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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.
I almost get the sense that people are interpreting abjad as "lesser-than" an alphabet. It's just a distinction, it's not a value judgement.
>> 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 mea…
Earlier 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 One that presumably did not succeed, and was superseded by proto-Sinaitic?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…
I'm honestly amazed at how you know so much about everything
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Without additional conventions, "alphabet" would have been the appropriate name for any writing systems derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which include the majority of the writing systems based on alphabets, abjads or abugidas. The few other such writing systems, which have not passed through the Phoenician alphabet, are those derived from the Ancient South Arabian script, which for some reason had a different alphabetic order of the letters than the Northern Semitic alphabets, so it did not start with Alep and Bet.
As far as I can understand that's not a real alphabet, it's an abjad (consonants only)
The article states, "symbols on the cylinders could be an early Semitic alphabet" and this is when they lost me. I guess we're just pushing propaganda now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Semitic-speaking_peo...
The article states, "symbols on the cylinders could be an early Semitic alphabet" and this is when they lost me. I guess we're just pushing propaganda now.
That’s common parlance in archeology for ancient languages in that region. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Semitic-speaking_peo...