A funny claim about the Origin of the Hebrew alphabet.

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Exactly, "alphabet" and "language" are two different things, language including the spoken and written system, alphabet is just the symbols of the written system.

It is not yet proven that Phoenician and ancient Hebrew were the same spoken language, but the Alphabet were both Phoenician, yet the bible sites are saying it's the Phoenicians who took the Hebrew language and alphabet and used it as their language, this is a history falsification.

Last edited by The_Face_of_Boo on 14 Sep 2011, 8:40 am, edited 2 times in total.

Which is historically a** backward. We have lots of evidence that the in Phonecia and Urgetrit it was done first. The Hebrews started out as bumpkins and sheep herders. They did not get citified and commercial until well after they overran what is now called "the holy land". Read that: the land is holy mine now. With the exception of the Dutch who make land out of water, land is where it is found, stolen or occupied. Buy (or steal) land -- they aren't making any more of it.

ruveyn

The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein tells in detail about this era....

Bumpkins? But I thought "countyfied" people were supposed to be so much more moral and virtuous than the rest of us!
At least that's what the sort who claim the Hebrews were handed their alphabet directly from God usually claim.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The alphabet originates in the end from Egyptian Hieroglyphs which, along with Sumerian Cuneiform, is the world's first writing system, developing not from another writing system but from proto-writing.

Correct about the difference between language and writing system, I frequently write English in the Perso-Arabic Script, for example. Yet, if different languages, Phoenician and Hebrew are both of the same language complex, the Caananite Languages.

Sound based or ideographic?

ruveyn

Here an example: Farsi and Arabic. the Farsi isn't the same as the Arabic language, in fact the Arabic is a Semitic language, while Farsi belongs to the Indo-European tree, so they are totally two different languages in term of sound based, terminology and everything. They only share the Arabic script and some mutually-imported words. The Persians had their own distinct script before the invasion of the Arabs. Later, the Arabs and especially the Ummayads have imposed Arabic on the Persian people as a primary language as an attempt to kill its language, the Farsi was dying during the Ummayad Caliphate but a Persian 'linguistic' revolution revived the language and adopted the Arabic script for it, which was the only known script back then, but the language is still closest to the old Persian except visually.

The Turkish has also undergone such major changes in scripting, from old Turkish scripts , to Arabic script and finally the Latin script.

So the question here (a) whether the Old Hebrew is the same Language of the Phoenician language (in sound based, words, terminology, script....~100% identical) or (b) they're two languages originated from the same parent language, (c) or they just had their own very old spoken language yet adopted the Phoenician script just to write it. There's no certain answer because the Hebrews' origin itself is still uncertain.

I can recall two theories:
1- The ancient Hebrews were newcomer nomads to the land of Canaan (palestine, lebanon..) and were primitive compared to the Canaanite city-based civilization back then , (c) would make more sense with this theory .
2- The ancient Hebrews were just Canaanites and were the descendants of a very specific El-fanatic Canaanite sect which became later a distinct religion (EL is the god-king of the Canaanites, also it's the other name of Yahweh ). I read once a very interesting paper about a sectarian conflict between Pro-El Canaanites and Pro-Ba'al (son of EL) Canaanites , the evidences of polytheism to the monotheism transition in the Bibles and in the Hebrew history would support this theory. It is also said that Tyr city (King Hiram) was of those pro-EL folks, which may explain the historical close relations between King Hiram and the ancient Jews, why did help them to build the first Temple? Was it just for economical gain or they had something very in common ? Phoenician kings were never supreme rulers and their rule were limited by council of elders and mercants. Anyways (a) or (b) would make more sense with this theory.

Argument number 2 makes very good sense.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

That's quite interesting, I aware of the Heiroglyph origin of all Semitic languages, but Heiroglyph was logogram, while the Canaanite languages (and Phoenician probably the first of them) were the first sound-based alphabet.

Sumerian Cuneiform is logosyllabic, like the modern Japanese orthography, while Egyptian Hieroglyphs is logoconsonantal, where logograms represent most common morphemes and glyphs standing for 3, 2 or 1 consonants represent affixes, loanwords and less common morphemes.

There you go again, assuming the existence of God. If you want to discuss history, stick the -facts- as best as they can be know. God is the object of a belief, not an observed fact. People who claim they have "seen" or "heard" God usually end up taking pschotropic drugs.

ruveyn

I think you misread my post.
I was talking about the sort of people who believe that the Hebrew's alphabet had been handed down from heaven to them.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Why should we take the beliefs of crazy people seriously?

ruveyn

That was kinda my point.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer