A Note on Alphabetic Origins

Abstract

The discovery of the Ugaritic ABC in November, 1949, has touched off a discussion that promises to continue for a long time.1 It introduces the first substantial break in a body of evidence which had remained basic since the composition of the acrostic passages of the Old Testament and the taking over of the Phoenician 2 alphabet by the Greeks. To be sure, the letter-sequence of the traditional Phoenician alphabet now proves to go gack to the fourteenth century B. C. at the latest. It follows that, once established, the order of the alphabet became normative for such otherwise divergent systems as the Ugaritic, the Phoenician, and the Greek. But the new find serves also to place in a sharper focus the differences between the underlying phonemic equipment of Ugaritic and Phoenician respectively. At the same time, however, a number of new problems have been brought to the fore. The Ugaritic script contains symbols for the same 22 phonemes that are represented in the Phoenician alphabet, and in both systems the order of these symbols is the same. Ugaritic differs, however, in that it operates with eight additional characters. Three of these are betrayed as local Ugaritic peculiarities 3 on two counts: internally, by departing from typical Semitic requirements; and externally, by being placed after Tan obvious addition to the long-familiar list '(A) to T.4 But the other five additional symbols break up the traditional sequence, no two of them being grouped together. The following transliteration gives the order of the new ABC while bringing out at the same time the phonetic values and the respective places of the additional Ugaritic characters: ABG DHWZH? YK LM N S PSQR T T