Katana VentraIP

Phoenician language

Phoenician (/fəˈnʃən/ 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]

phoe1239  Phoenician
phoe1238  Phoenician–Punic

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]

1st: /paʻalti/ 𐤐𐤏𐤋𐤕𐤉 pʻlty

2nd masc. /paʻalta/ 𐤐𐤏𐤋𐤕 pʻlt

2nd fem. /paʻalt(i)/ 𐤐𐤏𐤋𐤕 pʻlt

3rd masc. /paʻal/ 𐤐𐤏𐤋 pʻl

3rd fem. /paʻala(t)/ 𐤐𐤏𐤋𐤕 pʻlt, also 𐤐𐤏𐤋 pʻl, Punic 𐤐𐤏𐤋𐤀 pʻlʼ

[50]

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.

Ahiram sarcophagus

Bodashtart inscriptions

Çineköy inscription

Cippi of Melqart

Mdina Steles

Sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II

Karatepe bilingual

Kilamuwa Stela

Nora Stone

Pyrgi Tablets

Temple of Eshmun

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.

Punic language

Phoenician alphabet

Extinct language

List of extinct languages of Asia

Phoenician-Punic literature

Hackett, Joe Ann (2008). (PDF). In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia (PDF). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486890. ISBN 9780511486890.

"Phoenician and Punic"

(1997). "10. Phoenician and the Eastern Canaanite Languages". In Hetzron, Robert (ed.). The Semitic Languages. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-05767-1. Retrieved 17 August 2021.

Segert, Stanislav

(30 June 1997a). "Phoenician and Punic phonology". In Kaye, Alan S.; Daniels, Peter T. (eds.). Phonologies of Asia and Africa: (including the Caucasus). Eisenbrauns. ISBN 9781575060194.

Segert, Stanislav

Fox, Joshua. "A Sequence of Vowel Shifts in Phoenician and Other Languages." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 55, no. 1 (1996): 37–47. .

https://www.jstor.org/stable/545378

Holmstedt, Robert D., and Aaron Schade. Linguistic Studies In Phoenician: In Memory of J. Brian Peckham. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013.

Krahmalkov, Charles R. A Phoenician-Punic Grammar. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

Schmitz, Philip C. "Phoenician-Punic Grammar and Lexicography in the New Millennium." Journal of the American Oriental Society 124, no. 3 (2004): 533–47. :10.2307/4132279.Copy

doi

Segert, S. A Grammar of Phoenician and Punic. München: C.H. Beck, 1976.

(2013) [1997]. "Phoenician and the Eastern Canaanite languages". In Hetzron, Robert (ed.). The Semitic Languages. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315002682. ISBN 9781315002682.

Segert, Stanislav

Tomback, Richard S. A Comparative Semitic Lexicon of the Phoenician and Punic Languages. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press for the Society of Biblical Literature, 1978.

Tribulato, Olga. Language and Linguistic Contact In Ancient Sicily. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Woodard, Roger D. The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.