Bēt
Bet, Beth, Beh, or Vet is the second letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''bēt'' 𐤁 , Hebrew ''bēt'' , Aramaic ''bēṯ'' 𐡁, Syriac ''bēṯ'' ܒ and Arabic ''bāʾ'' . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪈, South Arabian , and Ge'ez . Its sound value is the voiced bilabial stop ⟨b⟩ or the voiced labiodental fricative ⟨v⟩. The letter's name means "house" in various Semitic languages (Arabic '' bayt'', Akkadian '' bītu, bētu'', Hebrew: '' bayīṯ'', Phoenician '' bēt'' etc.; ultimately all from Proto-Semitic '' *bayt-''), and appears to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a house by acrophony. O1 The Phoenician letter gave rise to, among others, the Greek beta ( Β, β), Latin B (B, b) and Cyrillic Be ( Б, б) and Ve ( В, в), and also the Armenian letter Ben (Բ, բ). Origin The name ''bet'' is derived from the West Semitic word for "house" (as in ), and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Phoenician Language
Phoenician ( ; ) is an extinct language, extinct Canaanite languages, Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre, Lebanon, Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet History of the Greek alphabet, spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern Alphabet#European alphabets, European scripts. Phoenician belongs to the Canaanite languages and as such is quite similar to Biblical Hebrew and other languages of the group, at least in its early stages, and is therefore mutually intelligible with them. The area in which Phoenician was spoken, which the Phoenicians called ''Pūt'', includes the northern Levant, specifically the areas now including Syria, Lebanon, the Galilee, Western Galilee, parts of Cyprus, some adjacent areas of Anatolia, and, a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Paleo-Hebrew Alphabet
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 of Israel (Samaria) and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Bible due to its similarity to the Samaritan script; the Talmud states that the Samaritans still used this script.Sanhedrin 21b:22: " Mar Zutra says, and some say that it is Mar Ukva who says: Initially, the Torah was given to the Jewish people in Ivrit script, and the sacred tongue, Hebrew. It was given to them again in the days of Ezra in ''Ashurit'' script and the Aramaic tongue. The Jewish people selected the ''Ashurit'' script and the sacred tongue for the Torah scroll and left the ''Ivrit'' script and the Aramaic tongue for the commoners. Who are these commoners? Rav Chisda said: The Samaritans utim What is ''Ivrit'' scrip ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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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]   |
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Beta (letter)
Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced bilabial fricative while in borrowed words is instead commonly transcribed as μπ. Letters that arose from beta include the Roman letter and the Cyrillic letters and . Name Like the names of most other Greek letters, the name of beta was adopted from the acrophonic name of the corresponding letter in Phoenician, which was the common Semitic word ('house', compare and ). In Greek, the name was , pronounced in Ancient Greek. It is spelled in modern monotonic orthography and pronounced . History The letter beta was derived from the Phoenician letter beth . The letter Β had the largest number of highly divergent local forms. Besides the standard form (either rounded or pointed, ), there were forms as varied ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Acrophony
Acrophony (; + 'sound') is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic: the names of the letters α, β, γ, δ, are spelled with the respective letters: (), (), (), (). The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Proto-Sinaitic script and the succeeding Phoenician alphabet, in which the letter A, representing the sound , is thought to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox, and is called 'ox', , which starts with the glottal stop sound the letter represents. The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet is ''bet'' (which means 'house' and looks a bit like a shelter) representing the sound and from ''ālep-bēt'' came the word "alphabet"another case where the beginning of a thing gives the name to the whole, which was in fact common practice in the ancient Near East. The Glagolitic and early Cyrillic alphabets, although not consisting o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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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]   |
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Egyptian Hieroglyph
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.In total, there were about 1,000 graphemes in use during the Old Kingdom period; this number decreased to 750–850 during the Middle Kingdom, but rose instead to around 5,000 signs during 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. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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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]   |
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Pr (hieroglyph)
Pr (𓉐 Gardiner sign listed no. O1) is the hieroglyph for 'house', the floor-plan of a walled building with an open doorway. While its original pronunciation is not known with certainty, modern Egyptology assigns it the value of ''per'', but purely on the basis of a convention specific to the discipline. However, the Ancient Greek rendering of the title ''pr-`3'' as suggests the reconstruction of the historical ( Late Egyptian) pronunciation as *''par'', see Pharaoh#Etymology. Pr combined with an associated "personal name", god, or location becomes the ''"house of .... ."'' An example for pharaoh Setnakhte is the city of: Pr-Atum, (city of Pithom). Pr and ankh-(life) is a "combination hieroglyph" and is the "word" for ''house of life''. The "house of life" is a library for papyrus books-(scrolls), as well as a possible scriptorium. The shape of ''pr'' in beginning dynasties had variations in the shape of a square, with the opening. See Garrett Reference for tomb ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters.In total, there were about 1,000 graphemes in use during the Old Kingdom period; this number decreased to 750–850 during the Middle Kingdom, but rose instead to around 5,000 signs during the Ptolemaic period. Antonio Loprieno, ''Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction'' (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 12. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for Ancient Egyptian literature, religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic (Egyptian), demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreov ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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House
A house is a single-unit residential building. It may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems.Schoenauer, Norbert (2000). ''6,000 Years of Housing'' (rev. ed.) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company). Houses use a range of different roofing systems to keep precipitation such as rain from getting into the dwelling space. Houses generally have doors or locks to secure the dwelling space and protect its inhabitants and contents from burglars or other trespassers. Most conventional modern houses in Western cultures will contain one or more bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A house may have a separate dining room, or the eating area may be integrated into the kitchen or another room. Some large houses in North America have a recreation room. In traditional agriculture-oriented soc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |