Re: Order of Alphabet
- From: "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:06:12 GMT
Dennis wrote:
>
> In a reply to one of my posts, Peter T. Daniels replied:
>
> "See Leslie Threatte's review in *Written Language and
> Literacy* (I think vol. 2), which is accompanied by my small
> article on how the revised understanding of Semitic
> sibilants due to Alice Faber makes all Woodard's arguments
> [*Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer*] nugatory and otiose."
>
> Woodard also says, "... J. Watt has recently demonstrated
> that the characters of the second-millenium B.C. cuneiform
> consonantal script of Ugarit were assigned an order in the
> signary on the basis of sound-class membership (the same
> order which, *mutatis mutandis*, occurs in the subsequently
> attested Phoenician script - and hence the Greek alphabet-
> and presumably in its immediate ancestor Proto-Canaanite)."
> footnote 2: W.[sic] Watt, 1989, "The Ras Shamra Matrix,"
> Semiotica 74:64-108.
The man's name is William Watt (semiotician at UC Irvine), and his
"theory" is the height of absurdity. I've presented my refutation a
couple of times but can't get it published because he also makes a
statistical argument (which also doesn't hold water), and my
collaborator's refutation is too intemperate (imagine someone looking
intemperate alongside me!) and he refused to tone it down.
Below I give the core paragraphs of my refutation -- simply copied from
a Word document so lots of characters won't come through.
> Does what you said invalidate this idea, that the order of
> the alphabet is based on "order of sonority"? What is the
> current thinking on why we have the current order of the
> alphabet, which does date back to the order of the Ugaritic
> abjad at least? I have read that it might have referred to
> an ancient calendar (Moscati, Bausani).
The two ancient orders of the alphabet are utterly inexplicable (the
ancient South Semitic order, similar to the present-day Ethiopic order,
was discovered in the 1980s), and the best guess I know of is that the
symbols were simply put down in the order they were devised, and that
became the default/defacto order.
_______________________________________________________________________
Watt agrees with the scholarly consensus that the last three Ugaritic
letters (i È, u Ë, Í `s) are extraneous to the basic sequence. He
concurs with the majority of researchers that the 27-letter signary is
ancestral to the 22-letter one, so that even though his Ras Shamra
Matrix has obviously been derived from his Byblos Matrix, he postulates
it as an ancestral matrix.
Let us consider the sequence of events that this requires to have
happened. (1) Someone devised a set of 27 symbols for the 27 consonants
of Northwest Semitic. Evidence from script invention in modern times
suggests that, if the symbols were memorized in a particular order, this
order was random, perhaps corresponding to the order in which they were
devised.
(2) Someone?perhaps the same person as the deviser?decided to arrange
the letters in a more reasonable order, and hit upon the idea of placing
them in a two-dimensional matrix, with at least one of the dimensions
reflecting phonetic similarity. The ?best? matrix for 27 letters is, of
course, 9 cells by 3 cells. The arranger was perhaps unable to group the
27 letters into 3 groups of 9 or 9 groups of 3. Similarly, matrices of
28, 30, 32, 35, 40, 42, 44, or 45 cells could not accommodate the
phonetic analysis; only a 48-cell matrix would do, wherein three of five
groups of 3?7 letters were divided into subgroups of 2?5 letters.
(Assigning the interdentals as Col. IIIa rather than Col. IIb might make
the phonetic groupings a bit more credible.)
(3) At first, Watt?s only suggestion regarding the order of the columns
was a vague mention of the untenable claim of a relation to ?the order
of the symbols of the Akkadian syllabarium? (1987: 13), taken from
Driver 1976 ?passim.? By 1989 (p. 94 n. 11), Watt had noticed Driver?s
dismissal of the claim (1976: 180), and proposed the ?principle of
maximal separation? (p. 69), adding the labels ?extreme back,? ?extreme
front,? ?middle,? ?back,? and ?front? to Cols. I?V respectively. The
principle is said to apply to the order of letters within columns as
well, because the Matrix ?was designed to be recited both vertically and
horizontally, and because it was expected that such recitations would be
eased ? if highly-similar (hence easily confused) sounds were as distant
from each other as possible? (1989: 70, emphasis in original).
(4) The empty cells in the Matrix (1989: 81?84) were assigned (a) so
that the sequence could be halved between l and m and (b) so that the
letter-names could be read as a ?poem? either horizontally or
vertically, with cola of 5, 5, 4; 5, 5, 3 names per row and 3, 4, 2, 4;
3, 4, 2, 5 names per column. Unfortunately Watt has not realized that:
the putative letter names were meaningful words of the language, and the
resulting ?phrases? make no sense (obviously, if the letter names could
be read in a meaningful sequence, the question of the origin of
alphabetical order would never have arisen); case desinences would have
been present on at least some of the words (others might have been in
construct form); and Ugaritic poetry is scanned by counting syllables,
not words.
(5) When the Ras Shamra alphabet became the Phoenician alphabet, and
five letters were subtracted from the Matrix?presumably because of sound
changes in the history of Phoenician that made letters for ·, d*, z*,
tÒ, and g? otiose?it mutated into the Byblos Matrix, which fits its
abecedarium more tightly than did the earlier one without any reordering
of the letters. This either is an amazing coincidence, or reveals a
capacity to predict the course of future development of the sound system
of a language?here, Canaanite becoming Phoenician?far beyond that of any
present-day phonologist.
While each of these steps seems improbable, step (5) strains credulity
the most.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.
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- Order of Alphabet
- From: Dennis
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