phoenician alphabet was the phoenician invention that became the most influential in the western world.
phoenician alphabet was the phoenician invention that became the most influential in the western world.
what phoenician invention became the most influential in the western world?
phoenician alphabet
modern historians agree that greek alphabet is derived from the phoenician. with a different phonology, the greeks adapted the phoenician script to represent their own sounds, including the vowels absent in phoenician. it was possibly more important in greek to write out vowel sounds: phoenician being a semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in the indo-european greek. (however, akkadian cuneiform, which wrote a related semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the phoenicians simply accepted the model of the egyptians, who never wrote vowels.) in any case, the greeks repurposed the phoenician letters of consonant sounds not present in greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its leading consonant, and the letter took the value of the now-leading vowel. for example, "ʾāleph", which designated a glottal stop in phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel ; "he" became , "ḥet" became (a long vowel), "ʿayin" became (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants "wau" and "yod" became the corresponding high vowels, and . (some dialects of greek, which did possess and , continued to use the phoenician letters for those consonants as well.)
phoenician alphabet
toward the end of the 14th century bc, the egyptian empire weakened, and lebanon was able to regain its independence by the beginning of the 12th century bc. the subsequent three centuries were a period of prosperity and freedom from foreign control during which the earlier phoenician invention of the alphabet facilitated communications and trade. the phoenicians also excelled not only in producing textiles but also in carving ivory, in working with metal, and above all in making glass. masters of the art of navigation, they founded colonies wherever they went in the mediterranean sea (specifically in cyprus, rhodes, crete, and carthage) and established trade routes to europe and western asia. these colonies and trade routes flourished until the invasion of the coastal areas by the assyrians.
history of ancient lebanon