What language did the Phoenicians speak? Phoenician, of course. In terms of linguistic classification, it belongs to the Afroasiatic languages (once known as “Hamito-Semitic”), which made their way from North Africa via Arabia into Mesopotamia and the Near East. There are some four hundred Afroasiatic languages in all, spoken by around 630 million people worldwide. They divide into several branches:
- Egyptian, comprising the language of the ancient Egyptians and its descendant, modern Coptic;
- Berbero-Canarian, the languages of the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa and the Canary Islands;
- Chadic, the languages of the peoples around Lake Chad (Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon), the best known of which is Hausa;
- Cushitic, the languages of north-east Africa: Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania;
- Omotic, a branch closely allied to Cushitic, in western Ethiopia; …and, at last, ta-da!…
- Semitic, the Asian branch, whose speakers set out from Ethiopia, crossed the Red Sea, and settled first in Arabia and thereafter in the Near East.
The Semitic languages were spoken by Babylonians, Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Judaeans, Samaritans, and Nabataeans. Their modern representatives include Arabic, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese, and the Ethiopian pair Amharic and Tigrinya—some 350 million speakers between them.
The Abjad Revolution: How Letters Came to Be
Now, it was precisely the Phoenicians who hit upon the notion of a writing system founded not on meaning-bearing pictograms, as with hieroglyphs and cuneiform, but on letters denoting sounds, or phonemes—an alphabet. The Phoenicians, mind you, wrote only the consonants, so their alphabet is more properly called an abjad: a consonantal writing system. Such systems are still used by the Semitic languages today—Arabic and Hebrew alike—though supplemented by vowel points, those little marks placed around the letters to indicate the vowels. (There are also abugidas, syllabic systems in which a consonant symbol acquires some additional squiggle for the vowel: Ethiopic, Indic, Korean, and so on.)
Phoenician commercial influence was so far-reaching, and the alphabet they devised so admirably convenient, that it spread across the whole of the then-known world. As a result, the majority of modern writing systems trace their origins to the Phoenician alphabet.
The Egyptian Trace and a Global Inheritance
There is a theory, however, that the Egyptians had a hand in it. And indeed: the symbols the Phoenicians took as the basis for their letters are pictograms of words beginning with the sounds those letters denote. Egyptian hieroglyphs, too, over and above their pictorial meaning, could be pressed into service like letters, to write the sounds of borrowed names and foreign words.
Be that as it may, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, the Greek, the Armenian and the Georgian, the Hebrew and the Arabic—all of them issue from Phoenician. There is even a theory that the scripts of India and Indochina, with all their enigmatic curlicues, have Phoenician roots as well, though on that one would not care to insist.
Here is a table to be going on with; I shall set out the particulars in the next post.
