Writing Accross Boarders

The Idea of Writing
Writing Across Borders
Edited by
Alex de Voogt and Joachim Friedrich Quack
BRILL
LEIDEN
BOSTON
2012
Cover iLLustration: Multi-lingual sign posted by the Greek-Norwegian mission on Sai Island, Sudan,
using Arabic and Old Nubian scripts for the Nubian language.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The idea of writing : writing across borders / edited by Alex de Voogt and Joachim Friedrich
Quack.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-21545-0 (alk. paper)
1. Writing. 2. Written communication. 3. Language and languages-Orthography and spelling.
I. Voogt, Alexander J. de. 11. Quack, Joachim Friedrich, 1966P211.134 2011
302.2'244-dC23
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................
vii
Invention and Borrowing in the Development and Dispersal of

Writing Systems
.
. .
.
..
Alex de Voogt
27- 30- 22 - 26 - How Many Letters Needs an Alphabet? The Case

of Semitic
Reinhard C. Lehmann
11
Nubian Graffiti Messages and the History of Writing in the

Sudanese Nile Basin
.
.
.
. .
.
Alex de Voogt & Hans-Jorg Dohla
53
...........
.............
. . ..
......................
............
.....................
......................................................................................................
....
....................... . . .
...........
............
......
.......
..........
69
About "Short" Names of Letters

Konstantin Pozdniakov
Early Adaptations of the Korean Script to Render Foreign
Languages
..
.
. .
.
. .
Sven Osterkamp
83
Han'gill Reform Movement in the Twentieth Century: Roman

Pressure on Korean Writing
. . .. .
. .
Thorsten Traulsen
103
.....................................
........
......
.............
.......
.....
...
..
........
...........
...... .. . .
....
...
... .........
........................
The Character of the Indian Kharothl Script and the "Sanskrit

Revolution": A Writing System Between Identity and
Assimilation
.
.
.
.
. ..
..
Ingo Strauch
......
...............
..........
........ . . .
..... .......
.....
...........
...............
Symmetry and Asymmetry, Chinese Writing in Japan: The Case

of Kojiki (712) ..............................................................................................
Aldo Tollini
131
169
vi
CONTENTS
Writing Semitic with Cuneiform Script. The Interaction of

Sumerian and Akkadian Orthography in the Second Half of
the Third Millennium BC
Theo JH. Krispijn
..... . ... ......... . .. . .... . . . .. .......... ... . ... .... . . . ................ .
Old Wine in New Wineskins? How to Write Classical Egyptian

Rituals in More Modern Writing Systems
Joachim Quack
.. ... ..... . .......... ... ...... ....... ... . .
Subject Index
Language (Group) and Script Index
Author Index
....................................................................................................
............. ....... ..... ... ...... .. .. . ...... . .... . ......
...... . .................................... . ... ............. ..... ..... ...... ........... ... . . .... ....
181
219
245
249
251
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shift
ing Asymmetries in Cultural Flows" at Heidelberg University hosted the
exchange of thoughts and ideas that were at the basis of this publica
tion. In particular, we wish to thank Profs. Madeleine Herren-Oesch, Axel
Michaels and Rudolf Wagner for their support.
The Idea of Writing seminar series started at Leiden University where
it was hosted for five years. This is the first volume that resulted from
a meeting outside Leiden, at Heidelberg University in Germany. Subse
quent seminars have been held in Einsiedeln, near Zurich, Switzerland
and Venice, Italy. They illustrate the lasting interest that this exchange
has created. We owe particular thanks again to Connie Dickmeyer for her
corrections and suggestions, and the patient staff at Brill Publications who
have facilitated the continued productivity of these exchanges by publish
ing this second volume of contributions.
The publication of this volume has been made possible by generous
funding of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ( German Research
Foundation) in the context of the cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe
in a Global Context".
27-30-22-26
HOW MANY LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

THE CASE OF SEMITIC*
Reinhard G. Lehmann
Introduction and General Considerations

In his recent novel "Das Geheimnis des Kalligraphen", the Syro-German
writer Rafik Schami reports a fictitious dialogue between the progressive
young calligrapher Hamid Farsi and his master Serani. In the course of
this dialogue, the master states:
Die arabische Sprache hat nur neunundzwanzig Buchstaben, und je mehr
du davon zerstOrst, umso unsicherer und ungenauer wird die Sprache.
(Schami 2008: 395)'
Modern oriental scholars know that the Arabic alphabet has 28 letters.
A twenty-ninth letter is added by tradition, attributed to Mohammed
himself, and is nothing but the Lam-Alif ligature LA, which simply com
bines the two letters into a single cohesive unit. Accordingly, Hamid Farsi
considers the Lam-Alif ligature superfluous, artificial, and not a genuine
letter in the Arabic alphabet. However, the more conservative and careful
calligraphy master Serani warns his young, impatient pupil not to be all
too optimistic, modernistic, or straightforward:
Ich will dich nicht entmutigen. Diesen Buchstaben LA hat der Prophet dem
Alphabet hinzugefiigt, und er bleibt, bis die Erde untergeht. Wenn du auf
mich horen willst, streiche keinen einzigen Buchstaben, weil sonst die ganze
islamische Welt gegen dich sein wird, denn diese Buchstaben kommen im
Koran vor. (Schami 2008: 39SY
* Thanks to Robert M. Kerr, Philip C. Schmitz and other colleagues and friends with
whom I could discuss parts of this paper. However, mistakes and errors are exclUSively
my responsibility.
, The Arabic language has only twenty-nine letters, and the more of them you destroy, the
more uncertain and imprecise the language becomes. (translation by R.G.L.).
2 I don't want to discourage you. The Prophet himself added the letter LA to the alphabet,
and it will persist until the world ends. Ifyou listen to me, then you won't do away with one
single letter, or otherwise the whole of the Islamic world will disapprove ofyou because these
letters are found in the Koran. (translation by R.G.L.).
12
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
And:
Man nimmt keinen Buchstaben weg [ . ] den die Jahrtausende geformt
haben . . . (Schami 2008: 396)3
.
The dialogue scene points to some problems, which are directly relevant
to the title of this paper:
- To determine how many letters, or graphemes, an alphabet needs, it is
crucial to know what a letter is. Is the Lam-Alif ligature of the Arabic
alphabet a letter, or is it not? Moreover, ifLam-Alif is not a letter, why
then should OMEGA, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, be labelled
a letter? Yet, it is conspicuous that even the name O-mega tells us that
it is nothing more than a diacritical variation to denote the 'big'-that
is, long-pronunciation of the {o} of the Greek alphabet, which thus
became the O-mikron. This is a fact that is also proven occasionally by
its early archaic written forms.4 And if the Arabic LA were a letter, why
then isn't the German digraph {CH} or the German {SZ} ligature (g) a
letter?
- There is a claim that reducing the number of letters of an alphabet
causes uncertainty and imponderability of the language. Is this claim
really convincing?
- There is the claim that a letter, once invented, will last for eternity:
"You must not remove a single character [ . . . ] , which has been formed
by millennia." This, however, is obviously not true. In the course of his
tory, several letters have become obsolete and were removed in several
alphabets.
Despite the traditional Muslim's claim that the Arabic alphabet has
29 letters, modern oriental scholars know that it actually has only 28 let
ters. And some might even say that the Arabic alphabet has only 15 or
3 You must not remove a single character [ . . . ], which has been formed by millennia.
(translation by R.G.L.).
4 In areas like Ionia, Knidos, Paros, Melos and others, the difference between the short
and long /0/ was marked by use of "a new sign which appears to be a doublet formed
from 0 by breaking the circle" Qeffery 1961: 37), i.e., opening it at the bottom. Another
interesting specimen is found in an archaic inscription from Phleious (first half of the sixth
century BeE ) where in the word AWL the OMEGA is written with a digraph formed by two
full circle dotted OMIKRONs that are written one below the other Qeffery 1961: pI. 24,lb,
also Jeffery 1961: 147 note 1). On this basis, on the other hand, Bernal even concludes that
the double-circle was its most pristine shape (BernaI 1987: IS; 1990: 121).
27-30-22 - 26 -
HOW
MANY
LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHAB ET?
13
18 letters, because some similar letters have merged graphically, such as

ra with z ay, /:la with fJa and gim, ha with ta and fa (and, the final shape
aside, also with ya and nun), and fa with qaf, or were secondarily differen
tiated for phonemic reasons, such as dal and gal, and' ayn and gayn, and
were thenceforward distinguishable only by additive points (Gruendler
2006: 151). These distinguishing points, or diacritic marks, have not been
there from the beginning of the Arabic script, and are not in the earli
est versions of the Qur'an (Gruendler 1993: 131SS). But others may argue
that in earlier times, when the Arabic script evolved from an older, most
presumably Nabataean or Nabataean-like ancestor, these letters of course
were distinguishable, and only later merged into one common shape, thus
making it necessary to add diacritical marks, or points ( Gruendler 2006 ) .
This, however, implies that older Arabic or pre-Arabic texts for instance
remained readable for some time anyway, even after letter shapes became
very similar or merged totally (Kerr 2010: 372). It also implies that neither
the merger or reduction of a graphemic inventory nor its enhancement by
diacritics had its most important reason in simple readability.
Thus, how many letters does the Arabic alphabet, for instance, have?
And how many letters does an alphabet need at all? Anyway, the quest
for the number of letters that form an alphabet could indeed be a bit
complicated.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) contains more than 130
graphemes, or signs, and depending on what you really count, there are
even more than 160 signs, or 'letters'. However, no one would reasonably
say that the IPA is a real natural alphabet. There is presumably no indi
vidual that will actually be able to produce in speech all the sounds of
this set of signs, or feels the need to do so, simply because there is not a
Single language that has all of these phonemes. Thus, there is a remark
able restriction: an alphabet represents only the sounds of a single natural
language (or group of natural languages ), which is used by a certain group
of speakers at a certain time in history. Does it represent all of the sounds
of such a natural language? Presumably not-there is sufficient evidence
to assume that every natural alphabet as a graphemic system is to a certain
extent deficient in relation to the phonemic system of the language or dia
lect it is used for. Moreover, obviously the ratio between a phonemic and
a graphemic system can change in the course of history.
I will suggest in this paper that the Northwest Semitic shortened or
'short Abgad' does not reflect a spoken dialect (the Phoenician, as is
mostly believed) at all, but has emerged as a scriptiofranca for the Semitic
speaking Levant. In the late second millennium BeE, the short Abgad,
14
REINHARD G. LE HMANN
which eventually made the game in alphabet history, provided sufficient

consonantal contrast to constitute a to some extent supraphonemic 'writ
ing across the borders' that covers a broad variety of Levantine Northwest
Semitic dialects. To get this point, a Semitic alphabet typology, comments
on several questions and unsolved problems, and a critical evaluation of
terminology are required.
Historical (and Typological) Background
There is no doubt that what we call an alphabet today had developed
more than 3000 years ago somewhere in Syro-Palestine, or the Levant.
However, a closer look at these ancient Levantine alphabetic ideas shows
conspicuously that already in antiquity there were two competing alpha
betical sequences: Hala/:tama and Abgad.5 Both seem most probably to
have displayed close and presumably almost full match of both, the exist
ing phoneme inventory of the language and the provided graphemes, and,
what is more, both seem to have originally reflected a common phonetic
inventory, albeit in a different order. Of course, because they did not rep
resent vowels, some would argue that they both are not true alphabets.
Actually they really were. We will come back to this point again later.
Old South Arabic - Sabaean (Sabaic): 29
What has been traditionally called the 'South Arabic' sequence, or
alphabetic order, also called Hala/:tama according to its first four letters
h - l-/:t - m, is almost exclusively attested in the South-Arabic language area.
From several finds of mainly Sabaic abecedaries, this fixed alphabetic
Hala/:tama letter sequence is known already from the first millennium
BCE as follows:
h -l-/:t -m -q-w-s-r-b -t-s -k-n -b-$-s-f-' -' -r;l-g-d-g -t-z-g-y-t-
Minor deviations from this sequence are only found in some stone inscrip
tions, but not so far in the so-called minuscule script, which was used on
5 Of course, there are also other 'alphabetic' sequences of other scripts in antiquitiy,
the most interesting of which is that one used by the older runic script, called the Futhark
(fujJark). Theo Vennemann in several publications recently tried to derive it from the
Phoenician-Punic Abgad-sequence, which in my opinion is the most convincing theory
up to now (Vennemann 2006, 2009).
27-30-22-26 -
15
wooden sticks, esp. palm-leaf stalks.6 With 29 phonemes, the old South
Arabic alphabet seems to preserve most completely the original Semitic
consonantal phonemic inventory (Stein 2003: 18).7
Based on palaeographical criteria, the Old South Arabic script would
see m to date to at least the mid-second millennium BCE. This presum
ably also applies to the Halal:tama sequence. This script was continued
independently in Ethiopia where a South-Semitic language (Ge'ez) was
adopted early in the Common era. The Ethiopic derivative of the 'South
Semitic' writing system in a separate and isolated development due to
phonetic mergers often confuses some graphemes in writing. It was also
secondarily transformed into a 'semisyllabary' (Diringer 1968) by altering
the shapes of the consonantal graphemes depending on the following
vowel. Hence, one can claim that the classical Ethiopic script has either
26' consonantal graphemes or is a syllabary with 251 characters (33 x 7 +
20; cf. Getatchew Haile 1996: 573). Nonetheless, the Ethiopic script still
"has the analytic depth of an alphabet" ( Coulmas 1989: 153)
However, despite the almost exclusive South Arabian attestation of the
Hala/:tama sequence and its seemingly exclusive later South Semitic his
tory, it is noteworthy that the very earliest evidence of Hala/:tama is found
in the thirteenth century BCE long alphabet of 27 signs from Ugarit in
Syria ( see below).8 Accordingly, the so-called 'South Semitic' alphabet is
.
6 Stein (2003: 11, 2010: 591); for further references Stein (2010: 591 and 743f). Abecedaries
written in stone are published by: Bron & Robin (1974), Irvine & Beeston (1988), Ryckmans
(1985). The sole published deviation in minuscule script, with the interchange of d and
z in Oost.Inst. 37, most probably is nothing but a (mistaken) exception (Stein 2003: 11
Fn. 64).
7 A remarkable phenomenon regarding the number of letters is that only in minuscule
writing, i.e. on wooden sticks, the South Arabic alphabet uses the grapheme <cj>, where
for etymological reasons <f:> is to be expected. But in terms of lexicography, there are no
exceptions (Stein 2003: 27f, Nebes & Stein 2008, and recently Stein 2010: 502f).
8 A reverberation of the HalaJ:tama is also found in a late Egyptian alphabetic device,
as recently is shown by Quack 1993, 2003. Moreover there is the claim that an underlying
notion of HalaJ:tama were also perceivable in the Latin word elementum ("letter / charac
ter as, basic constituent of speech"), reflecting ha-la-/:la-ma (Muller 1994: 309, Gruendler
2006: 148). At any rate, this would mean that the so far only rarely attested northern, or
Levantine, history of the Hala/:lama should not have come to an end so early after all.
However, though for phonological reasons it is most probable that Latin elementum is a
foreign loan word ("Herkunft unklar, jedenfalls nicht Erbwort", Walde & Hofmann 1938:
398), MUller's assumption has severe historical difficulties. If Latin elementum depends
on ha-la-/:la-ma, it would be the only first millennium BeE remnant of the Hala/:lama
in the Mediterranean except for the above-mentioned Egyptian and a few Ancient North
Arabic 'abecedary' inscriptions in different, if any, order including a modified Abgad as
well as Hala/:lama (Macdonald 1986, 2008a: 185), which then must have been responsible
for the transmission onto Latin. Yet, also the older hypothesis that elementum represents
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
by no means exclusively South, but also Levantine! This is not even ruled
out by an occasionally reported assumption that the Ugaritic HalaJ:zama
were only the attempt of an Arabian tourist scribe to learn the Ugaritic
script-which is nothing but an over-romanticized attempt by modern
scholars to escape the aporia of the facts.
The Ugaritic Evidence: 30 (27)
It is a matter of fact that the earliest well attested rich inventory alpha
betic system with a considerable number of texts known hitherto is the
Ugaritic cuneiform, or wedge alphabet. The texts and abecedaries that
have been found in Ugarit and its environs witness to three different sys
tems of a cuneiform alphabet.
Currently, eighteen Ugaritic cuneiform abecedaries, combined text
abecedaries or abecedary fragments are known (Puech 1986, Hawley
2008). Nearly all of these abecedaries represent the dextrograde Ugaritic
long alphabet of 30 signs. Its original 27 signs were most probably adapted
from an unattested Northwest Semitic linear alphabet tradition (Lundin
1987b, Dietrich & Loretz 1988) . Three additional signs were doubtlessly
secondarily appended hence finally prodUcing a 30-letter sequence. As
nearly all of these abecedaries9 show, they baSically arrange the charac
ters according to an expanded scale of the so-called Abgad device, which
has its name from the first four letters' - b -g - d of the short standard scale
(see below) :
'-b -g-fJ- d-h -w-z -J:z-t-y-k-s-l-m-d-n -f,-s- '-p-$-q-r-J-g-t-' i- ' u-s
the beginning of the second half of the Abgad order (el-em-en- . . . ) in analogy to 'Alpha
bet' (Walde & Hofmann 1938: 398) fails because such half-cutting division of the alphabet
is not attested in Latin, but in Semitic only (which can be seen by the Atbash encoding
device, or, for instance, Psalms 9 and 10, which subdivide a totally complete alphabetic
acrostic in its middle, and by Nahum 1, which covers only the first half of the alphabet.
See for a recent discussion Renz 2009). Moreover, the pronunciation of the letters L, M
and N as 'el', 'em', and 'en' seems to be not much earlier than the fourth century CE. Thus,
there seems to be an interdisciplinary circular reasoning, and regarding the etymology
of elementum Latin philology seems to be as helpless as it was one hundred years before
(thanks to Christian Tomau, Wiirzburg, with whom I was able to discuss this pOint).
9 These abecedaries are listed in Hawley 2008 and in KTCP 5.4-5.6, 5.9, 5.12-5.14, 5.165.17, 5.19-5.21, 5.30. Only in the fragments RS 15.071 (KTCP 5.8), 5.274 (7.54), 12.019 (5.5),
and 19.174[4] (9.342) is no decision possible whether they contained 30 or only 27 let
ters. The fragmentary abecedary RS 16.265 covers the missing letters in additional enig
matic (exercise ) letter sequences that remind of a similar phenomenon in lines 1-4 of the
proto-Hebrew 22-letter abecedary ostracon from 'Izbet $artah. For RS 88.2218 (dextrograde
Halaf:tama sequence), see below. For an overview and discussion of Ugaritic abecedaries
see Pardee (2007).
27-30-22-26
17
HOW MANY LETTE RS NEE D S AN ALPHABET?
This first category, the cuneiform long alphabet, is by far the most widely
used, represented in numerous administrative and literary texts from the
north Syrian coastal sites of Ugarit and Ras Ibn HanL Noteworthy, how
ever, is the occasional interchange of signs of mostly similar phonemic
value within the Ugaritic Long Alphabet, thus <t> for <$>, as in art for ar$
(affricate pronounciation), <w > for <h>, as in bwtm for bhtm, <h> for <fJ> as
in phr instead of pfJr, and < ' > for < '> as ttar instead of tfr (Tropper 2000:
21.352.5). Maybe such examples are more than mistakes only, and reflect
vernacular variations that might have rendered similar phonemes with a
reduced set of graphemes.
Another long but non-expanded cuneiform alphabet of 27 signs is also
attested at Ugarit, but only in one abecedary that is written dextrograde
(RS 88.2215 KTU 9.426, Bordreuil & Pardee 1995, R6llig 1998, Bordreuil
& Pardee 2001). It omits at least the last three letters of the Ugaritic Stan
dard long Alphabet and displays some more peculiarities in both letter
shape and adjustment. A similar abecedary was discovered in Beth Shem
esh to the west of Jerusalem, but is written sinistrograde (KTU 5.24 8.1,
Lundin 1987, Pardee 2003/04: 18 n. 43). Both, though not entirely identical,
bear witness to the so-called South Semitic alphabetic Hala/:lama device.lO
However, to date no Ugaritic texts are known, that are unambiguously
written in this 27-letter alphabetic system.
Finally, at Ugarit there was a possibly somewhat later cuneiform
short alphabet system of presumably 22 letters, which could be written
in either direction (Dietrich & Loretz 1988: 145-275).11 Texts written in
this alphabetical system seem to be dated not earlier than the thirteenth
century BeE, and are not only found three or four times in Ugarit/2 How
ever, they also spread south from Ugarit across the Levant, to several sites
=
10
"Enfin, les formes des signes de cet abecedaire si particulier sont tout aussi etrangeres
Ougarit que l'ordre: aucun autre texte ougaritique n'utilise cet inventaire graphique"
(Hawley 2008: 225), similarly Robin (2008: 233). However, Rollig (1998: 87) states "An ugari
tischen Schreibgewohnheiten andert dieses Alphabet ja nichts, denn der Phonembestand
blieb derselbe. Man wird also in der ugaritischen Uberliefemng vergeblich nach Texten
im 'siidsemitschen' Alphabet such en." According to Rollig, the few differing sign forms
could be blamed on a scribal scholar and are not evidence enough for use or non-use of
the Hala/:lama series in Ugarit.
11
As yet, there are only 21 letters of the Abgad device identified, missing the <$> sign.
Also possible is that there was a short alphabet tradition with 24 letters, missing only the
interdentals of the long alphabet (Tropper 2000: 76-77). A table of the sign forms, which
vary to a certain extend, is found in Tropper (2000: 75).
12
Ugarit: KTU 4.31 (right to left), KTU 4.710, and Minet el-Beida: KTU 1.77 (right to left).
The attribution of a further text, the votive clay nail KTU 7.60 to this group is questionable,
Dietrich & Loretz (1988: 168-70; 1989: 107).
a
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
in Syria-Palestine and Cyprus/3 Some of them might also have 24 letters,

what could be counted as a transitional stage from the Long to the Short
Alphabet. 14 Nevertheless, they bear witness to a short( ened) alphabetic
cuneiform tradition. Often this short cuneiform alphabet is considered
the day adaptation of the Phoenician linear alphabet into wedge script
(Pardee 2008: 7), which implies that the Phoenician alphabet was an
entirely independent development (however, the question remains why
there should have been such radical reduction in the phoneme inventory
only some 200 km south in 'Phoenicia'). In this Ugaritic short alphabet,
there is only one letter for ale! (Le., without vowel-connotation), the <!J>
sign is replaced by the </:l > sign, the <[j> sign is replaced by the <' > sign
( which indicates a merger of the two sounds-or graphemes-respec
tively). Also the interdental phonemes It/, I/ and Idl have no distinctive
grapheme but seem to be represented by their sibilant equivalents, i.e.,
/s/, 1$1, and /z/ respectively (Dietrich & Loretz 1989: 107f, Tropper 2000:
22. 5 ). The 'short' alphabet was used to write texts; no abecedary is yet
attested in this alphabet, and even the few examples of these texts found
at Ugarit were all from outside the palace area, thus suggesting that they
do not originate from the 'official' schools ofUgarit (Dietrich & Loretz 1989:
108). Hence, we do not know exactly whether the Ugaritic short alphabet
bears witness to the Abgad sequence (though this is not unlikely), and it
is uncertain whether the texts constitute a 'phoenicianizing' representa
tion of the Ugaritic language or are in a kind of early plain Phoenician or
another North Canaanite dialect (Pardee 2003/04:17). Anyway, lexicon and
grammar of the short alphabetic cuneiform texts seem to be closer to later
Phoenician or another North Canaanite dialect than to the Ugaritic texts
of the long alphabet (Tropper 2000: 22.81ff; Dietrich & Loretz 1989: 110).
With the destruction of Ugarit at the beginning of the twelfth century
BCE the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet tradition came to a sudden end. But
13 Listed, for instance, by Millard ( 2007: 85), which are: Silver Bowl from Rala Sultan
Tekke (Cyprus) 6.68; storage jar from Tell Nebi Mend/Qadesh (but with the <FP sign, thus
maybe long alphabet tradition); two vessel inscriptions from Kamid el Lodz (one dextro
grade, the other sinistrograde); an inscribed jar handle from Sarafand-Sarepta [Lebanon]
KTU 6.70 (dextrograde, relative z and verb p'l indicating 'Phoenician' Canaanite language :
Smith ( 2005 ) ; Vita ( 2003: 401f ) ; a bronze tablet (knife blade?) from Tabor valley (dextro
grade) KTU 6.1; a small tablet from Tel Taanak (left-to-right) KTU 4.767. Dietrich & Loretz
( 1989: 109 ) : "This group of texts attests inscriptions written in both directions. The widely
held notion, that the short alphabet is characterized by right-to-Ieft writing cannot be
maintained. In these texts the direction of writing appears to be rather a function of local
school traditions."
1 4 KTU 6.68 and KTU 5.24 including the <Ip and <FP sign (Tropper 2000: 22-45 ) .
27-30-22-26 -
HOW
MANY LETTERS NEE D S AN ALPHABET?
19
the Abgad order that formed its dominant arrangement device (but most
likely was not an Ugaritic invention, nor was alphabetic writing at all,
Pardee 2007: 182) survived as the basic order of most Western and Semitic
alphabets until today.
T he arrangement of the short alphabet in a 22-letter Abgad device as
it is attested from the late second millennium BCE onwards seems to be
nothing but an abbreviation, or selection from the (Ugaritic) long Abgad
series. Its most common standard device, now starting plainly with '-b
g- d, is known from several Northwest Semitic abecedaries of the first mil
lennium BCE, but best from the Hebrew Bible:'5
'- b -g - d-h -w-z -/:z -t-y-k-l-m-n -s-'-p -$-q -r-s-t
The as yet oldest authority for a 22-letter short Abgad sequence, however,
is the proto-Hebrew linear exercise on the Izbet $artah sherd, dated
by archaeological context data-to the late twelfth century. In its bot
tom line, it clearly displays a genuine Abgad device, although with slight
alterations (Cross 1980; Hallo 2004: 28Sf):
'
'- b -g -d-h -m-l).-z-t-y-k-l-[ ]-n -s -p- '-$-q -q -s- t

A quite similar arrangement is found in the late 10th century Tel Zayit
stone abecedary (Tappy et al. 2006; Sanders 2008; Rollston 2008b), which
was discovered in 2005:
'- b -g-d-w-h-l).-z- t-y-I-k-m -n -s -p- '-$-q -r-s- t
While the apparent position change of the bilabial sounds /w/ and /m/ in
the Iz bet $artah sherd most probably had phonemic reasons, the </:z> - <z>
and the <' > - interchanges here (and in a few other abecedaries) are
remarkable.
The latter is also found in some other proto-Hebrew (and Hebrew
only, or Southern Levantine, but not Ugaritic!) abecedaries of the early
'
15 Unfortunately, the numerous Northwest Semitic linear abecedaries are mostly either
fragmentary or represent a selection of some letters only. However, these all incontrovert
ibly bear witness to the Abgad series or at least segments thereof. In the Hebrew Bible,
though, there is a considerable number of complete abecedaries attested in the follOwing
Biblical Hebrew acrostics, where every colon, verse, or stanza starts with a new letter of
the alphabet: Psalms 9-10 (disturbed between Lamed and Pe), 25 (Waw missing), 34 (Waw
missing), 37, Ill, 112, 119, 145 (Nun missing), Prov 31:10-31, Lamentations 1, 2, 3, 4, and Sirach
51:13-30 (Zayin-Kaf missing), Nah 1:2-8 (first half), outside the Bible also in the Dead Sea
Psalms scroll 11QpSa XXi:ll-17, xxii:I-15, xxiv:3-17. For Biblical Hebrew acrostics in general,
see Freedman (1999: 1-24), for abecedaries, most recently Gzella (forthcoming).
20
first millennium, the most prominent of which are the abecedaries 1 and
3 from Kuntillet Adjrud in the southern Negev.16 Moreover, this very pecu
liarity of an < '>- to -< '> interchange is also found in some Biblical
acrostic poems.17 Though, in any case, this deviation from the majority or
'standard' sequence does not have a phonemic reason, it is not likely that
it was just haphazard or mistaken. Rather, its long afterlife even in the
Hebrew Bible seems to trace back to a different Abgad variety, which must
be seen in connection with local or areal 'Hebrew' scribal traditions.
Thus, to conclude the first overview, there seem to have been five
main classes of early alphabet records, to be categorized by graphic for
mat (cuneiform or linear), number of graphemes, abecedary-device, and
direction of writing:
This -< ' > modified Abgad is also found 3 times on an unprovenanced early sixth
century BCE Hebrew ostracon of the Moussaieff collection, which was recently published
by Martin Heide (Heide 2007).
'
' 7 Among the aforementioned (n. 15), a modified order with interchange of < >- to
'
-< > is found in Psalms *9-*10 and Lamentations 2, 3 and 4, and also in the assumed
underlying Hebrew text of the Greek (Septuagint) version of Prov. 31. That this -< ' >
modified Abgad device is as yet found outside the Hebrew Bible in South Levantine or
'proto'-Hebrew abecedaries only, is maybe of some importance. Anyway, the majority of
later Abgad abecedaries in general bears witness to the < '>- order, which accordingly
we may label the 'standard'. It is not only found in most Biblical poetic acrostics (see
note 15), but in an early ostracon of the eighth century from Lachish, too. Unfortunately
though, most Hebrew Abgad abecedary inscriptions and also some Phoenician, Aramaic,
and Ammonite abecedary sherds or seals are either fragmentary or too short respectively
to reveal whether they testifY to a < ' >- or to a -< ' ) order. Accordingly, nothing can
be said about which of both variants was the most common. Quite differently, Sanders
(200S: 102, referring to Byrne 2007: 4-5) claimed the -< ' > sequence to be the older
one because of the well known Hebrew scribal habit of placing a directly under a
'superscript' <s>, which, in his opinion, "could well have been triggered" as a "ghostly trace
of a different order entirely" by the Halaf.zama device with its <s>--< ' >-< ' > sequence.
However, Byrne's underlying notion is not convincing. Abecedaries, whatever their main
function might have been, were not very useful as a curricular guide (as Byrne 2007: 5
claims) "to gain familiarity and proficiency with the characters, their relative size, and
their relative placement" (Byrne 2007: 5). Would it not have been much more effective
to gain scribal proficiency in baseline control, relative letter size, and letter placement by
copying texts (not abecedaries), for these alone provide most or all of the combining pos
sibilities? Beyond sole reading and writing knowledge, mastership-level scribal proficiency
is first and foremost knowledge of layout and keming devices (Lehmann 200Sb), which
were acquired by practicing, writing and copying texts again and again. Moreover, Sanders
obviously ignores the fact that the -< ' > sequence, which he claims to be "found in no
Israelite abecedary", is well attested at least three times in the Hebrew Bible in reasonably
late texts (Lamentations 2-4), which alone rules out any idea that this order might be the
earlier, Canaanite, and non-Israelite.
,6
27-30-22-26 -
HOW
MANY
LETTERS NEE D S AN ALP HABET?
21
Cuneiform (wedge) long alphabet with expanded inventory (30):

Abgad device, left-to-right (dextrograde)
Cuneiform (wedge) alphabet with full inventory (27):
Hala/:tama device, dextrograde and sinistrograde (so far only two
examples)
Cuneiform (wedge) alphabet with reduced inventory (22):
Abgad device? (no abecedary), sinistrograde (right-to-Ieft)
Linear alphabet with full inventory (27):
Abgad device? (no abecedary), sinistrograde
Linear alphabet with reduced inventory (22):
Abgad device, sinistrograde
To be honest-there is a 'fake', or misleading assumption, in this overview
because there actually is no full-inventory 27-sign linear alphabet as yet
found. This is only what scholars normally expect to have been there.Is
Nevertheless it is not attested. Maybe there are some non-linear, quasi
pictographic forerunners of the rich-inventory alphabet in the early sec
ond millennium, depending on how you interpret the protosinaitic and
related inscriptions of the second millennium BCE. Nonetheless, they are
not linear. As yet, the full inventory 27-sign linear alphabet is a phantom,
as is a yet-unattested 27-sign cuneiform (wedge) Abgad sequence. How
ever, while there are good reasons to assume the existence of the latter/9
18
See, for instance, the entirely useless effort made by Martin ( 19 62 ) to identify in the
sub-text of the so-called Rapa' palimpsest arrowhead a linear <g>-letter, bearing the shape
of <z> "with two small slanting strokes appended to the upper crossbar" (p. 183). All neces
sary obj ections to this is said by Cross (1967: 14* n. 34). Relying strictly on the claim already
made by W.F. Albright that there must have been a Northwest-Semitic linear long 27letter-alphabet, as far as I know, Martin was the last who seriously tried to find something
like that in any Northwest Semitic linear alphabetic inscription. It is obvious that Martin
failed totally. As a side-effect of his fatal methodological meander, unfortunately also other
useful and valuable insights of Martin remained underestimated.
19 The final position of the surplus letters 'i, 'u, s in the expanded cuneiform Abgad
points clearly to a primal 27-letter Abgad that closed with the letter <t>o Originally, there
was one '-sign only, which was a pure consonantal glottal stop (the 'a sign). The vowel
specializing signs 'i and 'u, as well as s predominantly for loanwords, were added at a
later stage (Sivan 2001: 9-10). Furthermore, the abecedary RS 230492 ( KTU 5.19) has an
unexpected and otherwise inexplicable dividing stroke after the <t>-sign, which confirms
that the users of the 30-letter cuneiform Abgad by all means were aware of the second
ary character of the last three signs 'I, 'u and s (Bordreuil 1982: 9-10: " . . . confirme que les
utilisateurs de l'alphabet ougaritique de trente lettres etaient conscients du charactere
supplementaire des trois dernieres lettres i, u, et s."). However, the KTU edition as well
as Tropper (2000: 22) interpret the divider as a missing part of the 'i sign, which, from a
palaeographic point of view, is less probable.
=
22
it remains unlikely that there ever was something like a linear long Abgad.
Thus, the fourth class in the above list should be disregarded.
As for the remaining classes, there are two basic parameters: the arrange
ment of letters, and the number of graphemes. It seems as if here lies the
historical clue for the question under discussion. Beforehand, however, a
clarification of terminology is necessary.
Abjad and Alphabeta- the Vaniels'Distinction
Among the four abovementioned parameters, graphic format and direc
tion-of-writing are predominantly dependent on extrinsic factors such as
areal economic conditions and availability of writing material, or sociolog
ical and regional trends of scribal behaviour. Thus, apparently it seems
most important to keep apart the number of graphemes and the abece
dary-device, which are the basic classes that point more to the intrinsic
notion of writing itself. But not all scholars do so.
In the last two decades, a traditional term for arrangement, or abece
dary order, became almost totally intermingled with what grammatolo
gists hold important in terms of 'alphabet' type-with fatal effects on
terminology. Maybe some would object that the abecedary order is n ot
relevant. But the chosen term suggests that the order of signs is relevant
which, indeed, it is. Sadly, this is how terms got confused.
It was Peter T. Daniels who brought up a terminological opposition
between Alphabet and Abjad. He first did so in 1990 to refute I.J. Gelb's
earlier statement that West Semitic scripts were not alphabets, but rather
syllabaries (Daniels 1990, Gelb 1963, see also Powell 1991: 238-245 and
Powell 2009: 153 ) . Meanwhile, this distinction has attained certain noto
riety amongst linguists and, above all, on many Internet sites. Respond20
20
It is clear that the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabetic writing was influenced qua tech
nique (extrinsic factors) by the Hittito-Mesopotamian writing traditions. Nevertheless, it
shares its basic intrinsic principle (alphabet) with the bulk of Semitic linear writing. On
the other hand, a close investigation of the Northwest Semitic script traditions of the first
half of the first millennium BeE has shown that script changes up to seemingly differ
ent 'national scripts' depend almost exclUSively on changes in the scribe's hand and the
scribe's attitude, that is: on regional sweep and influence of dominant scribal schools (van
der Kooij 1986: 90-93.244-251.253). As long as there is no better explanation, we must
assume that also the earlier change and fixing of writing direction( s) had the same cause.
Once a dominant writing direction had been set (however marginal the reason might have
been), the canon of 'path dependence' became the rationale for all further development
and did not allow any reconversion of direction or shape in writing.
27-30-22-26 -
HOW
MANY
LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?
23
ing to an earlier objection to Gelb by Swiggers 1984, who differentiated

between a 'standing-for' and a 'denotation' view, and because "distinct
types of script should not be lumped together" (Daniels 1990: 729 ) , Dan
iels wanted to further differentiate between terms than just 'syllabary'
and 'alphabet' alone. This is why to define Alphabet more rigorously he
introduces the traditional Arabic numeric letter sequence Abjad as a new
script term into grammatology, and in the subsequent years he has vigor
ously defended it. An alphabet, Daniels claims, "contains characters that
denote all or most of the individual segments of a language, both vocalic
and consonantaL . . . The West Semitic scripts, then, are not alphabets,
since they do not represent the vowels." Rather, the West Semitic scripts
"constitute a third fundamental type of script, the kind that denotes indi
vidual consonants only" (Daniels 1990: 729), for which he proposes to use
the traditional Arabic numerological term Abjad.
Only the Greeks, Daniels claimed, first developed what one could label
a 'true' alphabet. However, he did not say so because of the etymology
of the word (which would be a true and irrefutable reason), but because
a 'true' alphabet in his view must represent all or nearly all phonemes
of a language including vowels-which obviously is not the case with
any ancient West Semitic 'alphabet'. To escape objections regarding the
vowelled aleph-signs in the Ugaritic expanded 3o-letter Abjad for instance,
he simply labels this writing system an 'augmented Abjad' (Daniels 1990:
730 ) . By the way, he even introduced a "fourth fundamental type of script,"
though not as new, when he along the way redefines the older term 'neo
syllabary' for the Ethiopic script system and labels it Abugida (Daniels
1990: 730 ) .2 1
It is fully comprehenSible that in his zeal to refute the Gelb thesis,
Daniels creates another and more sophisticated system of his own. Some
years later only, in astounding aplomb he then stated: "It must simply be
recognized [ . . . ] that abjads are not (any longer) syllabaries and not (yet)
alphabets, and that abugidas-though they denote syllables-are not
like syllabaries, since vowels receive identification equivalent to that for
consonants." (Daniels 1996a: 8 ) . Notwithstanding the fact that the appar
ently sophisticated nomenclature used by Daniels has already found wide
21
It is interesting that Daniels here is still cautious: 'Were it not for the existing term,
I would propose maintaining the pattern by calling this type an 'abugida,' from the Ethio
pian word for the auxiliary order of consonants in the signary." However, some years later,
the Abugida is another fixed Daniels' term passim in The World's Writing Systems, ed. by
Daniels & Bright (1996).
24
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
acceptance in many publications, it also has its awkwardness. In his quest

for the early history of the alphabet, such distinctions weaken the eye and
obfuscate terminology instead of clarifying it. So the remaining question
is: what must simply be recognized?
Granted that the distinction between Alphabet and Abgad were to be
helpful from a typological and grammatological point of view, however, is
it also correct or even useful regarding linguistics and Semitic philology?
I am not so certain about this. Regarding Semitic writing, Daniels' distinc
tion is artificial, and it is also dubious regarding Semitic philology and
linguistics. Rather, this distinction is again to foster a certain bias as if the
West Semitic alphabet were not yet entirely complete, lacking something
important to be a fully working script system.22
In rejecting concepts of 'evolution' with respect to the history of writing,
Daniels opts for "successive improvements" (Daniels 1996a: 8). This though
is awkward, too, because not every change in a system is necessarily
22
What is worse (however, Daniels is not to be charged with this), the distinction in
favour of a 'true' Greek 'alphabet' is capable of strange eurocentristic or at least graecocen
tristic chauvinistic effects, as Daniels himself pointed out by rebutting Eric Havelock (Dan
iels 1996b: 27-28). Notions similar to Havelock's can also still be found in recent German
publications, for example where of the Greek alphabet it is said that "die bahnbrechende
Entwicklung eines Alphabets mit Konsonanten- und Vokalzeichen strahlte sowohl nach
Osten aus [ . . . ] , als auch nach Westen [ . . . ] " ( Casaretto, et al. 2007: 38), and Similarly: "Die
Suche nach aLLgemeiner Kenntnis von den allgemeinen Gesetzen der Natur, die insbeson
dere der Medizin eine vollig neue und bis heute wirksame Fassung gab, war auf leistungs
fahige Notationen angewiesen. Den Griechen kam zur Hilfe, dass sie ein gleichermai'jen
exaktes wie flexibles Schriftsystem entwickeln konnten. Es forderte die Abstraktion, die
man zur Erkenntnis gesetzesmaiger Vorgange in Natur und Gesellschaft benotigte" ( Ger
hard 2007: 6). It goes without saying that this corresponds neither to basic historic facts
nor to the historical deductions therefrom. Probably, the most radical German exponent
of such a notion is the media theorist Friedrich Kittler (however, note the recent caveat
by Jan Assmann 20n: no-m). Unfortunately, also the esteemed classicist Barry P. Powell
(2009: 153ft) clings to a certain graecocentrism with fatal consequences for his perception
of Semitics. Powell is at least poorly informed, when he contrasts "fewer than one hundred
examples of West Semitic writing from the Levant" surviving from the whole first millen
nium BCE with the "epigraphic testimony to the Greek alphabet, swelling into an ocean of
epigraphic remains" (2009: 153-154). Obviously, his volitional graecocentrism in matters of
writing had let him astray regarding what the current state-of-the-art of West Semitic epig
raphy really is (and already was during the past 50 years or more). Actually Powell would
had done better at least to ponder on what Tatian noted already in the second century:
"Do not maintain a totally hostile attitude to foreigners, men of Greece, nor resent their
beliefs. For which of your own practices did not have a foreign origin? The most famous
of Telmessians invented divination through dreams, Carians foreknowledge through stars;
Phrygians and the most ancient of the Isaurians the lore of bird-flights, Cyprians a cult of
sacrifices; Babylonians astronomy, Persians magic, Egyptians geometry, Phoenicians edu
cation through the letters of the alphabet. Therefore stop calling imitations inventions."
(Tatian, Gratio ad Graecos 1.1; Whittaker 1982: 2-3).
27-30-22-26
HOW MANY LETTE RS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?
25
an improvement of a former system, which then might be abandoned.

Rather, at least in the most ancient Semitic alphabetical systems changes
seem to be mere adaptations or adjustments to fit better the requirements
of a given linguistic situation.
It remains problematic to take over the term Abjad in its 'Daniels' defi
nition when dealing with the early history of the (West) Semitic alphabet.
Even the late M. O'Connor got into confused terminology-coining terms
like "southern linear abjad" (O'Connor 1996a: 98) or "South Semitic Abjad"
(which nota bene denotes the Halal;ama) and wrote of "distinguishing the
alphabet from the alphabetic order . . . to recognize the Levantine order
and the South Semitic order, which must be independent of each other,
as being of comparable antiquity" (O'Connor 1996b: 790). Fatally enough,
there was no unambiguous 'Levantine' order, as the rare but real Ugaritic
Halal;ama evidence proves, but only an as yet statistically significant
preference of Abjad (Abjad) order use. Moreover, Daniels himself fails
to discuss or even to mention the 'South Semitic' Halal;ama device that
automatically would contradict him by its sole existence: one is curious
about how terms would change if one day it happened that an Abjad
sequence were found in Sabaic script within Sabaean boundaries, then
perhaps speaking of hall;amic Abjads and abjadic (abgadic) Abjads . . . ?
To take a definition by David Crystal, from a linguistic point of view
an alphabet simply is "a type of writing system in which a set of sym
bols (letters) represents the important sounds (phonemes) of a language"
( Crystal 1992: 14)-and one feels inclined to complement this with the
second half of Daniel's definition of writing in general: . . . "in such a way
that it can be recovered more or less exactly without the intervention
of the utterer." (Daniels 2007: 55). The sole point in question is whether
a phonemic-graphemic alphabetic system works economically with its
language ( s) or group of languages, which it was created for or adapted to.
Or, to say it in other words: what are the important sounds (phonemes),
or what sounds were considered important by the majority of speakers or
scribes of a language to recover an utterance more or less exactly without
the intervention of the utterer at the time when a phonemic writing sys
tem for this language came into being?
The answer is clear: Greek is an Indo-European language with a large
number of vowel phonemes and diphthongs and a lot of consonantal
clusters, all of which are far more semantically distinctive and sensitive
than in the Semitic languages. Thus, adopting the Abjad in the Aegean
abets adapting it to the peculiar needs of their language type. By and by,
assigning some graphemes of unknown sounds to vowels (some more
-
dropped out of use: koppa and digamma), and adding some more at the
end, Greek finally created the Alpha-Beta, which fits almost perfectly as an
alphabetic base system for the non-Semitic Indo-European languages, and
which finally made the game. This is not even rebutted by the few lndo
European languages that have been or are written with adaptations of
Arabic or Hebrew script, because these adaptations include the additional
and later vowel denoting tokens of these scripts as well.
On the other hand, by no means is the (west) Semitic Abjad a non
alphabetical system, and by no means is it deficient ( Coulmas 2003: 113). It
is Daniels himself who concedes that "the Semitic abjads really do fit the
structure of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic very well [ . . . ] since the spelling
ensures that each root looks the same through its plethora of inflections
and derivations" (Daniels 1996b: 27 )-which is only partly true at all, if
one regards such phenomena as assimilation and metathesis or Phoe ni
cian Sandhi at least in Northwest Semitic of the first millennium. The long
Abjad system, enhanced by two or-depending on how one counts
three occasionally-used vowel signs (matres lectionis) works perfectly
until today with the Arabic language, as is proven by the (modern) Arabic
script itself (and is indirectly and unintentionally proven even by Daniels
1997), which has remarkably few differences from the Ugaritic long alpha
bet. And even the short Abjad, though with more frequent mater lectionis
use, runs with Modern Hebrew. Thus, an Abjad truly is an alphabet in the
linguistic meaning of the word.
Abjad or Alphabeta-it is mostly a matter of how much ambiguity
one can tolerate and how much entropy one can stand before the writ
ing becomes incomprehensible. "Given the systematic nature of [Semitic]
consonant writing, it is clearly mistaken to look at it as something incom
plete, an imperfection of technology which was to be fully developed only
by the Greeks" (Coulmas 1996: 92) Recently, Jan Assmann also objected
to connatural graecocentristic positions as those of the German media
theorist Friedrich Kittler:
.
Wenn behauptet wird, die Vokalisierung eines konsonantischen Alphabets

komme einer Kulturrevolution gleich, halte ich dies fUr eine Oberdrama
tisierung. (Assmann 20n: no)
As a set of letters, an alphabet is not the mirror of what should be there in

a language from a phonemic or even phonological point of view, rather,
it is the data stock of what provides maximum efficiency with least effort
from a semantic point of view-which implies: the driver is the principle
of least effort!
27-30-22-26
- HOW
MANY
LETTE RS NEED S AN ALP HABET?
27
Anyway, the quest for the arrangement of letters is by no means irrel

evant. Hence, the Abjad term, which as a numerological term originally
denotes a certain letter seq uence, remains an important terminus techni
cus exactly in this meaning, Le., to denote the very letter order begin
ning with '-b -g- (IJ) -d-h-w . . . and should not be abandoned and ceded
to grammatology. As a minimal terminological compromise, and to fur
ther avoid terminological confusion-which may be an effect of incon
siderately taking over Daniels' terms-I suggest using Abgad (with "g") to
denote the Northwest Semitic alphabetic device (see below) in contrast to
Abjad, which unfortunately already seems to be established for a different
notion in terms of grammatology.
Halal).ama or Abgad? How to Sort an Alphabet
As mentioned, the first basic parameter is the arrangement of letters,
that is: the alphabetic sequence, Halal:zama or Abgad? In spite of some
intrinsic variants and alterations, and in spite of certain exceptions, it is
a matter of fact that, beginning with the first millennium BCE, one can
ascribe both long abecedaries, the Halal:zama and the long Abgad device,
to the two greater areas of their graphemic type, i.e., the South Semitic and
the North Semitic graphic letter sets respectively.23 Anyhow, it is notice
able and most interesting that the letter type that predates them both is
the Ugaritic wedge alphabet. It is the Ugaritic cuneiform script alone that
displays both devices, the Halal:zama and the Abgad, though by far not
on an equal footing. Even though obviously the Halal:zama never was the
standard in the realm of North Semitic and vanished in the Levant before
the first millennium, and acknowledging the as yet unrevealed roots of
the South Semitic script, it is almost indisputable that South Semitic
Halal:zama and North Semitic Abgad are siblings (Trapper 1994: 298f.300,
cp. Lemaire 2008: 50 ) . This becomes clear not only from their early co
existence in the Northern Levant in the second half of the second millen
nium BCE, but also from their common phoneme inventory.
23 However, note that there seems to be a certain 'zone of uncertainty' in the Ancient
North Arabian, where letter inventories or abecedaries are found in (modified) Abgad,
Halal:zama or simple order by graphic shape (Macdonald 1986, and infra n. 8). This so
far unparalleled diversity is explicable by the spread of literacy throughout " 'non-literate'
nomadic communities which [ . . . ] thought of and used the ability to write in a quite dif
ferent way to the sedentaries." (Macdonald 1986: llS and ff.)
28
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
For comparison, we arrange the South Arabic according to the (Ugaritic)

long Abgad device:
Ugaritic
- '- b -g-tJ -d-h -w-z -/:l - t-y-k-s-l-m-cj-n -,? -s - ' -p-s-q -r-t-g- t-'i- ' u-s
- b -g-tJ -d-h -w -z-/:l - t-y-k-s-l-m-cj-n -,? -s - '-f-$ -q -r-t-g - t-8-Q.
,
South Arabic / Sabaic ( arranged in Abgad-mode)
It can easily be seen that there is a difference of only two or three signs
respectively-the secondarily added Ugaritic signs in their normal posi
tion at the end, after t, and two more Arabic graphemes (in the above
chart these latter ones are not added at the end of the sequence, it
seems so only because the 'Arabic' inventory is arranged here in 'Abgad
mode' for better comparison). The differences are indeed few, but they
show that already in the late second millennium each must have had its
own history.
Since the graphemic surplus of the Ugaritic 30-letter long Abgad is
added at the end (letters ' i- ' u -s ), and because there is a common pho
nemic inventory of 27 signs in both the Ugaritic and the South Arabic,
although different in sequence, and because the South Arabic inventory
has two more letters which are unknown in the Abgad tradition, it is most
probable that they both represent an expanded superstrate alphabet, the
basis of which must have been a stock inventory of 27, either as an Abgad,
or as a Hala/:lama device.
Nevertheless, it remains unclear when the two devices separated from
one another ( Schippmann 1998: 18-19)-if they where once united. The
controversy becomes even harder because it applies to the basic question
how the alphabet came into being at all and which of the two devices, the
Hala/:lama or the Abgad, is the older one. But this is not the topic here.
Short or Long? How Many Letters Does an Alphabet Need?
The second parameter is the number of graphemes. Short or long? How
many letters does an alphabet need? There is as yet no clear-cut archaeo
logical and hard epigraphical data indicating that either the short alpha
bet or the twenty-seven-sign alphabet preceded the 22-letter standard
alphabet of the first millennium BeE (Pardee 2003/04: 18 n. 45, Pardee
2007: 183f) .
Some scholars assume that the long Alphabet is an expanded version
of the older short alphabet of 22 signs ( enhancement theory, for instance
27-30-22-26 -
HOW
MANY
29
Dietrich & Loretz 1988: 141-143, 1991). However, most scholars argue the
other way round that the Ugaritic Long Alphabet (30/27) is an adaptation
of an early form of the Northwest Semitic long Abgad device, which finally
was reduced to 22 signs (reduction theory). The aporia is that so far there
is no clear and unambiguous Northwest Semitic linear rich-inventory, i.e.,
long (27/30) Abgad (or any other device) abecedary listed. Notwithstand
ing W.F. Albright's earlier claim (Albright 1950: 12-13) that there also must
have been a 27-letter-linear long Alphabet, all attempts to unambiguously
detect more than the well-known 22-letter linear Abgad have failed.24
But although the majority of the Ugaritic abecedaries is based upon the
Abgad system, it is only Ugaritic that displays all types of Semitic alpha
bets as yet known to us: long (30-enhanced) Abjad, (27) long Hala/:lama,
and short (22) Abgad. And it is notable that the full inventory alphabets
(27/30) seem to be northern Levantine only, while the reduced-inventory
texts are found at Ugarit, too, but more often to the south in Lebanon and
Palestine, which means that it was scattered throughout the Levant.
Thus, to invoke Occam's razor, it seems most reasonable to adhere to
the reduction theory. This posits that near the end of the second millen
nium in the Northern Levant an old, inventory-rich, alphabetic system of
27 consonant signs, which was almost exactly matching the consonan
tal inventory of the spoken language before, became reduced (Pardee
2007: 183f).
As matters stand, i.e., because there is not a single linearized instance of
a long Abgad surplus letter, for instance ItI or IIJI, we must also admit that
by linearization of the graphemic type this reduction to 22 graphemes was
already done, or in other words: the 22-letter short Abgad predates or is
simultaneous with the emergence of linear letter forms, i.e., the lineariza
tion. This implies that the reduction of the Abgad to 22 graphemes must
have happened not later than in the third quarter of the second millen
nium, i.e., most probably in the thirteenth century. This is confirmed by
the date of the Ugaritic-written short Abgad texts.
As we now know, it was this trimmed down system that finally made
the game. Its Levantine development and slight only alteration in the first
millennium BeE gave birth to the Hebrew, the Aramaic, the Syriac, the
Palmyrene, the Nabataean and others, and finally to the Arabic alpha
bet. By its transmission to the Aegean and further west it became subject
24 F o r instance M.F. Martin, 1962. A Twelfth Century Bronze Palimpsest, Rivista degli
Studi Orientali 37: 175-193 (see infra note 18).
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
to various alterations, modifications, and enhancements, but finally was

spread throughout the world.
Shortening the Alphabet I: Who and When?
Admittedly, there is not a single primordial vowel sign in the Semitic
alphabets. However, there is a need for grammatologists to understand
that this is no impediment to understanding what an alphabet is. Also it is
not the problem that we have a respectably high amount of letters, includ
ing vowel signs, in the Greek Alphabet. And it is also not a challenging
question here why there are so many consonant-only letters in the South
Arabic or in the Ugaritic writing tradition.
The most puzzling question is:
What about the short Abgad system? Why are there so few letters left in
the Northwest Semitic Abgad of the first millennium BCE?
Of course languages with a rich phoneme inventory can get along with a
deficient, or reduced alphabetic grapheme inventory ( Coulmas 2003: 113).
On the other hand, "a borrowed alphabet in which phonemes of the bor
rowing languages are lacking tends to become polyphonic," (Blau 1982: 3,
cf. Blau 2010: 73ff)-which is only the reverse of the medal. For example,
older Aramaic obviously had at least 26 consonantal phonemes (Creason
2008: 112-114), but is written with the 22-Abgad system, and similarly this
is the case with Hebrew for instance. Hence one cannot help admitting
that the speakers of Hebrew or Aramaic adopted an incongruous alpha
betical system, which beforehand had already been reduced to only 22
letters, insufficient to represent all consonantal phonemes.25 There again
is no just cause to assume that their common donor or forebear never had
more than 22 graphemes. The sole existence of a long Abgad tradition,
though in cuneiform only, but nevertheless Abgad, makes a strong point
against that.
But if a sudden reduction of the Abgad alphabetical system from 27 to
22 graphemes had taken place at some point more than 3000 years ago,
where and when did this occur, and why was it done so? Most scholars
assume that the (Proto-) Phoenicians did it, and there seems to be no
reason to obj ect to it (Lemaire 2008: 49f ).
2 5 The same, t o be sure, happened again more than a thousand years later when Arabic
took over the Nabataean-Aramaic alphabet.
27-30-22-26 -
HOW
MANY
31
To be sure, there is no clear-cut evidence that the Phoenicians invented

the alphabet, but there is less evidence that the Hebrews (or others) did.
Thus, to invoke Occam's razor again, it seems most likely that the early
Phoenicians were, if not the inventors of the 27-letter alphabet, at least
the transmitters of the 22-letter alphabet. The very earliest texts of consid
erable length known to us that were written with the linear-short Abgad
are undoubtedly Phoenician. These come from Byblos, like the famous
Ahirom sarcophagus inscription (Lehmann 200sa, 2008b ) or the Shipit
baal, Abibaal, and Elibaal inscriptions, and somewhat later also from other
Phoenician sites like Tyre, Sidon, and the overseas colonies. Moreover
putting aside the inscribed Canaanite arrowheads of the late second
millennium-, even the earliest of these texts already at the turn of the
millennium display a considerable degree of scribal experience, skill, and
craftsmanship (Rollston 2008a, Lehmann 2008b ) . What we know of the
original West Semitic texts, i.e., inscriptions, from the middle or late sec
ond and even of the first millennium, are sherds, graffitti, and fragments
incised in stone, but naturally nothing that is written flat. Flat writing
however, i.e., with ink on papyrus or another smoothed or planar surface,
must have gone on simultaneously with and even earlier than clumsy
scratches on sherds. This is also most likely considering the conjectural
genesis of Ugaritic cuneiform (Lundin 1987b, Dietrich & Loretz 1988). It is
also evident that scratched or carved 'cursive' linear letter forms in argil
always are predated by plain cursive types of professional flat writing (van
der Kooij 1986) . Unfortunately, all this has gone forever because of the
perishable nature of papyrus in the climate of Palestine, and, therefore,
conclusions are speculative. The dearth of evidence for the early history
of the linear alphabetic writing obscures our knowledge of the origin and
early history of the alphabet. Nevertheless it has particular implications.
Some years ago, Benjamin Sass emphasized the sudden thirteenth-cen
tury alphabetic boom after a purported "excessively long palaeographic
standstill" of ca. 1800-1300 BCE ( Sass 2004-0S: 148). This finally causes him
to doubt the existence of (non-linear) alphabetic inscriptions preceding
the fourteenth century, and to claim that the early history of the alpha
bet was not so early at all, but that the alphabet was born in Palestine in
the thirteenth to twelfth centuries, shortly before it lost its 'Proto-Sinaitic'
look and letter shapes became linear. However, notwithstanding the prob
lematic dating of some early non-linear alphabetic inSCriptions, Sass' view
is loaded with some methodologically problematic and romantic presup
positions, as, for instance, in this passage:
32
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
Rather than as a sudden 'boom', its timing quite inexplicable, ending a cen
turies-long freeze, this surge in the 13th-12th centuries may be understood as
the swift, enthusiastic implementation of the breakthrough made in Egypt
only shortly before. Brilliant inventions take root fast. (Sass 2004-05: 154)
However, by no means every 'brilliant invention' takes root as fast as Sass

assumes, especially not if it undermines much older stable and estab
lished systems, as were the Mesopotamian cuneiform and the Egyptian
writing. A 'freeze' or standstill in palaeographic development is only
then problematic, if one confidently assumes that the bearers of an early
alphabetic invention, and those who handed it down, were already 'demo
cratic' in that sense that they shared their knowledge and skill freely with
everyone who was interested. But how can we know whether they did so?
The meagre contents of the few intelligible 'Proto-Sinaitic', or early non
linear or proto-linear West Semitic inscriptions, including the recently
published and highly controversial Qeiyafa ostracon (Misgav, Garfin
kel & Ganor 2009), give no hint in this or in another direction. Hence,
it is also possible that alphabetic writing was the arcane knowledge of
only a restricted group of people or functionaries, such as some kind of
(w )iiSipu( m) or early O17 lawiyyim (ritual) specialists for instance, or other.26
As long as there was no broad social backing (and the evidence does not
point in this direction), a new, phonematic 'bgd or hl/.zm based script sys
tem, which demands a good deal of abstract effort from its users, could
not have 'boomed' suddenly.
Alphabetic writing is not such easy a skill to acquire in a short period of
time-either by a gifted individual or even by a social group accustomed
to writing, if any, in non-alphabetic systems, as often was assumed regard
ing the development of the Northwest Semitic alphabet. Rather, acquir
ing any fluent or even orthographically correct proficiency in writing a
first alphabetic system requires substantial time (Rollston 2008b: 68-69).
Moreover, special calligraphic knowledge, as it was already employed in
the earliest Phoenician inSCriptions of Byblos (Lehmann 2008b) but is
lacking in the 'Proto-Sinaitic' texts, needs a developmental period. This
equally rules out an invention of the alphabet shortly before these inscrip
tions. Hence, one has to conceive a considerable incubation period in
which the 'idea of alphabet' could steadily grow and stabilize as an effec-
2 6 Lemaire (2008: 49) speaks of "priests of local shrines who preserved and developed
the use of this 'Canaanite' alphabetic script, perhaps so as to express a certain specific
religiOUS and cultural tradition." From an ethnographic perspective, cf. also Schulz (1987).
27-30-22-26
HOW MANY LETTERS NEE D S AN ALPHABET?
33
tive and competitive system, before it could achieve currency. "Thus, in

the current state of the documentary evidence, the most credible working
hypothesis would seem to link the origins of the alphabet . . . around the
middle of the period 2000-1300" (Lemaire 2008: 47).
No fast-taking root of some 'brilliant idea' was responsible for the boom
and sudden spread of alphabetic literacy. Rather, we have to look for other
'booming factors', which are equally able to explain an astounding-and
maybe sudden-reduction of the alphabet in its Abgad device.
Shortening the Alphabet 11: Who Did What?
If it was the (Proto-) Phoenicians who boiled down the alphabet to 22
graphemes, and if their way of doing so immediately 'boomed' all over
the Levant, why did they do so? We remember what the wise calligraphy
master Serani said in Rafik Schami's novel: "The Arabic language has only
twenty-nine letters, and the more of them you destroy, the more uncertain
and imprecise the language becomes." Would it not be correct to say, that
the fewer letters a script system has the more uncertain and imprecise the
meaning? Semiticists know about the difficulties in deciphering Phoeni
cian inscriptions because the defective and vowelless grapheme system
doesn't even use supportive vowel letters, i.e., matres lectionis.
The most prominent and traditional explanation seems to be that wide
spread linguistic changes had taken place in that period of time, which
involved the loss of certain sounds. This is described as a typical feature of
the Phoenician language. In grammars and concise descriptions of Phoe
nician, it is generally assumed that the (spoken) Phoenician language
had only 22 phonemes, which implies a full match of the graphemic with
the consonantal phonemic inventory, i.e., that Phoenician had as many
graphemes as it had consonant phonemes. (Harris 1936: 16f; Swiggers
1991: 119f, Friedrich & Rollig & Amadasi 1999: 11; Krahmalkov 2001: 16.19,27
recently again Krebemik 2007: 124, Rainey 2007, MacDonald 2008b ).28 The
27 However, Krahmalkov (2001: 19) notes that in early Phoenician of the Late Bronze
Age the consonantal repertory was larger. Thus he self-contradictorily objects to the com
monly held opinion that the 22-letter Phoinikeia grammata ( ct'OlVlX lc( ypalJ.lJ.c('TC( or XC(OIJ. lc(
ypalJ.lJ.c(Tc(, Herodot Hist. V 58-59) alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians but, rather,
"had been devised in the Late Bronze Age and later" and was "adapted by the Phoeni
dans to the needs of their language which, in the early Iron Age, possessed a repertory of
twenty-two consonantal phonemes" (Krahmalkov 2001: 16) .
2 8 Maybe one of the most pithy precis o f this respect i s indeed made by MacDonald
(2008b), who states that "it was singularly unfortunate that the first widely used linear
34
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
assumption is drawn from the fact that the Phoenician alphabet-which

is claimed to be the oldest standardized linear alphabet in the Eastern
Mediterranean-has only 22 graphemes. And normally there are no fur
ther questions or doubts on that. Most notably, already in 1936 Zellig Har
ris, who was one of the most influential scholars in the twentieth century
regarding Phoenician phonemics (on Harris, see Barsky 2011), stated that
"the complete absence of spelling variations in the Phoenician inscrip
tions as far back as they go would indicate that the alphabet conformed
exactly to the needs of the language." However, Harris clearly saw and
expressed the methodological weakness of the argument, admittedly also
stating in an often overlooked footnote that "this is, of course, merely an
argument from silence." (Harris 1936: 17 n. 21)29
The assumption equally implies that the Hebrews, the Aramaeans, and
the other people of first millennium Levant speaking a non-Phoenician
Northwest Semitic dialect, or language, unheSitatingly and invariably fol
lowed the Phoenician example in the trail of a supposed alphabetic 'boom'
(Sass 2004-05) of the late second millennium BCE to content themselves
with 22 graphemes only. But why should they have done so?
Alan Millard recently again pointed out that, "as ancient people read
aloud, it may be assumed the signs gave sufficient information . . . " (Millard
2007: 85). Texts were recovered through re-oralization, which means that
the message was re-activated only by enunciating again that which was
written down, thus, by reconversion of visible script into audible speech.
Compare for instance the semantic development of the verb qr' 'to shout'
> 'to read out loud' > 'to read'.
If this is true, the most intriguing point seems to be how the reconver
sion process from visible script to audible speech could have worked in
an area, where a variety of presumably different Canaanite dialects with
different phonemic treatments of the interdentals and the laryngeals still
existed. It is widely accepted that the main Canaanite dialects including
alphabet was designed to express Phoenician, which had one of the smallest repertoires of
consonantal phonemes of any Semitic language. Alas, the twenty-two letters of the Phoe
nician alphabet were treated as sacrosanct within the Near East, and the non-Phoenician
Near Eastern languages which came to be written in it were squeezed into this rigid frame,
regardless of the resulting ambiguities."
29 It should be also noted that already Harris made only one page later a possibly uncon
scious admission to a non-congruent phoneme-grapheme-relation in Phoenician writing:
"The spelling in these inscriptions is etymological and the rules of orthography are rigid
and unchanging, hiding all changes in pronunciation." (Harris 1936: 18, italics by R.G.L.).
27-30-22-26 -
HOW
MANY
35
Hebrew, including also the Transjordan fringe, and also the Aramaic vari
eties of the first millennium, despite of their 22-graphemes-only script
system employed more than consonantal 22 phonemes in their speech
at least up to the seventh or to the second century BCE respectively. The
proof was already made by Bnmno 1970, Wevers 1970, Blau 1982, Degen
1969: 32ff, and Garr 1985, though with different methods, and many schol
ars had contributed to this topic in the last decades with further observa
tions and adding more comparative material to subsequently refine the
picture (Sivan & Cochavi-Rainey 1992; Hoch 1994, Steiner 2005). Today, it
is generally accepted that in the first millennium BCE for the vast amount
of Northwest Semitic languages the 22-letter alphabet was deficient from
a phonemiC point of view, or, in other words: the data reveal that at least to
some extend sounds like the interdentals Iql, ItI and It/ had not yet merged
to their neighbouring sounds, and that often also the velar-pharyngal pairs
of 1/J/-I/:lI and Igl-I 'I were still phonemically distinct and retained in
speech at least in the late Bronze and Early Iron Ages-and further on.
It is true that Phoenician orthography remained conservative, rarely
indicating vowels even after routine contact with the different devices to
denote vowels in Greek, or, by use of matres lectionis, in Aramaic and
Hebrew. But what, on the other hand, are the reasons to assume that the
Phoenicians, only some hundred kilometres south from Ugarit with its
rich phoneme and grapheme inventory, should have had a thus remark
ably decreased consonantal phoneme inventory, dropping the interdentals
and other sounds? Claiming that the Phoenician alphabet employed only
22 letters because that number represented the inventory of consonantal
phonemes in their language means alleging that the 22-letter Abgad was
a real phonemic (alphabet', or system, at least for Phoenician. But is this
really true? Since consonants carry the gist of information in Semitic lan
guages, is it really feasible to say that the Abgad, once it lost some of its
graphemes like </J> p, <q>, and <t>, was still purely phonemic? Or isn't that
turning an outcome into its cause?
Granted also that there are no Phoenician texts in a 27-1etter alpha
bet, but only in a 22-letter system: is this sufficient reason to argue that
they introduced the 22-letter short Abgad because they did not have more
sounds in their language, whereas their eastern and southern Aramaic,
Israelite, Judahite, and Moabite (recently Beyer 2010: lO-17) neighbours
continued to articulate discernibly somewhat more than 22 phonemes in
their dialect or language? Moreover, is it really within reason to imagine
that those speakers simply jumped on the bandwagon of such mumbling
,
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
22-sounds-only-writing Phoenicians?30 From a methodological point of

view there seems to be a considerable circular reasoning in these assump
tions: it jumps too hastily to an explication, which anticipates the out
come (Phoenician script bequeaths only 22 graphemes) to be the cause
(Phoenician speech had only 22 consonantal phonemes).
Even those who freely admit that there is inevitable material dem
onstrating that by no means was the early Phoenician language of the
Levant a consonant-poor language and the 22-letter short Abgad simply
displayed its actual phonemic state, do not try to escape the traditional
view that the Phoenicians were responsible for the truncation of a for
merly longer alphabet. Rather, one tries to postulate the short alphabet as
the reflex of an actual "innovating speech of the royal elite", thus introduc
ing a 'short speech' as a kind of sociolect that finally "would also be used
for the speech of the common citizens" (Hoch 1994: 415). However, this is
a way to subsequently reduce the derivation group of the short Abgad by
and by into nothing: which royal elite where?
Anyhow, a last retreat from which to argue the point of a 22-letter one
to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation again and again still seems to be
Phoenician, which is held responsible for the spread of the short Abgad
even over an area where languages with more than only 22 phonemes
still were spoken. Nevertheless, these languages continued for quite some
time, possibly for the duration of their existence, to write and spell in
accordance with a presumed phoneme-based Phoenician-hence for
themselves deficient-orthography.
Shortened Phoneme Invento ry: How Many Phonemes?
If it is true that Phoenician and the Phoenicians were responSible for
the spread of the Short Abgad system (and the epigraphic evidence from
Byblos for instance still points in that direction), there is another diffi
culty that has come to the attention of scholars in the last decades: is it
30 Accordingly, Rainey (2007: 69) from an entirely different approach and with a view
to 'redefine' Hebrew as a Transjordanian language simply claiming that "the speakers of
Hebrew did not speak the same dialect as those from whom they borrowed the alphabet",
recently states that these borrowed the Canaanite ( Phoenician) alphabet because "the
rustic clans from the steppe lands were so impressed by that superior cultural feature that
[ . . . ] they adopted the writing medium of the highly cultured people of the coastal areas."
Rainey correctly points out the question of an obviously deficient graphemic system for
these languages. However, his explanation seems to be as romanticized as that of Sass.
=
27-30-22-26 - HOW MANY LETTERS
NEEDS AN ALPHABET?
37
still possible to argue that Phoenician had 22 phonemes solely because

the 'Phoenician' alphabet had only 22 graphemes? This became one of the
key assumptions for the reconstruction of Canaanite. However, the
underlying syllogism is not compelling, and by no means is it mandatory
or self-evident that early Phoenician should have had 22 consonant pho- .
nemes only.
Without any claim to be comprehensive, let us have a look on some
of the relevant data, mainly from Egyptian sources. The transcriptions of
Semitic words in Egyptian writing of the New Kingdom and the Third
Intermediate Period as discussed by Hoch 1994
probably tell us more about old Phoenician and Hebrew than current hypo
thetical reconstructions of these languages can tell us about the origin of
the words here studied. The generally accepted reconstructions rest on a
very bold assumption-that the short Semitic alphabet contained a graph
eme corresponding to each phoneme. It will be suggested that the assump
tion that the bulk of Semitic words are from older dialects of Phoenician
and Hebrew is more likely than the assumption upon which Phoenician is
reconstructed. The conclusion to be drawn is that our current reconstruc
tion should be reconsidered. (Hoch 1994: 12)31
From Hoch's data it follows that "the most reasonable conclusion seems
to be that most of the Canaanite dialects had a fairly extensive phonemic
inventory and used a short alphabet, with polyvalence of several graph
emes". His data confirm the polyvalence of certain short Abgad letters in
the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages as employed by Virtually all Canaan
ite dialects, and even so that "Phoenician may have also been more con
servative in its phonemic inventory than universally believed" ( Hoch 1994:
416-417 ).32
However, because the source language of Semitic words in Egyptian
writing as discussed by Hoch 1994 remains unsure in many cases, only the
few well-defined unequivocal Phoenician examples are listed here.33 Thus,
from a methodological point of view, two conditions are to be applied
3 1 Compare also, towards the end of Hoch's book: "By far the most important factor that
emerges from the Egyptian evidence is the size of the phonemic inventory, which numbers
as high as 27-29 phonemes, even in the more recent material. This is far more than usu
ally believed to be present in the contemporary Canaanite dialects. Although it cannot be
demonstrated that any single dialect contained the full inventory, it would seem likely that
dialects with mergers were in the minority as source languages" (Hoch 1994: 413).
3 2 Cp. also Krahmalkov (2001: 19), however, see infra note 27.
33 More examples, though not unequivocally classifiable as proper Phoenician, are
found in Helck (1971: 507-527); Sivan & Cochavi-Rainey (1992); Schneider (1992); and Hoch
(1994) passim.
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
here to Hoch's material, which causes a substantial restraint of evidence:

a) the Semitic foreign word must comprise diagnostic consonants to
prove a polyvalence of the Short Abgad at all, and b) the Semitic foreign
word must be identifiable as unequivocally Phoenician by external evi
dence, thus being a Phoenician toponym or anthroponym, or by the shift
of short accented *Ial > 101.34 Anyhow, even if every word which is not
well-defined Phoenician by these conditions is ruled out, there are still
enough clear-cut arguments left over:
In the Egyptian story of Wenamun (1,29; 3,7 and 1,16-17; Schip
per 2005: 177), the name of the Phoenician-Byblian ruler Zakarba cl, or
Zakurba cl, is written T-k-r-b- l representing the voiced interdental pho
neme Idl, clearly distinguishing it from Izl (Schneider 1992: 256f; Hoch
1994: 372-373, 400 n. 5, 417). This retention of Idl in the twelfth or eleventh
century gives witness that the Phoenicians still retained a phonemic dif
ference between Idl and Izl at a time when the short Abgad already was
in use.35 Nevertheless, on at least three almost contemporary or slightly
later Phoenician arrowheads36 the orthography of this name has <z>, which
was the only possible orthography in a Canaanite-based 22-letter Abgad
system, as is also displayed in somewhat later cognate Hebrew names
like i1;lT Zakaryii, or i1;lT Zaka ryiihu, and the Aramaic hypocoristicon
':l! Zakkiir. Because the root *dkr ('to remember') not only in Phoeni
cian, but also in some earlier Aramaic texts is written zkr (in contrast to
later Aramaic dkr), it is most probable that at least until the early first mil
lennium even in Phoenician Canaanite the overall phonemic polyvalence
of the short Abgad <z>-letter was retained.37
Also the original interdental * ItI seems to have been still phonemically
different from 1$1, as Egyptian writings of the roots 'n; (*'rt) 'to terrify', r$
( < *rt, Hebrew 1" ', 'to go swiftly), and the noun $m' *tm', Hebrew N O,
'thirst') suggest (Hoch 1994: 405), though we cannot be sure whether the
source language of these words was Phoenician. However, again there is
at least one clear example: The name of the Phoenician city Tyre (Hebrew
'-
34 The Canaanite shift, however, is to handle with care because it could be diagnostic
to Canaanite in general, but seems to be ruled out here anyway because of the vowelless
Egyptian script.
35 Anyhow it should be mentioned that some object to such an optimistic differentiation
between the Egyptian writing of Semitic < rj> and <Z>, Quack: ZDMG 146 (1996) 507-514.
36 See Starcky (1982: 180) and Deutsch & Heltzer (1995: 24-26).
3 7 Schneider (1992: 257) additionally mentions the name t-k-r-m-w of a person stemming
from Gaza which, of course, cannot be collected as Phoenician proper.
27-30-22-26 -
HOW MANY LETTERS NEEDS AN ALP HABET?
39
1 $or) is given in Wenamun l)-r (1,28; 3,6; Schipper 2005: 178), still pho
nemically representing its original and etymological sound ItI as in tr.38
Further, owing to the Phoenician literary ambience of its records in
the story of Wenamun, it is obvious that also the phonemic IIJI - I/;I oppo
sition was maintained in Phoenician. There are at least two examples:

ma=sa=IJi (Wenamun 1,9-10; Hoch 1994: 152, Schipper 2005: 45-46) for
Phoenician *maSiIJa 'amphora', compare Hebrew ;'1)o/Q 'anointing', and
IJ=b =-r (Wenamun 2,1 and 1,X+24; Sivan & Cochavi-Rainey 1992: 12f; Hoch
1994: 240; Schipper 2005: 65.187.189) for Phoenician *IJabira 'business,
trading partner, colleague', compare Hebrew 1;tt:) , 1;1. 1) 'companion' and
1 -i- TJ 'guildsman'.
Thus, from this sparse evidence alone there is sufficient reason to con
clude that in the first millennium BCE Phoenician, like Hebrew, had more
than 22 different consonants and at least two more semantically sensible
phonemes ( l1J1 and lu/), if not more, even in later times: A close analy
sis of the Persian period Yahawmilk inscription from Byblos, for instance,
shows that rules of a written 'Space Syntax', which is a background radia
tion of oral performance, consistently and on three occasions served to
'save' the minimal pair ptIJ "to engrave" and pt/; "to open", avoiding a
consonant sandhi where I IJI and I/;I clashed on word boundaries in the
construct-genitive relation ptIJ /;r$ "golden engraving" (not: "golden door",
Lehmann 2oo5b: 88-90).39 The semantically distinct phonemic values
IIJI and I/;I for the one only common grapheme </;> were still in use.
And maybe there were more. Moreover, it is not very plausible to assume
that only 200 km south of Ugarit and either coeval with or only 200 years
after the long Abgad, in Phoenician a sound system simply and almost
38 Because of the "key fact" that the Egyptians generally perceived a difference between
the Canaanite reflexes of original * W and * /s/ (Hoch 1994: 404), in principle also this
could be a source to prove that Phoenician had more phonemes than only the 22 that are
presented by the short Abjad. Unfortunately, as far as I can see there is no well-defined,
unequivocal Phoenician example for that. However, there is the often refuted (cp. Garr
1985: 28) note of Piutarch that the Phoenician word for "bull" was 6wp instead of expected
(J'wp, which could reflect the still interdental pronunciation tor: LWP yap Ol <PO[VlXE TIjv ouv
XctAOU(J'l ( Vita SuLLae xvii).
3 9 The known Phoenician notion to produce graphemic sandhi-such as in mlqrt, the
deity "Milqart", from mlk-qrt "King-of-the-city" (Friedrich-Rollig-Amadasi 1999: 48.56), and
more (Schmitz 2011)-presumably could be one scholarly reason to insist in assuming
that already in the late second millennium Phoenician had an intelligibly reduced pho
nemic inventory of 22 consonantal sounds, thus also to afford 22 graphemic units only in
the linear alphabet. However, also vice versa it is conceivable that a principle of scriptio
franca (vide infra), once being established, abets to increased productivity of spoken and
written sandhis.
40
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
immediately shrinked down to only 22 consonants, whereas Ancient

Hebrew, the next contiguous language,40 retained the phonemic opposi
tion of Ib l versus l/:ll and Igl versus / ,1 until well into the first millen
nium, and probably up to the second century BCE, as can be proven by
the Septuagint and other transliterations for instance (Wevers 1970, Blau
2010: 75-76.86, Steiner 2005).41 Similarly the Aramaic languages of the first
millennium retained older, not any longer graphemically represented
phonemes such as voiced interdental I dJ, and also an uncertainty in the
representation of the emphatic voiced interdental * If/I by either older < q >
or younger < ' > until well into the first millennium (Folmer 1995, passim).
Shortening the Alphabet Ill: Why ? And What Was It Good For?
How than is it any longer possible to explain the shortening of a long,
almost phonemically congruent script system (the long Abgad) into a defi
cient, polyvalent script system (the short Abgad)?
To begin with, I would like to emphasize three main aspects again
regarding the short Abgad:
- The Ugaritic short alphabet is attested mainly late (thirteenth century
BCE) and not only at Ugarit, but also scattered around the Levant and
Cyprus. Its writing direction is not (yet) fixed.
- The Greek alphabet has consistently not a Single feature that could be
accounted to the long Alphabet tradition, neither to Ugaritic cuneiform
nor to any Canaanite long-linear alphabet, and neither to the Hala/:lama
series nor to an assumed linear long-Abgad device.
- The Greek alphabet, however, is obviously a dependant, if not offspring,
of the 'Phoenician-style' linear short Abgad series. This is clear both
by the way of its various 'inner' modifications and by its enhancement
only at the end, i.e., after <t> (Wachter 1996).
40
T o be sure, here the term 'Hebrew language' i s used for convenience only, bearing in
mind a South Canaanite dialect cluster of the late second and early first millennium BCE
which eventually evolved to what only later and tentatively could be labelled as 'Hebrew'
language (Ullendorff 1977, Knauf 1990, Lehmann 2008a: 6-16).
41 Similarly even Steiner (ZOOS: 261), who opts for Phoenician influence being respon
sible of the later Hebrew merger of Ib./ and Ib.!, wonders about "the glacial pace of the
diffusion, with the merger taking more than a millennium to reach Jerusalem" If, however,
the conjecture of this paper is correct that there was not an early phonemic merger of
these sounds in Phoenician at all, there is nothing to be worried about.
NEEDS AN ALPHABET?
41
Thus, the 'Phoenician-style' short Abgad alphabet seems to be most prob

ably developed in the course of the partial 'globalisation' of the Eastern
Mediterranean by the Sea Trade in the late second millennium, Le., in
the thirteenth century BCE ( Artzy 1997, 1998, Brody 1998, Haider 19881989, Negbi 1992, Sherratt 1993, 1998, Schipper 2005: 113-138, and Monroe
2009 ) . This becomes even clearer if considered the trade connections as
described in the (to be sure, later) trade list of Ez 27, esp. 12-24 (Saur
2008: 107-225 ) . The 'Phoenician'-type short Abgad system became what
one may label a scriptio franca of the Eastern Mediterranean.
This was a process similar to texts written in the Phoenician language
being a regional standard lingua franca even in regions that presumably
have not been colonized by Phoenicians, such as Karatepe in Anatolia,
Hassan-Beyli, Cinekoy and Sam'al (Greenfield 2001: 179, Krebernik 2007:
118, Lemaire 2008: 52 ) . Note that my use of scriptio franca refers only to
the Phoenician alphabetic writing system, not necessarily to the Phoeni
cian language or any other dialect in the Canaanite group. Nevertheless,
the Phoenician-Levantine dialect continuum gave birth to, and provided
a scriptio franca.
The shorter and less sophisticated a script sign inventory is, the easier
it adapts to other language systems or dialects respectively. In assigning
phonemic values to their graphemic token we must be aware of regional
differences, and even very close and spatially limited regional differences.
Not every single difference in pronunciation is clearly discernible, but
undoubtedly these variations were there. The classic and famous Bibli
cal "Shibboleth" incident of Judges 12:16, where the Ephraimites did not
conform to the expected pronunciation of the word sibb 6lt, rather saying
sibb 6lt or the like (which is not necessary to discuss here in detail),42 is
only the most prominent tip of the iceberg.
Moreover, there is the 'summer fruit/end' pun in Amos 8:2, which plays
with the Hebrew words qayi$ 'summer (grain/fruit), (written 'P"P q ayi$)
and q e$ 'end' (written 'PP qe$ ) :
See, for instance, J. Marquart, 1888. S ibbolet ephraimitisch S ibbolet? ZA W 8: lSl

lSS; P. Swiggers, 1981. The Word Sibbolet in Jud XII.6, jSS 26: 20S-207; E.A. Speiser, 1942.
The Shibbolet Incident (Judges 12,6), BASOR 8S: 10-13; Gary A. Rendsburg, 1988. More on
Hebrew sibbolet,jSS 33: 2SS-2S8; Andre Lemaire, 1985. L'incident du sibbolet (Jg 12.6). Per
spective historique. In Melanges M. Defear, (AOAT 21S), pp. 27S-281, Neukirchen; Ronald
Hendel, 1996. Sibilants and sibbolet (Judges 12:6). BASOR 301: 69-7S; J.A. Emerton, 1985.
Some Comments on the Shibbolet Incident (Judges Xn.6). In Melanges M. Delear, (AOAT
21S), pp. lS0-lS7, Neukirchen; and others. For the sibilant distinction and polyphony of the
Hebrew iV-sign generally, see, most recently, Blau (2010: 73-7S).
42
42
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
ma- 'atta rij ' 'amos
wa' omar k3Lub-qayi
wa'y'yomr YHWH 'elay
ba haq-qe$ 'l- 'ammiyisra ' eL
Amos, what seest thou?
And I said: a basket of summerfruit.
Then the Lord said unto me,
The end is come to my people Israel
In the northern Hebrew dialect full monophthongization seems to have

taken place, which blurs the difference between f"i' qayi$ and fi' qe$
anyway, thus leading to fi' qe$ in both words.43 Insofar Blau 2010 : 8 is
right when he states that "the pun would have been more powerful in
the speech of the population of the Northern Kingdom, whom Amos was
addressing, if Amos pronounced qayi$ as qe$." However, this could not
have been a sufficient reason alone to make the pun work, because in
this case his addressees would have understood the last line as summer
has come to my people Israel-which is not thus unexpected at all and
normally happens every year. Therefore there must have been a further
and more stable pronunciation difference between fi' ('summer') and fi'
('end') beyond writing alone to make the pun play properly any effect.
C ertainly this was the difference between the emphatic voiceless fricative
dental in fi' /qe$/ 'end' and an assumed emphatic voiced fricative dental
in fi' or f"i' /qe$/ 'summer', as exemplified in written Ugaritic q$ 'sum
mer' for instance.
Also, a third demonstrative example, though Aramaic, should be given
from the Old Testament. It is the single dispersed Aramaic verse of Jer
emiah 10 :11:
'IELahayya di s3ma,Y.Ya w3- 'arqa la 'abadu
yebadu me'ar'a umin t3/:lot s3ma,Y.Ya 'ell
The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth,
these shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens
Besides the phenomenon of a chiastic word play, it is conspicuous that

the same word for 'earth' is written differently in the first and in the
43 For instance line 7 of the tenth-century BeE Gezer calendar inscription, where the
"month of summerfruit" is written yrlJ-q$, or the word "wine" in the (northern) 'Israelite'
Samaria Ostraka and R. ez-Zetun, where it is written l' /yen/ in contrast to instances in
(southern) 'Judahite' inscriptions (Arad, Lachish, el Qom), which are constantly written r
/yayn/ (even in the construct state!) in accordance with Biblical Hebrew orthography.
27-30-22-26
43
second stichos, i.e., within an interval of few words only: the first instance
is written 'arqa (in consonants only: 'rq ' ) , while the second is written ' ar'a
Cr"). Similar examples are found in some Achaemenid imperial Aramaic
papyri of the same period, i.e., the fifth/sixth century BCE.44 This ortho
graphic interchange of the same word in one single verse could only be
tolerated because in that very time period both writings were perceivable
as the same word, i.e., 'earth', which in older Aramaic most regularly is
written with the letter < q >, and in later Aramaic with the letter < ' >. This
was possible because of the etymology of the word, which is old /' an/i,
the phoneme Idi which the Levantine Abgad dropped when it became
reduced to 22 graphemes (a similar example is the inner-Hebrew dialect
variant m/:z q "to smite" adjacent to standard Hebrew-Canaanite m/:z$ in the
same verse Judges 5:26). However, still in the middle of the first millen
nium BCE there was such broad a range of pronunciation for this sound
possible that in a transitional stage of one or two centuries it could be
rendered by the grapheme <q> or < ' > of the 22-letter Abgad respectively
without causing serious problems for the meaning of the word and even
the understanding of an utterance. Despite the different orthography, on
the other hand, the pronunciation could not have been all too seriously
different, rather at least similar.
The Canaanite Semitic languages or dialects of the late second millen
nium Levant were by no means incompatible. Rather they form a dialect
continuum (which excludes Aramaic, to be sure) that reached from the
Northern Syrian coast down to the South Palestinian seashores (maybe
excluding some Philistine areas, admittedly), and from Galilee through
out the Jordan valley up to the Golan and Basan heights in the east (Garr
1985).45 Considering this, and given the need of a script standard for
supra-regional trade affairs, one should try to imagine what would have
happened if every shift of articulation in regional speech were to be rep
resented in a written document using a 27-or-2g-consonant system such
as the Ugaritic long Abgad or the Sabaic Hala/:zama device? The Levantine
Northwest Semitic languages display such an enormous number of lexical
isoglosses, which all too often differ from a graphemic point of view only
44 For instance in Aramaic documents from Egypt, TAE B2.2:5.12.15 (464 BCE) 'rq', in the
same document only one line later (B2.2:16) 'r". In the eastern periphery the older spelling
with <q> did survive until the third century BCE in the Aramaic Asoka inscriptions from
Kandahar, and others (Folmer 1995: 63-70).
4 5 Not to imply that this book is exempt from methodological criticism.
44
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
(Halayka 2008 ) , that the major requirement was not for a supra-regional
standard language.
Rather, it deserved a graphemic system that was able to blur the articu
lation and pronunciation differences for the purpose of East-Mediterra
nean and Levantine mercantile affairs, a scriptio franca.
Once again to recall Alan Millard ( 2007: 85 ) : "as ancient people read
aloud, it may be assumed the signs gave sufficient information . . . ".
Because texts were recovered through oralization, i.e., by reconversio n of
visible script into audible speech, at first glance it seems to be plaUSible
that aside from any administrative centre or official use at a royal court
or scribal school using a high literate standard, alphabetic writing in the
Levant can only mean this: The representation of the oral language by
means of graphic characters, i.e., the graphic representation of any oral
autochthonous language. But whoever coined an alphabet, or shrank an
inherited one, was necessarily limited by his own perception of sounds
or, to say more, he was restricted by his way to interpret slightly differ
ent sounds as representing the same phonemic notion in principle, which
means to hear, or to perceive, or to interpret the sound /1/ as even in some
cases representing also /s/ (or /t/, vice versa) , the sound /d/ as /z /, the
sound /v/ as //:t/, and so on, melting different areal dialectal pronunciation
varieties into one.
However, on the other hand, what would have happened if every sailor
or tradesman in the eastern Mediterranean sea trade made his records
by tracking down his own regional Canaanite-Semitic tongue, or articula
tion, in that rich consonantal graphemic system (the Long Abgad), which
graphically differentiates between sound like /t/, /1/, and / s/, or /v/ and
//:t/, or between /'/ and /[j/, between /d/, /d/, and /z/, and so on? The basic
question was risen already for instance by Childe 1942: 181.182:
. . . the merchant would have to be his own bookkeeper. This was the social
background of the Phoenician script. [ . . . ] Twenty-two signs were chosen to
denote simple consonants-vowels were not written. [ . . . ] It was in fact an
international body of merchants who sanctioned by use the new conven
tions; it was their activity that diffused and popularized the system in the
Iron Age.
Notwithstanding that Childe did not yet reflect on the question of the dif
ference between long and short alphabetic traditions, but rather adhered
to the position that shortening the Abgad has had its reason in a reduced
phonemic inventory of the Phoenician language, he made a good pOint:
i.e., to emphasize "the mercantile applications of writing that were needed
27-30-22-26
45
to excel in long-distance trade" (Monroe 2009: 144).46 To conclude in one

sentence: a standard script system was required for use in supra-regional
or quasi-international, i.e., eastern Mediterranean trade affairs, but, to be
sure, not that much a regional standard languageY
And what about Aramaic, which does not belong to the Canaanite dia
lect continuum? Aramaic also took over the 22-letter Abgad system, but
can by no means simply be subsumed under that group of languages that
formed the economic linguistic standard of the Eastern Mediterranean
sea trade-neither by linguistic reasons, nor from a geographical point
of view. Hence it is notable that linear alphabetic written Aramaic, at
its earliest attested level, ran remarkably close together with Phoenician
even there where Phoenician or any contiguous Canaanite dialect was
not the vernacular. In a similar way as Phoenician seems to have been a
second-level regional standard next to Luwian in Anatolian Karatepe and
the kingdom of Que (Lemaire 2008: 52), Phoenician was also next to Ara
maic in Zincirli (ancient Sam'al), where a supposedly Luwian ruler named
Kulamu mainly used Phoenician for his official declamations. But already
his successors took over their vernacular Aramaic language into the Phoe
nician script system, subsequently forming their own Aramaic script stan
dard on the basis of the 22-letter-Abgad. Thus, the starting point of the use
of the 22-Abgad system by Aramaic local rulers was by clear Phoenician
influence, maybe to engarland themselves with an international looking,
global-player-like flair.
Conclusion
As a scriptio franca, the 'Phoenician' -style 22-Abgad of the late second
millennium became the historical bottleneck of alphabetic development.
This happened most probably by means of mercantile requirements of
the Levantine sea trade, which dominated international affairs of the East
ern Mediterranean for a while, at least as far as the global players of traffic
and trade were concerned. Some hundred years later coming out of this
46 To be sure, Monroe does not refer to Childe here explicitly. He rather draws a com
parison to mercantile use of literacy in mediaeval Italy.
47 Maybe within here lies the main difference to Young (1993: 4-26) who basically
focuses on Phoenician as a prestige language. However, see Young (1993: 25 ) : "The pos
sibility must be borne in mind that our written sources may reveal much more of local
scribal practice than of genuine grass-roots differences in the spoken language."
REINHARD G. LEHMANN
bottleneck again, the Phoenician short Abgad already had made the game
and would remain an international prestige script of the Levant for some
time (Naveh 1987; Young 1993: 4-26; Rollston 2008b: 72, 78, 89), before the
alphabet( s) evolved into different 'national' script systems. These could
not track back any longer to the former functionally rich 27-phoneme
inventory, though more and different phonemes might have been needed
to properly display the vernacular. Rather, because of that true 'bottle
neck effect', those 'national' scripts had gradually to evolve their own
way to graphemically display the effects of interdental pronunciation of
* Idl either by <z> in Hebrew or <d> in Aramaic for instance,48 and also to
introduce their own tokens for vowels, vowel-length, and supra-segmental
divisions in Ancient and Classical Hebrew, Aramaic, and other Semitic
languages, as well as in Greek. For these different 'national' scripts then,
which generally can be distinguished as the scripts of politically and / or
culturally defined population groups, it was not any longer in the trade
where the script was spread, but through the courts or political centres.49
This hypothesis hopes to explain:
The starting point of the global success story of the 22-letter-Abjad.
The multilingual power or ability of the 22-letter-Abgad (Northwest
Semitic and beyond, and early Greek)
The performance of the 22-letter-Abgad even in North Semitic languages
that eVidently had a richer phoneme inventory than the graphemes of
the 22-letter-Abgad (Aramaic, Hebrew, and also Phoenician)
The launch of matres lectionis only in the realm of the 22-letter-Abgad,
which re-enhance a partially deficient consonantal phonemic system,
in contrast to the South Arabic Hala/:zama series (MacDonald 2008b),
which retains a more rich consonantal inventory of 29 phonemes to
endure lexemic differences.
4 8 More examples are given in Rollston (2008b: 65) for instance, and in many introduc
tions into Northwest Semitic languages. For Aramaic, note that Old NW Semitic * ItI was
represented by <s> in Old Aramaic, sometimes by <S>, and later in Imperial Aramaic by <t>,
proving also that the phonemic variation of the interdentals was active in speech at least
in the first half of the first millennium BCE.
4 9 This sentence picks up van der Kooij (1986: 250-251), but with important modifica
tions. The original sentence quotes: "Moreover, the regions can generally be distinguished
as politically and often culturally defined population groups. This points to a politically
centralised teaching of writing at one or more interrelated royal courts." (p. 250), and: "To
sum up, the tentative conclusion is that the wide nib ink writing was the one taught almost
exclusively, and that it was not in the trade, nor in the army, nor in the religious institu
tions that the script was spread, but through the courts or political centres." (p. 251).
NEED S AN ALPHABET?
47
The survival of the Hala/:tama series in South Semitic only, which was
not in the sphere of influence of the Levantine Sea Trade.
The early independent adaptation and subsequent enhancement of
the 22 letter Abgad in the Aegean and further west by mercantile
requirements.
-
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The Idea of Writing

Writing Across Borders

Alex de Voogt and Joachim Friedrich Quack

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ZEIST, THE NETHERLANDS

Invention and Borrowing in the Development and Dispersal of

27- 30- 22 - 26 - How Many Letters Needs an Alphabet? The Case

Nubian Graffiti Messages and the History of Writing in the

About "Short" Names of Letters

Han'gill Reform Movement in the Twentieth Century: Roman

The Character of the Indian Kharothl Script and the "Sanskrit

Symmetry and Asymmetry, Chinese Writing in Japan: The Case

Writing Semitic with Cuneiform Script. The Interaction of

..... . ... ......... . .. . .... . . . .. .......... ... . ... .... . . . ................ .

Old Wine in New Wineskins? How to Write Classical Egyptian

.. ... ..... . .......... ... ...... ....... ... . .

............. ....... ..... ... ...... .. .. . ...... . .... . ......

HOW MANY LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

Introduction and General Considerations

LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHAB ET?

18 letters, because some similar letters have merged graphically, such as

which eventually made the game in alphabet history, provided sufficient

HOW MANY LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

HOW MANY LETTE RS NEE D S AN ALPHABET?

in Syria-Palestine and Cyprus/3 Some of them might also have 24 letters,

MANY LETTERS NEE D S AN ALPHABET?

'- b -g -d-h -m-l).-z-t-y-k-l-[ ]-n -s -p- '-$-q -q -s- t

LETTERS NEE D S AN ALP HABET?

Cuneiform (wedge) long alphabet with expanded inventory (30):

LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

ing to an earlier objection to Gelb by Swiggers 1984, who differentiated

acceptance in many publications, it also has its awkwardness. In his quest

HOW MANY LETTE RS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

an improvement of a former system, which then might be abandoned.

Wenn behauptet wird, die Vokalisierung eines konsonantischen Alphabets

As a set of letters, an alphabet is not the mirror of what should be there in

LETTE RS NEED S AN ALP HABET?

Anyway, the quest for the arrangement of letters is by no means irrel

For comparison, we arrange the South Arabic according to the (Ugaritic)

South Arabic / Sabaic ( arranged in Abgad-mode)

LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

to various alterations, modifications, and enhancements, but finally was

LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

To be sure, there is no clear-cut evidence that the Phoenicians invented

However, by no means every 'brilliant invention' takes root as fast as Sass

HOW MANY LETTERS NEE D S AN ALPHABET?

tive and competitive system, before it could achieve currency. "Thus, in

assumption is drawn from the fact that the Phoenician alphabet-which

LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

22-sounds-only-writing Phoenicians?30 From a methodological point of

27-30-22-26 - HOW MANY LETTERS

still possible to argue that Phoenician had 22 phonemes solely because

here to Hoch's material, which causes a substantial restraint of evidence:

HOW MANY LETTERS NEEDS AN ALP HABET?

sition was maintained in Phoenician. There are at least two examples:

immediately shrinked down to only 22 consonants, whereas Ancient

27-30-22-26 - HOW MANY LETTERS

Thus, the 'Phoenician-style' short Abgad alphabet seems to be most prob

See, for instance, J. Marquart, 1888. S ibbolet ephraimitisch S ibbolet? ZA W 8: lSl

In the northern Hebrew dialect full monophthongization seems to have

Besides the phenomenon of a chiastic word play, it is conspicuous that

HOW MANY LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

HOW MANY LETTERS NEEDS AN ALPHABET?

to excel in long-distance trade" (Monroe 2009: 144).46 To conclude in one