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Originally Posted by Ana  We Lebanese like to attribute all the major achievements in the old world to our "supposed-to-be" ancestors! We somehow have an inferiority complex and treat that by saying phoencians were super people! |
According to the Egyptians language is attributed to Taautos who was the father of tautology or imitation. He invented the first written characters two thousand years BC or earlier. Taautos came from Byblos, Phoenicia, that shows a continuous cultural tradition going back as far as 8,000 B.C.
Alphabetic writing was already well established in the Late Bronze Age at Ugarit where a cuneiform script was used. The Phoenician alphabetic script was borrowed to write well before the first millennium BC.
The Phoenicians were not mere passive peddlers in art or commerce. Their achievement in history was a positive contribution, even if it was only that of an intermediary. For example, the extent of the debt of Greece alone to Phoenicia may be fully measured by its adoption, probably in the 8th century BC, of the Phoenician alphabet with very little variation (along with Semitic loan words); by "orientalizing" decorative motifs on pottery and by architectural paradigms; and by the universal use in Greece of the Phoenician standards of weights and measures
Phoenician words are found in Greek and Latin classical literature as well as in Egyptian, Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew writings. The language is written with a 22-character alphabet that does not indicate vowels.
Although the Phoenicians used cuneiform (Mesopotamian writing) in what we call Ugaritic, they also produced a script of their own. The Phoenician alphabetic script of 22 letters was used at Byblos as early as the 15th century B.C. This method of writing, later adopted by the Greeks, is the ancestor of the modern Roman alphabet. It was the Phoenicians' most remarkable and distinctive contribution to civilization.
The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder was a great admirer of the Phoenicians, he credited them with many discoveries, including the invention of trade. Although Pliny was not adverse to exaggerating, scholars do accept his evidence that Phoenicians were the first traveling salesmen. Because they needed an efficient method of keeping records, they invented an alphabet from which every alphabet of the world has descended. Along with an alphabet came the equipment for using it: pen, ink and, of course, papyrus, parchment and finally paper. A wax-writing tablet was found in an ancient Uluburun shipwreck (most likely to have been Canaanite Phoenician) off the coast of Turkey.
All such alphabets are descended from the Phoenician linear quasi-alphabet of 22 signs, first attested at Byblos and externally similar to the Proto-Byblian script. All the European alphabets are descendants of the Phoenician, and all the Asiatic alphabets are descendants of the Aramaic variants of the Phoenician.
The Phoenician alphabet is a forerunner of the Etruscan, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac scripts among others, many of which are still in modern use. It has also been suggested that Phoenician is the ultimate source of Kharoshthi and of the Indic scripts descending from Brahmi.
here's a table to illustrate the evolution and origin of languages and alphabet
in the course of history.
do you still think we have an inferiority complex??
If you don't have enough information about a subject don't just throw arbitrary judgements, it will make you look bad (really bad).
Cheers
The logic behind "arabic numbers" -
26th June 2008
means 143 (100 + 20 + 20 + 1 + 1 + 1). The numbers between one and 9 were written down as combinations of lines specifically I, II, III for the first three numbers but anything between 4 and 9 were combinations sets of III and II or III and III...etc. Number 10, 11 and 20 had their own format while a 30, for example, was a combination of a 20 and a 10.
