Editing Phoenician alphabet (section)

==Derived alphabets==
{{main|History of the alphabet}}
[[File:Phönizisch-6Sprachen.svg|thumb|Each letter of Phoenician gave way to a new form in its daughter scripts. Left to right: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic.]]

Phoenician was prolific. Many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, so ultimately to [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]]. The [[Latin script|Latin]], [[Cyrillic]], [[Armenian alphabet|Armenian]] and [[Georgian scripts|Georgian]] scripts are derived from the [[Greek alphabet]], which evolved from Phoenician; the [[Aramaic alphabet]], also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the [[Arabic alphabet|Arabic]] and [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]] scripts. It has also been theorised that the [[Brahmi]] and subsequent [[Brahmic scripts]] of the [[Indian cultural sphere]] also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed.

===Early Semitic scripts===
The [[Paleo-Hebrew alphabet]] is a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet, so called when used to write early [[Hebrew]]. The [[Samaritan alphabet]] is a development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century&nbsp;BC. The [[South Arabian script]] may be derived from a stage of the [[Proto-Sinaitic script]] predating the mature development of the Phoenician alphabet proper. The [[Geʽez script]] developed from South Arabian.

=== Samaritan alphabet ===
{{Main|Samaritan alphabet}}
[[File:Samaritan Leviticus.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.8|A page from the Samaritan version of [[Leviticus]]]]
The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by the [[Samaritans]] and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day. A comparison of the earliest Samaritan inscriptions and the medieval and modern Samaritan manuscripts clearly indicates that the Samaritan script is a static script which was used mainly as a [[book hand]].

===Aramaic-derived===
{{further|Aramaic alphabet}}

The Aramaic alphabet, used to write [[Aramaic]], is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the [[lingua franca]] of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including [[Hebrew alphabet|Hebrew]], [[Syriac alphabet|Syriac]], and [[Nabataean alphabet|Nabataean]], the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of the [[Arabic alphabet]]. The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the [[Second Temple period]], from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from the [[Qumran Caves]], such as the [[Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll]] dated to the 2nd or 1st century&nbsp;BC.

By the 5th century&nbsp;BC, among Jews the Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the [[Aramaic alphabet]] as officially used in the [[Persian empire]] (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The "[[Square Aramaic script|Jewish square-script]]" variant now known simply as the [[Hebrew alphabet]] evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about the 3rd century&nbsp;BC (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century&nbsp;AD).

The [[Kharosthi]] script is an Aramaic-derived alphasyllabary used in the [[Indo-Greek Kingdom]] in the 3rd century&nbsp;BC. The [[Syriac alphabet]] is the derived form of Aramaic used in the early Christian period. The [[Sogdian alphabet]] is derived from Syriac. It is in turn an ancestor of the [[Old Uyghur alphabet|Old Uyghur]].{{citation needed|date=November 2019}} The [[Manichaean alphabet]] is a further derivation from Sogdian.

The [[Arabic script]] is a medieval cursive variant of [[Nabataean alphabet|Nabataean]], itself an offshoot of Aramaic.

===Brahmic scripts===
{{See also|Brahmi_script#Semitic_model_hypothesis|label 1=Aramaic hypothesis}}
It has been proposed, notably by Georg Bühler (1898), that the [[Brahmi script]] of India (and by extension the derived [[Indic alphabets]]) was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today,<ref>Richard Salomon, "Brahmi and Kharoshthi", in ''The World's Writing Systems''</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Daniélou |first=Alain |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xlwoDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT53 |title=A Brief History of India |publisher=Simon & Schuster |year=2003 |isbn=978-1-594-77794-3 |pages=52–53}}</ref> with the notable exception of [[hangul]].<ref>''The Korean language reform of 1446: the origin, background, and Early History of the Korean Alphabet'', Gari Keith Ledyard. University of California, 1966, p. 367–368.</ref><ref>Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, ''The World's Writing Systems'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 219–220</ref>

It is certain that the Aramaic-derived [[Kharosthi]] script was present in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the link from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Bühler's suggestion is still entertained in mainstream scholarship, but it has never been proven conclusively, and no definitive scholarly consensus exists.

===Greek-derived===
{{further|History of the Greek alphabet|History of the Latin alphabet}}
The [[Greek alphabet]] is derived from the Phoenician.<ref name="JG">{{Cite book |last=Humphrey |first=John William |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=b76EBrop0sEC&q=greek+alphabet+is+derived+from+phoenician+alphabet&pg=PA86 |title=Ancient Technology |publisher=Greenwood |year=2006 |isbn=978-0-313-32763-6 |edition=Illustrated |page=219}}</ref> 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 [[Semitic roots|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, ''[[Aleph|ʾāleph]]'', which designated a [[glottal stop]] in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel {{IPA|/a/}}; [[He (letter)|''he'']] became {{IPA|/e/}}, [[Heth|''ḥet'']] became {{IPA|/eː/}} (a long vowel), [[Ayin|''ʿayin'']] became {{IPA|/o/}} (because the [[Pharyngeal consonant|pharyngeality]] altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants [[wau (letter)|''wau'']] and [[yodh|''yod'']] became the corresponding high vowels, {{IPA|/u/}} and {{IPA|/i/}}. (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess {{IPA|/h/}} and {{IPA|/w/}}, continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.)

The [[Alphabets of Asia Minor]] are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet.

The [[Latin alphabet]] was derived from [[Old Italic alphabet|Old Italic]] (originally derived from a form of the Greek alphabet), used for [[Etruscan language|Etruscan]] and other languages. The origin of the [[Runic alphabet]] is disputed: the main theories are that it evolved either from the Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts, or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet.<ref name="JG" /><ref>Spurkland, Terje (2005): ''Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions'', translated by Betsy van der Hoek, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, pp. 3–4</ref>

The [[Coptic alphabet]] is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the [[Hellenistic period]], with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on the [[Demotic script]].

The [[Cyrillic script]] was derived from the late (medieval) Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters (generally for sounds not in medieval Greek) are based on [[Glagolitic]] forms.

=== Paleohispanic scripts ===
{{Main|Paleohispanic scripts}}
[[File:Escrita sudoeste by Henrique Matos 004 02.jpg|thumb|upright=.8|Southwest stele of Fonte Velha]]
These were an indigenous set of genetically related [[Semi-syllabary|semisyllabaries]], which suited the phonological characteristics of the [[Tartessian language|Tartessian]], [[Iberian language|Iberian]] and [[Celtiberian language|Celtiberian]] languages. They were deciphered in 1922 by [[Manuel Gómez-Moreno Martínez|Manuel Gómez-Moreno]] but their content is almost impossible to understand because they are not related to any living languages. While Gómez-Moreno first pointed to a joined Phoenician-Greek origin, following authors consider that their genesis has no relation to Greek.<ref>{{Cite book |last=de Hoz |first=Javier |author-link=Javier de Hoz |url=https://www.academia.edu/1627528 |title=Historia lingüística de la Península Ibérica en la antigüedad |date=31 December 2010 |publisher=[[Spanish National Research Council|CSIC]] |isbn=978-8-400-09260-3 |volume=1 |location=Madrid |pages=495–499 |language=es}}</ref>

The most remote script of the group is the [[Southwest Paleohispanic script|Tartessian or Southwest script]] which could be one or several different scripts. The main bulk of PH inscriptions use, by far, the [[Northeastern Iberian script]], which serves to write Iberian in the levantine coast North of [[Contestania]] and in the valle of the river [[Ebro]] (Hiber). The Iberic language is also recorded using two other scripts: the [[Southeastern Iberian script]], which is more similar to the Southwest script than to Northeastern Iberian; and a variant of the Ionic Greek Alphabet called the [[Greco-Iberian alphabet]]. Finally, the [[Celtiberian script]] registers the language of the Celtiberians with a script derived from Northeastern Iberian, an interesting feature is that it was used and developed in times of the Roman conquest, in opposition to the Latin alphabet.

Among the distinctive features of Paleohispanic scripts are:
* Semi-syllabism. Half of the signs represent syllables made of [[occlusive]] consonants (k g b d t) and the other half represent simple phonemes such as vowels (a e i o u) and [[continuant]] consonants (l n r ŕ s ś).
* Duality. Appears on the earliest Iberian and Celtiberian inscriptions and refers to how the signs can serve a double use by being modified with an extra stroke that transforms, for example ''ge'' with a stroke [[File:NE Iberian ke1.svg|x16px]] becomes ''ke'' [[File:NE Iberian ke5.svg|x16px]]. In later stages the scripts were simplified and duality vanishes from inscriptions.
* Redundancy. A feature that appears only in the script of the Southwest, vowels are repeated after each syllabic sign.