As far as I can understand that's not a real alphabet, it's an abjad (consonants only)
By that standard, many alphabets, including the Phoenician and Arabic alphabets, aren't "real" alphabets.
Indeed, Arabic is an abjad.
A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
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Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#12[flagged]
In the LOTR, Eru Ilúvatar created the world with a specific hierarchy. In the Abrahamic religions everything happens for a reason In Buddhism suffering is enlightenment or something like that about some path In the world of the rich kids Leibniz and Darwin it be what it be So if all history is written by a few it is the will of the universe fighting that would be like fighting the very nature of reality itself. This…
There's a certain poetry to the parent comment, but I don't understand what it's meant to convey.
Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#13As far as I can understand that's not a real alphabet, it's an abjad (consonants only)
This is a modern distinction.
Until recently the term "alphabet" was used for any writing system where the symbols correspond approximately with phonemes, regardless whether both consonants and vowels are written as in all alphabets derived from or inspired by the Greek alphabet, or only the consonants are written, like in other writing systems derived from the old Semitic alphabet, without passing through the Greek alphabet.
Then the term "abjad" has been created, and also the term "abugida" (for alphabets where the base symbols are for consonants and the vowels are added as diacritic marks around the consonants), and the sense of "alphabet" has been restricted, in order to distinguish these 3 kinds of alphabets, but "alphabet" in the older wider sense can still be encountered frequently, either in the older literature or in informal speech, so one should be able to recognize both the stricter and the wider meanings.
In TFA, "alphabet" is used in the old wider sense. Moreover, it is not even used correctly in that sense, because they did not find a written "alphabet" like those used in teaching, but they have found a few written texts that are believed to have been written using an alphabetic script.
The oldest actual alphabets that have been found (which show the alphabetic order of the letters) are for the Ugaritic alphabet, which is older than the Phoenician alphabet, but much more recent than the oldest inscriptions that are believed to have been written with an alphabetic script.
Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#14Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#15I hope we will get much more research like this, now when Syria is liberated and has Democratic governors!
Its friendly governors but not yet proven to be democratic.
Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#16Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#17>> I try to keep that in mind when I’m excavating today; scholars of the future are counting on us to leave the best documentation we can.
The answer is to stop digging. It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil, without destroying all that evidence that future generations might be able to use. Of course that means disrupting the dig-to-museum/auction/television pipeline that funds the field.
Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
So we are in fact talking a non proto-Sinaitic script? One that presumably did not succeed, and was superseded by proto-Sinaitic? Or perhaps influenced / led to proto-Sinaitic?
The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script, taking into account that they say that it does not resemble other known scripts. Usually it is assumed that a script is alphabetic instead of being syllabic when the total number of distinct symbols is small, but this is not foolproof, because there are languages with a relatively small number of disti…
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Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#19The inscribed Umm el-Marra cylinders of northwestern Syria, circa 2400 BC, 500 years before alphabetic writing was derived in Sinai from Egyptian hieratic phonetic writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
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Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
#20As far as I can understand that's not a real alphabet, it's an abjad (consonants only)
This is a modern distinction. Until recently the term "alphabet" was used for any writing system where the symbols correspond approximately with phonemes, regardless whether both consonants and vowels are written as in all alphabets derived from or inspired by the Greek alphabet, or only the consonants are written, like in other writing systems derived from the old Semitic alphabet, without passing through the Greek…
> This is a modern distinction.
Well, the actual scripts were distinguished semantically all along, and "alphabet" is also a word newer than the scripts in question. We should probably just use the words that make most sense to modern english speakers rather than... whomever you're referring to. Or just use "phonetic script" or something.