Phoenician language
The Phoenician language was originally spoken in the coastal Mediterranean region that was called "Canaan" in Phoenician, Arabic, Greek and Aramaicbut "Phoenicia" in Greek and Latin and "Pūt" in ancient Egyptian. Phoenician was a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup. It was related to the Hebrew but was more developed.[1] The language is divided into three groups. Archaic Phoenician dates from the 10th to the 7th century BC.[1] Middle Phoenician dates from 6th to the 4th century BC. Late Phoenician was dated from the 3rd to the 1st century BC.[1] The purple cloth that was produced by the Phoenicians gave the ancient Greeks their name for the colour; Phoenicia.[2]
Phoenician was spoken in area that includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria, Palestine, northern Israel and parts of Cyprus.[2] In some adjacent areas of Anatolia, it was spoken as a prestige language. It was also spoken in the area of Phoenician colonization along the coasts of the southwestern Mediterranean, including what is nowTunisia, Morocco Algeria, Malta, wester, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and southern Spain. The Phoenicians were the first state-level society to make extensive use of the alphabet.[3] The Phoenician alphabet is the oldest verified consonantal alphabet, or abjad, and influenced most of the other alphabets.
References change
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Glenn Markoe, Phoenicians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 108
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Thomas F. X. Noble; et al., Western Civilization: Beyond Boundaries, Volume A (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011), pp. 30–31
- ↑ The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol III Part 1, eds John Boardman; I. E. S. Edwards (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 819
