Welcome to the History of the World Podcast. My name is Chris Hasler.

And you're listening to volume 2, The Ancient World. This is episode 12. The Story of Writing of Writing Part 2

Alphabet. Oh, The discussion of alphabets will link us back to the ninth episode on the Phoenicians because it is the Phoenicians who are

accredited with the creation of the first true alphabet, a writing system with 22 symbols representing consonant sounds. There were no

vowel sounds and this was not unusual in early writing systems.

Alphabets with no vowels are called abjad alphabets

to distinguish them from other alphabets.

This has often caused problems when such scripts have been rediscovered in the modern age

and we are guessing how particular words would be pronounced.

So the Israelite God Yare

would be a terrific example of this problem

and we investigated this during episode 10.

The name Yawhere is actually a verbal translation of the

tetragrammaton revealed to Moses as four consonant letters, which in the later Latin alphabet are Y H W H. H. H. H.

H. This has been vocalized as Yawe and in another respect it has been vocalized

it has been vocalized as Jehovah. We can see that kind of confusion with the translation of

Abjad alphabet words in modern society. We do not have a recording of how the word was pronounced, therefore we have to insert our own

vowel sounds.

The Phoenician alphabet is believed to have derived from a form of writing which emerged from Egypt

where we know that they used Egyptian hieroglyphs. Initially it would seem improbable that this would be the case with Levantine languages

being Semitic and unrelated to Egyptian language but we do have evidence of a proto-Sainitic writing system which appears

to be a link between the two, which demonstrates that Egyptian cultural influence was creeping into Levantine societies

...