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

On Dec 14, 10:55 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 14, 9:48 am, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Dec 14, 8:57 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Dec 14, 6:16 am, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

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?-

I can't help you if you don't tell me where the misinformation from
Hoffman stops and your question begins. The fundamental core of
Hoffman's theory is that (1) Hebrew had matres lectionis from the
beginning of writing (because, or maybe therefore, the Name of God is
YHWH, which is just a string of letters and had no pronunciation at
all), and (2) Greek vowel letters (somehow) developed out of matres
lectionis. The first of these is pious claptrap (he was apparently
"inspired" by a pious Hasid by the name of Zlotowitz, who is the
publisher of an extensive line of ultra-orthodox commentaries on
Scripture and rabbinic writings), and the second is disproved by
observing what happened every time a consonantal script with matres
_did_ get adapted to write non-Semitic languages.

(a) What do you mean by "so quickly"? Teaching someone to use a
consonantal or alphabetic writing system might take a couple of hours.

(b) It did not take some deep cogitation for the first Greek-speaker
to misunderstand how Phoenician writing works, and to assume that the
letters for consonants s/he couldn't hear as phonemes in Greek
represented instead the first sounds s/he _could_ hear, namely, the
following vowel.

I have most recently treated this inhttp://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/saoc/saoc60.html
(specifically, at the top of p. 61.)

(c) If you're asking why the Greek alphabet spread and diversified so
quickly, that's a question for Greek historians, not linguistics. Be
aware that there was no standard variety of Greek alphabet until 402
BCE; Etruscan and hence Latin got its alphabet from a western variety
that used some letters differently from the eastern variety that got
standardized in Athens a couple of centuries later.

Is it you or Hoffman who thinks the Greek alphabet didn't preserve the
sounds of the letters?

I'm sorry to waste your time. The following lays out my argument

Why can't _you_ lay out "_your_ argument"?

http://www.ancientscripts.com/greek.html

and includes:

"Unlike Greek, the Phoenician alphabet only had letters for
consonants. When the Greeks adopted the alphabet, they found letters
representing sounds not found in Greek. Instead of throwing them away,
they modified the extraneous letters to represent vowels. For example,
the Phoenician letter 'aleph (which stood for a glottal stop) became
the Greek letter alpha (which stands for [a] sound).

They did not "modify" the letters. The earliest Greek letters look
just like the Phoenician letters they are taken from, but they have
different uses.

There were many variants of the early Greek alphabet, each suited to a
local dialect. Eventually the Ionian alphabet was adopted in all Greek-
speaking states, but before that happened, the Euboean variant was
carried to the Italic peninsula and adopted by Etruscan and eventually
the Romans. The following chart compare various early variants, the
modern alphabet, and pronunciations."

What do they mean by "each suited to a local dialect"? What
phonological variants were there among the Greek dialects -- except
that some of them had /h/ and some didn't?

and

http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html

"This confusion regarding the earliest Greek is due to the fact that
no archaeological remains of this script have been found thus far. The
earliest examples only date from the 8th century BCE, when different
scripts are already in evidence. Many scholars place the time of the
Greeks' adoption of the alphabet from the Phoenicians sometimes
between 1200 BCE and 900 BCE. The older date would give a longer time
for the proto-Greek alphabet to develop into its local forms, but
there are no archaeological remains of any writing from this period.
The later date would satisfy the lack of evidence, but gives less time
for the script to diverge. "

It is not the case that "many scholars" opt for the early date. It was
a trial balloon by Joseph Naveh and P. Kyle McCarter in the early
1970s, and their evidence was shown not to show what they claimed it
did.

If the Phoenician alphabet was adopted in the earliest period there
should be an explanation in why. (This is the "quickly" time scale not
minutes or hours) Was a population considered illiterate yearning for
a means of writing down information, now that Linear B had "died"? Was
there some oral tradition that needed to be recorded for the
edification of the next and later generations? The presence of
multiple alphabets suggests this was a general need, not a specific
one.

What is "a population considered illiterate"?

Do you suppose there was some sort of "racial memory" that 500 years
earlier they had had this magic thing called "writing" that meanwhile
"died"?

Oral traditions do not "need" to be recorded. Both Vedic and Avestan
texts persisted for many, many centuries without ever being written
down. Who knows how many "Homeric" epics happen not to be preserved
because no one got around to writing them down? (In fact I gather that
the names and some of the content of some epics _are_ known, but
nothing of their text.)

What "multiple alphabets"? "Multiple alphabets" were never in use in
any particular location. As the Greek alphabet spread with Greek
seafarers, it naturally developed individual idiosyncrasies in
different locations that were in only sporadic communication -- they
certainly weren't regularly sending missives to each other!

Forget Hoffman, I didn't think it was important who wrote the
statement, and I still think you are unable to see the question
because of your fixation on his accuracy on an entirely different
subject.-

Ok, you've finally put quotation marks around the passages you've
quoted, and you've finally given some indication of what your question
is, but you're still under the thrall of considerable misinformation.
But that's likely to happen when you rely on websites rather than
publications that have been authenticated by knowledgeable authorities.

As one of my collegaues once observed, asking questions is not a way
to answer questions. Please actually look at the various Greek
alphabets and the Phoenician next to each other. The presentations
are different.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/greek.html

Forget the rest, I wanted an answer not an interrogation. Take your
knowledgeable authority and live with it.
.

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