Phoenician Language

The Phoenician language is one of the oldest languages in the history of humankind and one of the first languages to have an alphabet. The alphabet used in English today descended from the Phoenician alphabet by way of the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician language dates from the nineteenth century BCE.

History and Classification

The Phoenicians once occupied the territory that is now Syria, Israel, and Lebanon. The earliest known signs of their language date roughly between 1850 and 1700 BCE. While the Phoenicians had an alphabet prior to these dates, it was significantly different. The most ancient Phoenician language used letters called cuneiform. Cuneiform was a script composed entirely of different arrangements of wedge-like shapes, which were formed by digging a crude writing instrument called a stylus into wet clay. The more widely known form of Phoenician derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics; the hieroglyphs were small pictures that stood for a variety of sounds and ideas. The Phoenician adaptation of these hieroglyphs was not as ornate as the original hieroglyphs, however. It was a system of simple symbols that stood mainly for sounds. The writing was read from right to left and, interestingly enough, there were no vowel sounds, only consonants. Only twenty-two symbols were in the alphabet. The Phoenicians survived mainly through seagoing trade with nearby countries, and the language they used had to be easy to write quickly and even easier to comprehend, given that livelihoods depended on fast communication.

As the centuries passed, the Phoenician language changed. From the eighth century BCE forward, Phoenician was spoken and written in Greece; this was due to the pervasiveness of Phoenician influence and presence in the ancient world. Gradually, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician writing system into their own alphabet. They added vowels to the alphabet and modified the appearance of the symbols. Another interesting change affected the way the writing was read. Whereas in the older forms of Phoenician, the eye was meant to move from right to left while reading. In the ancient Greek language, the eye reversed course at the end of each line: right to left, left to right, right to left, and so on. The Greek term for this sort of reading was boustrephodon, which means "turning like oxen" in English; the movement of the eye was meant to mimic the way oxen plowed fields. This way of reading reflected a crucial difference between the Greeks and the Phoenicians: while the Phoenicians made their living as seagoing traders, the Greeks survived by growing extensive crops.

As time went on, both the Cyrillic alphabet and Latin alphabet grew from the Phoenician alphabet. Though the Romans and Greeks certainly clashed, there were numerous points of cultural exchange, language being one of them. Other tongues related to Phoenician were Hebrew, Arabic, and the ancient Aramaic language—people living in countries that were close to Phoenician countries. Despite the changes and reversals that took place as various languages evolved from Phoenician, the sequence of letters remained the same. The sequence that is used in many countries today, starting with a and ending with z, began with the Phoenician alphabet’s order. The letters had different names in Phoenician and Greek, of course (alpha, beta, gamma, delta in Greek, for example, as opposed to a, b, c, d in the English alphabet), but the same basic sequence has been in place for many centuries.

Geographic Distribution

The geographical range of the Phoenician language is difficult to summarize because the Phoenicians had a shifting homeland. Their colonies were concentrated on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, but they established settlements in many other places. This is primarily because the Phoenicians were traders, so it was in their best interest to establish bases in as many countries as possible. When pressed to assign a location to the "Phoenician people," historians and geographers can often provide no definitive answer. Byblos was one of the earliest Phoenician cities, and the earliest samples of Phoenician writing were found in its ruins. Other great cultural and business centers for the Phoenicians were Tyre and Sidon. The Phoenicians' tendency to drift eventually brought changes to its language. For example, the earliest Phoenician writing was in cuneiform, and then the language became more directly influenced by hieroglyphics. This is because as the Phoenicians interacted with the Egyptians in trade, and as they established more and more settlements farther from their point of origin, other cultures began to make their stamp on the Phoenician culture. Transitioning to an alphabet similar to the Egyptian alphabet made increasing sense as the Phoenician cultures and Egyptian cultures overlapped due to proximity. One of the largest imports from Egypt was papyrus, a thin kind of paper made from reeds, on which the Egyptians and then the Phoenicians inscribed their manuscripts. As the Phoenicians’ sphere of material exchange grew, the exchange of ideas developed as well. Therefore, as Phoenician cities faded in importance, the Phoenician language and culture lived on due to the historically wide-ranging presence of the Phoenicians around the world.

Bibliography

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Knott, Elizabeth. "Alphabet Origins: From Kipling to Sinai." Metropolitan Museum of Art. 22 Dec. 2014. Web. 9 Sept. 2015. URL:

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/assyria-to-iberia/blog/posts/alphabet

Schumm, Laura. "Who created the first alphabet?" The History Channel. 6 Aug. 2014. Web. 8 Sept. 2015.

http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/who-created-the-first-alphabet