Phoenician is a
Unicode block containing characters used across the Mediterranean world from the 12th century BCE to the 3rd century CE. The Phoenician alphabet was added to the
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
was turned down. (Se
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The Unicode block for Phoenician is U+10900–U+1091F. It is intended for the representation of text in
Paleo-Hebrew
The Paleo-Hebrew script (), also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, including pre-Biblical and Biblical Hebrew, from southern Canaan, also known as the biblical kingdoms o ...
, Archaic Phoenician,
Phoenician,
Early Aramaic, Late Phoenician cursive,
Phoenician papyri,
Siloam Hebrew,
Hebrew seals,
Ammonite
Ammonoids are extinct, (typically) coiled-shelled cephalopods comprising the subclass Ammonoidea. They are more closely related to living octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish (which comprise the clade Coleoidea) than they are to nautiluses (family N ...
,
Moabite and
Punic.
The letters are encoded U+10900 ''aleph'' through to U+10915 ''taw'', U+10916 , U+10917 , U+10918 and U+10919 encode the numerals 1, 10, 20, and 100, respectively, and U+1091F is the word separator.
Characters
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Phoenician block:
References
{{reflist
Unicode blocks
Phoenician alphabet