The Phrygian alphabet is the script used in the earliest Phrygian texts. It dates back to the 8th century BCE and was used until the fourth century BCE ("Old-Phrygian" inscriptions), after which it was replaced by the common

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 we ...

("New-Phrygian" inscriptions, 1st to 3rd century CE). The Phrygian alphabet was derived from the Phoenician alphabet and is almost identical to the early West

Greek alphabets 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 we ...

. The alphabet consists of 19 letters – 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 14 consonants (b, g, d, v, z, y, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t). A variant of the Phrygian alphabet was used in the inscriptions of the

Mysia Mysia (UK , US or ; el, Μυσία; lat, Mysia; tr, Misya) was a region in the northwest of ancient Asia Minor (Anatolia, Asian part of modern Turkey). It was located on the south coast of the Sea of Marmara. It was bounded by Bithynia on the ...

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...

. Words are often separated by spaces or by three or four vertically spaced points. It is usually written from left to right ("dextroverse"), but about one-sixth of the inscriptions was written from right to left ("sinistroverse"). In multi-line inscriptions there is usually a spelling of

boustrophedon Boustrophedon is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style. This is in contrast to modern European languages, where lines always begin on the same side, usually the le ...

(a few dozen inscriptions).

Alphabet

The nineteen characters of the Old-Phrygian alphabet are:Obrador Cursach (2018), p. 34.

Notes

External links

* {{Anatolian languages Alphabets Hellenic scripts

Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syll ...

Alphabet

Notes

See also

External links