Phoenician language
Phoenician (/fəˈniːʃən/ fə-NEE-shən; Phoenician śpt knʿn lit. 'language of Canaan'[2]) is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
Phoenician
attested in Canaan proper from the 11th century BC to the 2nd century BC[1]
Phoenician belongs to the Canaanite languages and as such is quite similar to Biblical Hebrew and other languages of the group, at least in its early stages, and is therefore mutually intelligible with them.
The area in which Phoenician was spoken, which the Phoenicians called Pūt,[2] includes the northern Levant, specifically the areas now including Syria, Lebanon, the Western Galilee, parts of Cyprus, some adjacent areas of Anatolia, and, at least as a prestige language, the rest of Anatolia.[3] Phoenician was also spoken in the Phoenician colonies along the coasts of the southwestern Mediterranean Sea, including those of modern Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Algeria as well as Malta, the west of Sicily, southwest Sardinia, the Balearic Islands and southernmost Spain.
In modern times, the language was first decoded by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in 1758, who noted that the name "Phoenician" was first given to the language by Samuel Bochart in his Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan.[4][5]
Phonology[edit]
Consonants[edit]
The following table presents the consonant phonemes of the Phoenician language as represented in the Phoenician alphabet, alongside their standard Semiticist transliteration and reconstructed phonetic values in the International Phonetic Alphabet.:[21][22]
Syntax[edit]
The basic word order is verb-subject-object. There is no verb "to be" in the present tense; in clauses that would have used a copula, the subject may come before the predicate. Nouns precede their modifiers, such as adjectives and possessors.
Phoenician, together with Punic, is primarily known from approximately 10,000 surviving inscriptions,[63] supplemented by occasional glosses in books written in other languages. In addition to their many inscriptions, the Phoenicians are believed to have left numerous other types of written sources, but most have not survived.
Roman authors, such as Sallust, allude to some books written in the Punic language, but none have survived except occasionally in translation (e.g., Mago's treatise) or in snippets (e.g., in Plautus' plays). The Cippi of Melqart, a bilingual inscription in Ancient Greek and Carthaginian discovered in Malta in 1694, was the key which allowed French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélemy to decipher and reconstruct the alphabet in 1758.[65] Even as late as 1837 only 70 Phoenician inscriptions were known to scholars. These were compiled in Wilhelm Gesenius's Scripturae linguaeque Phoeniciae monumenta, which comprised all that was known of Phoenician by scholars at that time.
Some key surviving inscriptions of Phoenician are:
Since the bilingual Pyrgi Tablets were found in 1964 with inscriptions in both Etruscan and Phoenician dating from around 500 BC, more Etruscan has been deciphered through comparison to the more fully understood Phoenician.