive versions are increasingly attested in later times, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet of Roman-era North Africa. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are some texts written in boustrophedon.
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Graphical characteristics:
Asymmetric, Open shape, Monochrome, Contains both straight and curved lines, Has no crossing lines.
Category: Language Symbols.
Phoenician alphabet is part of the Alphabets group.
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An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which is used to write one or more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic si… read more »
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"Phoenician alphabet." Symbols.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 20 Apr. 2024. <https://www.symbols.com/symbol/phoenician-alphabet>.
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