Phoenician ( ; ) is an extinct Canaanite language of the Semitic language family originally spoken by the Phoenicians. 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 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, includes the northern Levant, specifically the areas now including Lebanon, the Western Galilee, parts of Cyprus, some parts of Syria, some adjacent areas of Anatolia, and, at least as a prestige language, the rest of Anatolia. 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. It developed into the Punic language in North Africa.
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.: "Les anciennes lettres Grecques, suivant Hérodote, et les monumens que nous avons fous les yeux, venoient de Phénicie: or les lettres Samaritaines ne diffèrent pas des anciennes lettres Grecques; par conséquent les lettres Phéniciennes ne doivent pas, différer des Samaritaines. Ils voyoient for des médailles frappées en Phénicie, des lettres qui reflémbloient aux Samaritaines; nouvelle preuve, disoit-on, que les unes etc les autres font les mêmes. Sur un pareil fondement, Scaliger et Bochart ont donné le nom dé Samaritain et de Phénicien au même alphabet; d'autres, comme Edouard Bernard et le P. de Montfaucon, pour rendre' leur alphabet plus riche et plus général, ont joint aux caractères Samaritains des formes de lettres tirées des médailles Phéniciennes ou Puniques; mais l'explication qu'on avoit donnée de ces médailles, étant fouvent arbitraire, il eft aifé de voir à quelle erreur s'expofent ceux qui, au lieu de travailler sur les monumens mêmes, ne confoltent que les alphabets publiés jusqu a présent"
History The Phoenicians were the first state-level society to make extensive use of the Semitic alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is one of the oldest verified consonantal alphabets, or abjad. It has become conventional to refer to the script as "Proto-Canaanite" until the mid-11th century BC, when it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads, and as "Phoenician" only after 1050 BC.Markoe, Glenn E., Phoenicians. University of California Press. (2000) (hardback) p. 111. The Phoenician phonetic alphabet is generally believed to be at least the partial ancestor of almost all modern alphabets.
From a traditional linguistic perspective, Phoenician was composed of a variety of dialects.Glenn Markoe.Phoenicians. p. 108. University of California Press, 2000.Zellig Sabbettai Harris. A grammar of the Phoenician language. p. 6. 1990. According to some sources, Phoenician developed into distinct Tyro-Sidonian and Byblian dialects. By this account, the Tyro-Sidonian dialect, from which the Punic language eventually emerged, spread across the Mediterranean through trade and colonisation, whereas the ancient dialect of Byblos, known from a corpus of only a few dozen extant inscriptions, played no expansionary role.Charles R. Krahmalkov. Phoenician-Punic Dictionary. p. 10. 2000. However, the very slight differences in language and the insufficient records of the time make it unclear whether Phoenician formed a separate and united dialect or was merely a superficially defined part of a broader language continuum. Through their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the use of the alphabet to the Maghreb and Europe, where it was adopted by the Greeks.Peckham, J. Brian (2014). Phoenicia: Episodes and Anecdotes From the Ancient Mediterranean. Eisenbrauns. Later, the Etruscans adopted a modified version for their own use, which, in turn, was modified and adopted by the Romans and became the Latin alphabet.Edward Clodd, Story of the Alphabet (Kessinger) 2003:192ff In the east of the Mediterranean region, the language was in use as late as the 1st century BC,. "In the Eastern Mediterranean, Phoenician was used until the first century BCE. In North Africa it survived until the fifth century CE." when it seems to have gone extinct there.
Punic colonisation spread Phoenician to the western Mediterranean, where the distinct Punic language developed. Punic also died out, but it seems to have survived far longer than Phoenician, until the sixth century, perhaps even into the ninth century.
Writing system
Phoenician was written with the Phoenician script, an abjad (consonantary) originating from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet that also became the basis for the Greek alphabet and, via an Etruscan adaptation, the Latin alphabet. The Punic form of the script gradually developed somewhat different and more cursive letter shapes; in the 3rd century BC, it also began to exhibit a tendency to mark the presence of vowels, especially final vowels, with an aleph or sometimes an ayin. Furthermore, around the time of the Second Punic War, an even more cursive form began to develop,Jongeling, K. and Robert Kerr. Late Punic epigraphy. P.10. which gave rise to a variety referred to as Neo-Punic and existed alongside the more conservative form and became predominant some time after the destruction of Carthage (c. 149 BC).Benz, Franz L. 1982. Personal Names in the Phoenician and Punic Inscriptions. P.12-14 Neo-Punic, in turn, tended to designate vowels with matres lectionis ("consonantal letters") more frequently than the previous systems had and also began to systematically use different letters for different vowels, in the way explained in more detail below. Finally, a number of late inscriptions from what is now Constantine, Algeria dated to the first century BC make use of the Greek alphabet to write Punic, and many inscriptions from Tripolitania, in the third and fourth centuries AD use the Latin alphabet for that purpose.Jongeling, K. and Robert Kerr. Late Punic epigraphy. P.2.
In Phoenician writing, unlike that of abjads such as those of Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew and Arabic, even long vowels remained generally unexpressed, regardless of their origin (even if they originated from diphthongs, as in bt 'house', for earlier *bayt-; Hebrew spelling has byt). Eventually, Punic writers began to implement systems of marking of vowels by means of matres lectionis. In the 3rd century BC appeared the practice of using final 'ālep to mark the presence of any final vowel and, occasionally, of yōd to mark a final long .
Later, mostly after the destruction of Carthage in the so-called "Neo-Punic" inscriptions, that was supplemented by a system in which wāw denoted , yōd denoted , 'ālep denoted and , ʿayin denoted and hē and could also be used to signify .Jongeling, K., Robert M. Kerr. 2005. Late Punic epigraphy: an introduction to the study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic Inscriptions This latter system was used first with foreign words and was then extended to many native words as well.
A third practice reported in the literature is the use of the consonantal letters for vowels in the same way as had occurred in the original adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet to Greek and Latin, which was apparently still transparent to Punic writers: hē for and 'ālep for .
Later, Punic inscriptions began to be written in the Latin alphabet, which also indicated the vowels. Those later inscriptions, in addition with some inscriptions in Greek letters and transcriptions of Phoenician names into other languages, represent the main source of knowledge about Phoenician vowels.
Phonology
Consonants 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: + Phoenician consonants (Traditional School) Type Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Pharyngeal Glottalplainemphatic Nasal m n Stop /Affricate voiceless p t ṭ /◌/ k q ʾ voiced b d g Fricativevoiceless s ṣ /◌/ š ḥ h voiced z ʿ Trill / Tap r Approximant l j w
The system reflected in the abjad above is the product of several mergers. From Proto-Northwest Semitic to Canaanite, and have merged into , and have merged into , and , and have merged into . Next, from Canaanite to Phoenician, the sibilants and were merged as , and were merged as , and * and * were merged as *. For the phonetic values of the sibilants, see below. These latter developments also occurred in Biblical Hebrew at one point or another, except that merged into there.
Sibilants The original value of the Proto-Semitic sibilants, and accordingly of their Phoenician counterparts, is disputed. While the traditional sound values are for , for , for , and for , recent scholarship argues that was , was , was , and was . Krahmalkov, too, suggests that Phoenician *z may have been [dz] or even [zd] based on Latin transcriptions such as esde for the demonstrative z.
On the other hand, it is debated whether šīn and sāmek , which are mostly well distinguished by the Phoenician orthography, also eventually merged at some point, either in Classical Phoenician or in Late Punic.Kerr, Robert M. 2010. Latino-Punic Epigraphy: A Descriptive Study of the Inscriptions. P.126
Postvelars In later Punic, the laryngeals and pharyngeals seem to have been entirely lost. Neither these nor the emphatics could be adequately represented by the Latin alphabet, but there is also evidence to that effect from Punic script transcriptions.
Lenition There is no consensus on whether Phoenician-Punic ever underwent the lenition of stop consonants that happened in most other Northwest Semitic languages such as Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic (cf. Hackett vs Segert and Lyavdansky). The consonant may have been generally transformed into in Punic and in late Phoenician, as it was in Proto-Arabic.Лявданский, А.К. 2009. Финикийский язык. Языки мира: семитские языки. Аккадский язык. Северозапазносемитские языки. ред. Белова, А.Г. и др. P.283 Certainly, Latin-script renditions of late Punic include many spirantised transcriptions with ph, th and kh in various positions (although the interpretation of these spellings is not entirely clear) as well as the letter f for the original *p.Kerr, Robert M. 2010 Latino-Punic Epigraphy: A Descriptive Study of the Inscriptions. P.105 ff. However, in Neo-Punic, *b lenited to /v/ contiguous to a following consonant, as in the Latin transcription lifnim for *lbnm "for his son".
Vowels Knowledge of the vowel system is very imperfect because of the characteristics of the writing system. During most of its existence, Phoenician writing showed no vowels at all, and even as vowel notation systems did eventually arise late in its history, they never came to be applied consistently to native vocabulary. It is thought that Phoenician had the short vowels , , and the long vowels , , , , . The Proto-Semitic diphthongs and are realised as and . That must have happened earlier than in Biblical Hebrew since the resultant long vowels are not marked with the semivowel letters (bēt "house" was written bt, in contrast to Biblical Hebrew byt).