How did the Semitic Alphabet become the Greek Alphabet so quickly?

On Dec 14, 12:08 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 13, 6:22 pm, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



On Dec 11, 5:17 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Dec 11, 5:08 pm, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

The email address is legit

I have been reading several sources on the age at which the Greek
alphabet was developed. Are there any 21st century publications that
would provide new information on such questions as whether the
Cadmeian version of the alphabet has been found in the recent
excavations at Thebes?

Tradition has Cadmus giving the alphabet several generations before
the Trojan War, thus overlapping with the use of Linear B, but I have
seen nothing physical to confirm or deny this belief.

The best guess remains ca. 800 BCE. Attempts to push it back several
centuries on epigraphic grounds haven't withstood scrutiny; a telling
fact is that various pottery sequences remain quite uniform for quite
a while, and before that point they don't have inscriptions (either
formal or scratched in), and after, they do.

Probably still the most recent book is Barry B. Powell's (Cambridge,
ca. 1990) -- it includes editions of all the earliest materials -- but
his notion that the Greek alphabet was devised specifically for the
purpose of writing down Homer is just silly.

Here is one of my reasons for asking.

In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (Hardcover)
by Joel M. Hoffman (Author)

and this is his contribution to a similar discussion to this one a few
years back:

* From: joel@xxxxxxx (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman)
* Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:42:58 GMT

Absolutely nothing whatsoever that is said in that book about the
Hebrew alphabet (or its ancient relatives) is reliable.

(For those who followed my comments on it earlier, I have now had the
misfortune of reading it, and it is abundantly clear that the author
never checked any of his assertions with either knowledgeable
authorities, or with the data.)

Is everything below quoted from Hoffman, or does Linthicum return at
some point?

I joined this discussion late, so I hope I'm not repeating someone
else:

I go into the development of the alphabet in some detail in my latest
book (_In the Beginning:_, NYU Press, 2004); the book also includes
detailed references to other sources.

The basic story is well known: The Phoenician alphabet, which stems
from pictographs and which has a seemingly arbitrary order, became the
Hebrew alphabet, then the Aramaic alphabet, Greek alphabet, Latin
alphabet, etc. (The Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets were in fact the
same, but the letters probably had different names.) Overwhelming
evidence connects the invention of the alphabet to a Semitic language.

But there are several loose ends that suggest we have missed important
pieces of the picture.

To start, the Izbet Sartah abecedary from -1000 shows an early order
of the alphabet that differs only slightly from the canonical order of
the Hebrew alphabet. But the text is not Hebrew. (Some scholars
believe that the text is nonsense, written by a school child. I doubt
it.) If we ignore this problem, we find that while the order of the
alphabet was more or less established by -1000, the order still had
some variation.

Greek (and I know less about this) seems to be a much bigger problem.

From roughly -1450 to -750, there's essentially no Greek writing, and

then in -750, the Greek Alphabet pops into place fully formed.
Ignoring the question of why there's no Greek writing for 700 years,
we still have to wonder how exactly the Semitic alphabet --- via the
Hebrews, Arameans or Phoenicians --- became Greek so quickly, and why
there are no proto-Greek alphabets. How did the Semitic alphabet, in
which consonants but rarely doubled as vowels, so quickly become the
Greek alphabet in which separate letters were used for vowels?
Similarly, why did the Greeks feel compelled to preserve the order of
the letters, but not their sounds?

After Greek, the story becomes clearly, but the leap from Semitic to
Greek is still a partial mystery.-

I was recommended to this group to solve a problem, it appears that is
not possible. The statements Hoffman makes seem to have validity, even
logic, whatever you feel about his book. Rearrange the question: How
did the Semitic Alphabet become the Greek alphabet so quickly?
.

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