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Yodh
Yodh (also spelled jodh, yod, or jod) is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''yōd'' 𐤉, Hebrew ''yod'' , Aramaic ''yod'' 𐡉, Syriac ''yōḏ'' ܝ, and Arabic ''yāʾ'' . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪚, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . Its sound value is in all languages for which it is used; in many languages, it also serves as a long vowel, representing . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Iota (Ι), Latin I and J, Cyrillic І, Coptic (Ⲓ) and Gothic eis . The term yod is often used to refer to the speech sound , a palatal approximant, even in discussions of languages not written in Semitic abjads, as in phonological phenomena such as English "yod-dropping". Origins Yod originated from a hieroglyphic "hand", or *yad. D36 Before the late nineteenth century, the letter yāʼ was written without its two dots, especially those in the Levant. Arabic yāʼ The letter is named ' (). It is wri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hebrew Alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic languages, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze in Israel, Druze. It is an offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet. Historically, a different abjad script was used to write Hebrew: the original, old Hebrew script, now known as the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, has been largely preserved in a variant form as the Samaritan script, Samaritan alphabet, and is still used by the Samaritans. The present ''Jewish script'' or ''square script'', on the cont ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syriac Alphabet
The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century. It is one of the Semitic languages, Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician, Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Arabic alphabet, Arabic and Sogdian alphabet, Sogdian, the precursor and a direct ancestor of the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most—but not all—letters connect within a word. There is no letter case distinction between upper and lower case letters, though some letters change their form depending on their position within a word. Spaces word divider, separate individual words. All 22 letters are consonants (called , ). There are optional diacritic marks (called , ) to indicate the vowel (, ) and #Letter alterations, other features. In addition to the sounds of the language, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aramaic Alphabet
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian peoples throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes — a precursor to Arabization centuries later — including among the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Assyrians and Neo-Babylonian Empire, Babylonians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language, Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews, but not Samaritans, who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet, which they call "Ktav Ashuri, Square Script", even for writing Hebrew language, Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan script, Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient South Arabian Script
The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian: ; modern ) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE, and remained in use through the late sixth century CE. It is an abjad, a writing system where only consonants are obligatorily written, a trait shared with its predecessor, Proto-Sinaitic, as well as some of its sibling writing systems, including Arabic and Hebrew. It is a predecessor of the Ge'ez script, and a sibling script of the Phoenician alphabet and, through that, the modern Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. History The earliest instances of the Ancient South Arabian (''ASA'') script are painted pottery sherds from Raybun in Hadhramaut in Yemen, which are dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE. It is an abjad script, meaning that only consonants are usually written in the script, with vowels inferred from context; it shares this feature both with its predecessor, the Proto-Sinaitic script, and modern Semitic languages. It is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoenician Alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean basin. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age, sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as well as Old Aramaic. It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
In a writing system, a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme—the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a ''multigraph (orthography), multigraph''. Multigraphs include ''digraphs'' of two letters (e.g. English ''ch'', ''sh'', ''th''), and ''trigraphs'' of three letters (e.g. English ''tch''). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H, Greek eta , an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ancient North Arabian
Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Arabia and south Syria from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. The term "Ancient North Arabian" is defined negatively. It refers to all of the South Semitic scripts except Ancient South Arabian (ASA) regardless of their genetic relationships. Classification Many scholars believed that the various ANA alphabets were derived from the ASA script, mainly because the latter was employed by a major civilization and exhibited more angular features. Others believed that the ANA and ASA scripts shared a common ancestor from which they both developed in parallel. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the various ANA scripts descend from the monumental ASA alphabet, but that they collectively share a common ancestor to the exclusion of ASA is also s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iota
Iota (; uppercase Ι, lowercase ι; ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Ї, ї), and Je (Ј, ј), and iotated letters (e.g. Yu (Ю, ю)). In the system of Greek numerals, iota has a value of 10. Iota represents the close front unrounded vowel . In early forms of ancient Greek, it occurred in both long and short versions, but this distinction was lost in Koine Greek. Iota participated as the second element in falling diphthongs, with both long and short vowels as the first element. Where the first element was long, the iota was lost in pronunciation at an early date, and was written in polytonic orthography as iota subscript, in other words as a very small ι under the main vowel. Examples include ᾼ ᾳ ῌ ῃ ῼ ῳ. The former diphthongs became digraphs for simple vowels in Koine Greek.see Koine Greek phonolog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abjad
An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet. Impure abjads represent vowels with either optional diacritics, a limited number of distinct vowel glyphs, or both. Etymology The name ''abjad'' is based on the Arabic alphabet's first (in its Arabic alphabet#Alphabetical order, original order) four corresponding to ''a'', ''b'', ''j'', and to replace the more common terms "consonantary" and "consonantal alphabet" in describing the family of scripts classified as "West Semitic languages, West Semitic". It is similar to other Semitic languages such as Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel Length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many languages do not distinguish vowel length phoneme, phonemically, meaning that vowel length alone does not change the meanings of words. However, the amount of time a vowel is uttered can change based on factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it: the phonetic environment. An example is that vowels tend to be pronounced longer before a voiced consonant and shorter before a voiceless consonant in the standard accents of General American English, American and Received Pronunciation, British English. On the other hand, vowel length is indeed an important phonemic factor in certain languages, meaning vowel length can change word-meanings, for example in Arabic phonology#Vowels, Arabic, Czech phonology, Czech, Dravidia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Sinaitic Script
The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about Serabit el-Khadim proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, 30-40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite alphabet, Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. the History of the alphabet, 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 Canaanite languageJohn F. Healey, ''The Early Alphabet'' University of California Press, 1990, , p. 18. repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
