Editing Phoenician alphabet (section)

==Letter names==
Phoenician used a system of [[acrophony]] to name letters: a word was chosen with each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value.<ref>Jensen (1969) p. 262-263.</ref> For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for 'house' was ''[[Bet (letter)|bet]]''; hence the Phoenician letter was called ''bet'' and had the sound value ''b''.

According to a 1904 theory by [[Theodor Nöldeke]], some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script.{{Dubious|date=March 2010}} This includes:
* ''gaml'' 'throwing stick' to ''gimel'' 'camel'
* ''digg'' 'fish' to ''dalet'' 'door'
* ''hll'' 'jubilation' to ''he'' 'window'
* ''ziqq'' 'manacle' to ''zayin'' 'weapon'
* ''naḥš'' 'snake' to ''nun'' 'fish'
* ''piʾt'' 'corner' to ''pe'' 'mouth'
* ''šimš'' 'sun' to ''šin'' 'tooth'

[[Yigael Yadin]] (1963) went to great lengths to prove that there was actual battle equipment similar to some of the original letter forms named for weapons (samek, zayin).<ref>Yigael Yadin, ''The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands''. McGraw-Hill, 1963. The samek – a quick war ladder, later to become the '$' dollar sign drawing the three internal lines quickly. The Z-shaped zayin – an ancient boomerang used for hunting. The H-shaped ḥet – mammoth tusks.</ref>

Later, the Greeks kept approximations of the Phoenician names, albeit they did not mean anything to them other than the letters themselves; on the other hand, the [[Latin alphabet|Latins]] (and presumably the [[Etruscan alphabet|Etruscans]] from whom they borrowed a variant of the [[Western Greek alphabet]]) and the Orthodox Slavs (at least when naming the [[Cyrillic]] letters, which came to them from the Greek by way of the [[Glagolitic]]) based their names purely on the letters' sounds.