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ʿayn
''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac ܥ, and Arabic (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative () or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether (thus, in the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely in part due to European influence). The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letter O, O and O. It is the origin of letter Ƹ. Origins The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, perhaps ultimately (via Proto-Sinaitic) derived from the ''ı͗r'' hieroglyph ( Gardiner D4). The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, La ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ayin
''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac ܥ, and Arabic (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative () or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether (thus, in the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely in part due to European influence). The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letter O, O and O. It is the origin of letter Ƹ. Origins The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, perhaps ultimately (via Proto-Sinaitic) derived from the ''ı͗r'' hieroglyph ( Gardiner D4). The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, La ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abjad Numerals
The Abjad numerals, also called Hisab al-Jummal ( ar, حِسَاب ٱلْجُمَّل, ), are a decimal alphabetic numeral system/alphanumeric code, in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been used in the Arabic-speaking world since before the eighth century when positional Arabic numerals were adopted. In modern Arabic, the word ' () means ' ' in general. In the Abjad system, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, ʾalif, is used to represent 1; the second letter, bāʾ, 2, up to 9. Letters then represent the first nine intervals of 10s and those of the 100s: yāʾ for 10, kāf for 20, qāf for 100, ending with 1000. The word '' ʾabjad'' () itself derives from the first four letters (A-B-J-D) of the Semitic alphabet, including the Aramaic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, and other scripts for Semitic languages. These older alphabets contained only 22 letters, stopping at taw, numerically equivalent to 400. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semitic Scripts
Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, the North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic) is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Semitic language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. The script is attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, dating to the Middle Bronze Age (2100–1500 BC). The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC. However, the discovery of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River indicates that the script originated in Egypt. The evolution of Proto-Sinaitic and the various Proto-Canaanite scripts during ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Persian Alphabet
The Persian alphabet ( fa, الفبای فارسی, Alefbâye Fârsi) is a writing system that is a version of the Arabic script used for the Persian language spoken in Iran ( Western Persian) and Afghanistan (Dari Persian) since the 7th century after the Muslim conquest of Persia. The Persian dialect spoken in Tajikistan (Tajiki Persian) is written in the Tajik alphabet, a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet which has been in use since the Soviet era. The Persian alphabet is directly derived and developed from the Arabic alphabet. After the Muslim conquest of Persia and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th century, Arabic became the language of government and especially religion in Persia for two centuries. The replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet to write the Persian language was done by the Saffarid dynasty and Samanid dynasty in 9th-century Greater Khorasan. The script is mostly but not exclusively right-to-left; mathematical expressi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gardiner's Sign List
Gardiner's Sign List is a list of common Egyptian hieroglyphs compiled by Sir Alan Gardiner. It is considered a standard reference in the study of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Gardiner lists only the common forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he includes extensive subcategories, and also both vertical and horizontal forms for many hieroglyphs. He includes size-variation forms to aid with the reading of hieroglyphs in running blocks of text. In contrast, for example, the Budge Reference has about 1,000 hieroglyphs listed in 50 pages, but with no size variations. Gardiner does not cross-index signs; once put on the list, other significant uses may be overlooked. One example of this is G16, nbtỉ, the ideogram for the Two Ladies, goddesses Wadjet as the cobra and Nekhbet as the white vulture. These are the protective and patron goddesses of the separate Egyptian kingdoms that joined into ancient Egypt, who were both then displayed on the uraeus of Wadjet when the unification ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Greek Alphabet
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic Greece, Archaic and early Classical Greece, Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in Archaic Greek alphabets, many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BCE, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today. The letter case, uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: : , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , /ς, , , , , , . The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin script, Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyrillic Script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, Caucasian languages, Caucasian and Iranian languages, Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia. , around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin script, Latin and Greek alphabet, Greek alphabets. The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of tsar Simeon I of Bulgar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afroasiatic Languages
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/Sahel. With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent. Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth-largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a ''de facto'' group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch. The languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million na ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egyptian Language
The Egyptian language or Ancient Egyptian ( ) is a dead language, dead Afroasiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic language that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large Text corpus, corpus of surviving texts which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts, decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century. Egyptian is one of the List of languages by first written accounts, earliest written languages, first being recorded in the Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4000 years. Its classical language, classical form is known as Middle Egyptian, the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt which remained the literary language of Egypt until the Egypt (Roman province), Roman period. By the time of classical antiquity the spoken language had evolved into Demotic (Egyptian), Dem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a segmental symbol of a phonemic writing system. The inventory of all letters forms an alphabet. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent and exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. The word ''letter'', borrowed from Old French ''letre'', entered Middle English around 1200 AD, eventually displacing the Old English term ( bookstaff). ''Letter'' is descended from the Latin '' littera'', which may have descended from the Greek "διφθέρα" (, writing tablet), via Etruscan. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, which is a functional unit in a writing system: a letter (or group of letters) represents visually a phoneme (a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language). Letters are combined to form written words, just as phonemes are combined to form spoken words. A sequence of graphemes representing a phoneme is called a multigrap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,000 graphemes in the Old Kingdom period, reduced to around 750 to 850 in the classical language of the Middle Kingdom, but inflated to the order of some 5,000 signs in the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Through the Phoenician alphabet's major child systems (the Greek and Aramaic scripts), the Egyptian hieroglyphic script is ancestral to the majority of scripts in modern use, most prominently the Latin and Cyr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semitic Languages
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date in West Asia, with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from the 30th century BCE and the 25th century BCE in Mesopotamia and the north eastern Levant respectively. The only earlier attested languages are Sumerian and Elamite (2800 BCE to 550 BCE), both language isolates, and Egyptian (a sister branch of the Afroasiatic family, related to the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
