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, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
Standard in July 2006 with the release of version 5.0. An alternative proposal to handle it as a font variation of
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
was turned down. (Se
PDFsummary.)
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 ( he, הכתב העברי הקדום), also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in Canaanite inscriptions from the region of biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script ...
, Archaic Phoenician,
Phoenician,
Early Aramaic, Late Phoenician cursive,
Phoenician papyri,
Siloam Hebrew,
Hebrew seals,
Ammonite,
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