Talk:Proto-Canaanite alphabet

Sources

need to make clear that decipherment is in progress, see

• https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2005-February/017312.html
• https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2005-February/017488.html

One of these links is broken, and the other connects to some juvenile diatribe. Perhaps https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2005-February/017858.html will work?

hm, I assure you these links were working when I posted them. It appears that message numbers are constantly reassigned, on that server? dab (ᛏ) 11:57, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Image sources:

• http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/information/wadi_el_hol/inscr1.jpg
• http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/information/wadi_el_hol/inscr1_draw.jpg
• http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/information/wadi_el_hol/

dab (ᛏ) 09:42, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure it the Wadi el-Hol alphabet should be on a different article than the Proto-Sinaitic one: PS was so far the hypothetical direct ancestor of Phoenician/Arabic, with names reconstructed for these. The Wadi el-Hol one may predate that hypothetical alphabet, with other names, reconstructed from the hieroglyphs it is based on. dab (ᛏ) 09:48, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

three problems

I have three problems with this article:

• Why are etymologies given for the letters of the alphabet, with the claim that the names are translations from the Egyptian? This is speculation, with little supporting evidence. If it were true, you'd think the proto-Sinaitic script wouldn't been decyphered by now! Not to say it isn't true, but if convincing evidence has been found in the last couple years, it would be nice to see it here.

• It is also doubtful that the Northern Semitic alphabetic order is original. The Southern Semitic order may be just as old. Ugaritic had both orders, and both Southern Semitic and Egyptian both started with H. (It's not known if Egyptian had a fixed alphabetic order, but dictionaries started with H for ibis, the totemic animal of Thoth, god of writing.)

• The Ugaritic abjad is not derived from Cuneiform with a proto-Sinaitic "influence", any more than Hangul is derived from Chinese with a Phagspa influence. The medium of stylus on clay forced similarities of form, and there was almost certainly a stylistic influence (just as in the case of the influence of Chinese on Hangul, both written with brush on paper), but the shapes of the Semitic abjad is clearly visible in the arrangement of the Ugaritic wedges. That is, Ugaritic is simply the Semitic abjad written on clay.

—kwami 07:28, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

all points granted. This is hacked together from online sources, it would be great if you could add more details and references. dab (ᛏ) 08:00, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps I will - but I don't have my sources with me right now, and wouldn't want to try this from memory! kwami

note, there are images of the individual glyphs on commons already, c.f. de:Protosemitisches Alphabet. dab (ᛏ) 06:43, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Proto-Canaanite and Proto-Sinaitic are two different things (a reconstruction on the one hand, and an undeciphered script on the other). I created a Middle Bronze Age alphabets article for Proto-Sinaitic/Wadi el-Hol, and removed them from this article. --kwami 12:04, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to remove the letters. According to this month's article in BAR, Proto-Sinaitic was pictographic, but the official Canaanite scripts derived from it were not. Since Proto-Canaanite is just Phoenician prior to 1050 BCE, we would not expect it to be pictographic; the letters in this article would appear to be nothing more than expectations of what the ancestral script looked like, and that ancestral script was actually proto-Sinaitic. kwami (talk) 22:47, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Relation to Phonecian

I thought the relation to the Phonecian alphabet was uncertain.Cameron Nedland 02:37, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

images

new imges are now availble at commons.

Proto-Caananite

yad is properly hand, not arm kaf is properly palm of hand (or sole of foot, not relevant in this case) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Evan Siegel (talk • contribs) 17:38, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Image:Proto-Canaanite_alphabet_reconstructed_23_glyphs.png

I have some problems with that image: First, there is evidence for early Semitic alphabets with 22 (Phoenician), 27 (Ugaritic before addition of extras), 29 (South Arabian), and 30 (Ugaritic) letters, but there's no evidence for any early Semitic alphabet with 23 letters (as far as I'm aware). Second, the font used in that image seems to be associated with a group which makes broad sweeping claims (unsupported by any scholarly consensus) about a so-called "Proto-Semitic Alphabet" (a complete misnomer, by the way). It's also a highly speculative and hypothetical reconstruction of the shapes and values of the letters, since it seems to be based on Proto-Sinaitic, but actually little of proto-Sinaitic is securely understood beyond לבעלת ... -- AnonMoos (talk) 14:14, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I use CBMIBM alias. Wikinger is abandoned. I edited article to approve traditional 22 letter alphabet. CBMIBM (talk) 11:46, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I incorporated the table from Commons. Please edit/revert if it needs correction. — kwami (talk) 19:33, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

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By the way, Wikinger, I didn't request that the image be deleted, and assuming that you made the image directly from a font, I don't see how it can really be a copyright violation -- since shapes of characters in a font intended to be read as text (as opposed to purely decorative or ornamental "dingbats") cannot generally be copyrighted under U.S. law. AnonMoos (talk) 04:26, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Please call me CBMIBM, but never Wikinger - I abandoned Wikinger because it reminds me of nazi Wiking Jugend, and "Der Wikinger" nazi newspaper what I discovered recently here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiking-Jugend , thus please even delete Wikinger account to purge all nazi reminescents. CBMIBM (talk) 09:14, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

It's actually just the German spelling of "Viking", and the Nazi stuff was mainly dark-haired Bavarians and Austrians fantasizing that they were blond-haired Scandinavians... Since you seem to use a variety of shifting aliases, but I first encountered you under the name Wikinger, and have had the most interaction with you under the name Wikinger, it will be hard for me to address you as anything but "Wikinger". AnonMoos (talk) 12:48, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

But please at least try. CBMIBM is my final and last alias here for consistency with other wikis. Wikinger reminds me Combat 18, Conquista 88 and other nazi-terrorist groups, thus better would be avoid it completely. CBMIBM (talk) 17:40, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

i dont know who to contact about editing the page, ive looked around all of wiki and couldnt get straight answers. i just wanted to submit some illustrations that might assist in this alphabet. please contact me weronder@Hotmail.com —Preceding unsigned comment added by Werdoner (talk • contribs) 09:35, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Other article (perhaps merge?)

What this article needs is to be correlated with Middle Bronze Age alphabets (which is in much better shape than this one). What's the reason for having two separate articles? AnonMoos (talk) 13:30, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

A couple years ago s.o. insisted these need to be separate. I don't particularly care, but there is a distinction: the MBAA are actually attested, P-Can. is a reconstruction. — kwami (talk) 17:08, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

The more I think about it, the more I think merger would be a good idea, either to MBAA, or perhaps better, to Phoenician alphabet. — kwami (talk) 19:40, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

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As far as I can tell, a good reason to keep this article separate might be to present information on the Albright decipherment, which has achieved some prominence, though it is not actually very widely accepted among scholars of the subject. A bad reason to keep this article separate would be to present the views of obscure small religious groupings who assign some special mystical significance to the second millennium B.C. Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite alphabet which goes far beyond the accepted findings of mainstream linguistic scholarship. If such groups are prominent enough to merit their own Wikipedia articles, then their special religious views could be discussed on those articles, but they should not be presented as being factual on this article.

In particular, I must unfortunately take very strong exception to the "Semitic Early" or semear.ttf font which Wikinger used to create image Image:Proto-Canaanite_alphabet_reconstructed_23_glyphs.png and its replacement Image:Proto-Canaanite_alphabet_reconstructed_22_glyphs.png. A lot of Internet crackpottery and kookishness has congealed around that font, and the letter-shapes in that font aren't even that close to the letter-shapes in Albright's original book... AnonMoos (talk) 21:19, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I was about to merge with Phoenician, then realized that this would mess up the 'History of the Alphabet' template. Would it be a problem to merge the articles, and then either delete Proto-Canaanite from the template, or merge there as well, with a name like "Canaanite–Phoenician"? kwami (talk) 20:14, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

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Whether this article is merged or not, the important thing is to synchronize it with "Middle Bronze Age alphabets" and properly source material which comes from the Albright book to the Albright book. I have some ideas on how to do this, but haven't started on editing the article yet, sorry. On the template, just link to "Middle Bronze Age alphabets" instead of "Proto-Canaanite alphabet" -- it's not as if the exact relationships between second millennium B.C. alphabets were very well known... AnonMoos (talk) 10:49, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, cleaned up the template a bit. Wasn't sure if the early date should go to Phoenician or not, since the Phoenicians arguably didn't exist as a distinct people at the time. kwami (talk) 16:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

'en

On the left of the Phoenician eye, the Canaan eye has to be placed, anybody bothered to put it there? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.45.62.55 (talk) 09:22, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Hangul

Should Hangul be named as a descendant of Proto-Canaanite? Wasn't it developed around the 1500s by a duke in Korea? and the symbols were derived from the brushstrokes of Chinese, and the shapes actually may represent the shape of the mouth in pronunciation of the associated sound? The idea of alphabetic/phonetic system must have had an influence, but that does not make it a descendant..., right? Spettro9 (talk) 06:49, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

answered my own question - [[1]] Spettro9 (talk) 06:53, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

ש, س, and ס

I moved the Arabic letter س sīn from ס samekh to ש shīn, because the origin of the shape of س is clearly the same as ش, and together they are analogous to the two pronunciations of ש as either [ʃ] or [s]. Samekh never made it into Arabic, as the alveolar pronunciation of ש filled in for it. Johanna-Hypatia (talk) 19:17, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

another meaning

Quph - it's written that Qup or Qoph is a "monkey". But it's not. It is the hole of a sewing needle whome the twine goes through - and so the letter looks like. The ancient root q-f (q-ph) is generally a part of regular roots describing a passing foramen or beginning point, like the word "lintel" in hebrew (mashqoph). Gimel - gaml can be a throwstick, but it is eventually means scythe or sickle. as ancient root g-m-l means sickiling. the letter very looks like a scythe ...and in hebrew "magal" means "scythe" (and it is known that root letter order can be changed. Daleth - means a door, not a fish. (deleth, in hebrew) Nun - i don't think it means "snake"...some origins say it is a little fish, or a sea snake, or an offspring. in aramaic Non or Nun is a word for a fish (and so in some hebrew names for certain fish) and in hebrew "nin" means a great-grandson. as a verb root, it means multiplying. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.69.139.57 (talk) 14:52, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

merged

This article has long portrayed a hypothetical reconstructed ancestral form of the alphabet, essentially what we'd expect Proto-Sinaitic to be if it were fully deciphered, as if they were Proto-Canaanite. But Proto-Canaanite, as an attested script, is simply Phoenician prior to ca. 1050 BCE, and not the pictographic script invented for the table. Once the table was removed, there was essentially nothing left of this article, so I merged with Phoenician alphabet and history of the alphabet, where the script and its history are more profitable discussed. kwami (talk) 23:16, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Wait, according to this,[2] Proto-Canaanite *is* Proto-Sinaitic, as found in Canaan. Several articles need to be reformatted. kwami (talk) 01:34, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Since I've been accused of "vandalism" for merging this nonsense, I've restored a dab with conflicting refs to show there is no unambiguous use of the term. — kwami (talk) 18:04, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

I completely agree! Please redo your merge, Kwamikagami. I am removing the table and installing it on the Proto-Sinaitic page.Rppeabody (talk) 23:43, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

The table doesn't belong anywhere. It's a modern invention. It isn't what we have attested for Proto-Sinaitic. — kwami (talk) 00:32, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

It's not exactly what we have attested for Proto-Sinaitic, but parts of it are close. It does illustrate the alphabet hypothesis pretty well. See my comments on the Proto-Sinaitic talk page.Rppeabody (talk) 01:10, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Reinstate old article

@Kwamikagami: Originally you gave this article much of its shape, but in 2010 thought it makes more sense as a chapter at Proto-Sinaitic script. I think having the old article is still the better alternative.

a. The version history since then shows there is a kind of demand for an article here. Several users have reverted to the old version. This is not surprising, as the term P-C has some currency in works about the history of alphabet, regardless of how it should be defined.

b. The script is not "hypothetical" in any sense. There are inscriptions that are different from both Sinaitic, and Phoenician corpora, and they are often termed P-C. The Coulmas source concedes to that, it just warns that there is no clear-cut border, and that some feel it has no relation to P-S. It is, after all, just a script, not a writing system. ( For a source, see the tables in the end of [3] I don't really know how to work that messy paper into WP, but it gives a sense of what has been found.)

c. It is strange to put under P-S title something "with an undefined affinity to Proto-Sinaitic". Even if there was a continuity between the scripts (the majority view, I think), there is obviously a difference on the conceptual level. And while on its own the old article was fairly clear and useful, over there it contributes to a jumpy and uneven article. trespassers william (talk) 21:31, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Hi Danny. Go ahead and do what you think best. You seem to know what you're talking about, and I don't know anything of recent developments. I'm also pretty much retired from WP, and can't afford the time to craft an updated article. (The old article, if I remember right, was full of stuff that wasn't supported by the best sources.) — kwami (talk) 23:05, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Danny_lost -- one problem with having a separate Proto-Canaanite alphabet article was that all the inscriptions are so short, and none was really confidently deciphered. At least with Proto-Sinaitic, there's some degree of agreement on לבעלת, but Proto-Canaanite didn't even seem to have a לבעלת. I'm having trouble downloading the paper you linked to (I'll try later today on a more up-to-date computer), but if advances in scholarship have changed the situation, then it might be more advisable to have a separate article now. AnonMoos (talk) 09:13, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

BC or BCE

Can we choose a dating format and standardise throughout this article please? Currently, I can see both BC and BCE being used, which does not seem correct. BibleScholar (talk) 07:52, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

BibleScholar The article was created with 2nd millennium BC linked to the page, so it will stay as Anno Domini, though it would be more appropriate using the Common Era system since the topic predates the Christian era. See WP:ERA for more details. Jerium (talk) 21:07, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

New Proto-Canaanite article

We at the Proto-Sinaitic Script article discussed splitting the article into Proto-Sinaitic and into this article based on premise (b), but we need your input first. INFIYNJTE (talk) 16:55, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

I don't think anybody's taking responsibility for this stub. Let's have something in the chart that marks whether something was found in situ or on the market. Frevel 2010 (just ask) was very appropriately skeptical about a broad swath of examples being useful. Lots of credulity in the field with other writers. Are you going to add the image gallery here that was removed from the proto Sinaitic article? What good sources do you know for proto Canaanite? I'd love to catch up, on proto Sinaitic too. I asked in the refdesk about good PS cites but no dice. Temerarius (talk) 18:56, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Alright, so we will begin writing the article. INFIYNJTE (talk) 20:45, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

What is proto Canaanite? Sources

• Some people are going to use the term with knowledge, some without.
• https://www.jstor.org/stable/27925644 Some Considerations on the Ostracon from 'Izbet Ṣarṭah JOSEPH NAVEH, Vol. 28, No. 1/2 (1978) - Naveh '78 and the writers who follow in '88 '90 call this artifact proto Canaanite without saying why they call it that. We'll need an article on the thing itself. 1998 IS HOPHNI IN THE 'IZBET SARTAH OSTRACON? LAWRENCEJ. MYKYTIUK Purdue University says it was from a stratified dig, so probably genuine. How come so few references to it? Can you find recent papers about it? Temerarius (talk) 21:11, 15 February 2024 (UTC)