Noun

Singular Phoenician alphabet

Plural uncountable

Phoenician alphabet (uncountable)

1. 22 letters use for writing the Phoenician language. Derived from a previous semitic alphabet, it gave rise to the Hebrew and Greek alphabets.

Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite 19 c. BCE

• Ugaritic 15 c. BCE
• Phoenician 12 c. BCE
  • Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE
    • Samaritan 6 c. BCE
  • Aramaic 8 c. BCE
    • Kharoṣṭhī 6 c. BCE
    • Brāhmī & Indic 6 c. BCE
      • Brahmic abugidas
        • Devanagari 13 c. CE
    • Hebrew 3 c. BCE
    • Thaana 4 c. BCE
    • Pahlavi 3 c. BCE
      • Avestan 4 c. CE
    • Palmyrene 2 c. BCE
    • Syriac 2 c. BCE
      • Sogdian 2 c. BCE
        • Orkhon (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE
          • Old Hungarian ca. 650
        • Old Uyghur
          • Mongolian 1204 hh
      • Nabataean 2 c. BCE
        • Arabic 4 c. CE
    • Mandaic 2 c. CE
  • Greek 8 c. BCE
    • Etruscan 8 c. BCE
      • Latin 7 c. BCE
      • Runic 2 c. CE
    • Coptic 3 c. CE
    • Gothic 3 c. CE
    • Armenian 405
    • Georgian (disputed) ca. 430 CE
    • Glagolitic 862
    • Cyrillic ca. 940
  • Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE
  • Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE
    • Ge’ez 5–6 c. BCE

The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 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 has been classified as an abjad because it records only consonant sounds, with the addition of matres lectionis for some vowels. (One of its descendants, the Greek alphabet, revamped some letters to more consistently represent vowels.)

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. Many modern writing systems thought to have descended from Phoenician cover much of the world. The Aramaic alphabet, a modified form of Phoenician, was the ancestor of the modern Arabic and Hebrew scripts. 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.