Proto-Sinaitic, also known as Proto-Canaanite, was the first
consonantal alphabet. Even a quick and cursory glance at its inventory of
signs makes it very apparent of this script's Egyptian origin. Originally it was thought that at
round 1700 BCE, Sinai was conquered by Egypt, and the local West-Semitic
population were influenced by Egyptian culture and adopted a small number
of hieroglyphic signs (about 30) to write their own language. However,
recent discoveries in Egypt itself have compounded this scenario.
Inscriptions dating to 1900 BCE written in what appears to be
Proto-Sinaitic were found in Upper Egypt, and nearby Egyptian texts speak
of the presence of Semitic-speaking people living in Egypt.
No matter where and when the adoption of Egyptian signs onto a Semitic
language occurred, the process of adoption is quite interesting. Egyptian
hieroglyphs already have phonetic signs (in addition to logograms), but
the Sinaitic people did not adopt these phonetic signs. Instead, they
randomly chose pictorial Egyptian glyphs (like ox-head, house, etc), where
each sign stood for a consonant. How did they decide which sign get which
consonant? A sign is a picture of an object, and the first consonant of
the word for this object becomes the sound the sign represents. In short,
this is called the acrophonic principle.
For example, the word for an ox is /'aleph/, which is the first sign on
the left Proto-Sinaitic column. It stood for the sound /'/, which is the
glottal stop (also written as /?/).
Proto-Sinaitic soon spread to Canaan, hence its other name,
Proto-Canaanite, or Old Canaanite script. It evolved locally into the
Phoenician script.
Phoenician was the immediately descendent of
Proto-Sinaitic. Its major change is the more linear (less curved) shapes
of its signs. Other than this cosmetic change, everything else remained
pretty much the same. South
Arabian was also an early offshoot of Proto-Sinaitic, as its letters
are very different in shape and order from Phoenician.
The following is a comparison between Proto-Sinaitic, Phoenician, and Greek
alphabets.
1 The Greek letter that resembles
F was called digamma and actually represented the sound /w/. It
existed in archaic Greek scripts except the Ionian variant, which
supplanted other archaic scripts.
2 The Greek letter that looks like
M was the letter san. It appeared in scripts from Corinth and
Argos, and represented an alternative to sigma.
3 The letter Q actually
existed in Greek for a little while, and it was adopted by the Etruscans
before it disappeared due to its extraneous existence.
As you might have noticed, the continuity of the scripts appears quite
consistent. For a lengthier treatment on all alphabets, you can go to Development of the Alphabet.
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