Phoenician alphabet

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the writing system developed by the Phoenicians of the Levantine coast around 1050 BCE, consisting of twenty-two consonantal letters and representing the ancestor of virtually all modern alphabetic scripts including Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and ultimately the scripts of South Asia and Southeast Asia; the Phoenician alphabet was the first widely used phonemic writing system, replacing the complex syllabic and logographic systems of earlier Bronze Age civilisations with a small set of letters representing consonant sounds, making literacy far more accessible; the Phoenicians spread their alphabet through their extensive Mediterranean trade networks, and Greek adoption of the script with the addition of vowel letters produced the foundation for all subsequent European writing; the Phoenician alphabet thus represents one of humanity's most consequential intellectual innovations