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Saying that what he wrote about the changes is "dubious" is just pure nonsense. I think he knew a lot more about these languages than the jerk who said his ideas are dubious. Jim in Mission, KS 2602:304:CDB7:31A0:B032:FD82:B676:3BB4 (talk) 22:05, 26 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

the character W in Phoenician is written in Wikipedia to be pronounced as S (in English) or as šīn. To the least of my opinion (and I speak Old Hebrew, very similar to Phoenician origin) - the pronunciation is "Sh" (like Shin, the Hebrew character). The character itself is said to sound like Shen, which is in Hebrew is a tooth, and obviously pronounced as Shen and not Sen or what have you. This is to the least of my opinion, but I am pretty positive about it MarkBlonski (talk) 07:41, 13 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

also, in the table of the alphabets- in Cyrillic there is a missing character for the character Ts , it should have the Cyrillic Ч (in Hebrew צ) MarkBlonski (talk) 08:35, 13 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The last paragraph of section "Origins" claims:

The German philologist Max Müller (1823–1900) believed that the Phoenician alphabet was derived from the Ancient South Arabian script during the 9th-century BC rule of the Minaeans over parts of the Eastern Mediterranean.

There are a number of problems with this edit.

1) there never was a Minaean rule over parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, the kingdom of Ma'in was in todays Yemen experienced the hight of its power centuries later and never expanded significantly to the north.

2) The source is a non-scientific paper that was first published in the magazin "Dahesh Voice" and does not cite its sources properly.

The whole passage in said paper goes like this:

Some experts believe that the Phoenician script was derived from Arabic Musnad. German historian, Max Muller (1823-1900) thought it was adapted from Musnad during the 9th century B.C. when the Minaean Kingdom of Yemen controlled areas of the Eastern Mediterranean shores. Syrian scholar of the 19 th century, Shakīb ´Arsalān shares this view.18

The citation: 18. Mādūn, Muḥammad `Alī. Khatt al-Jazm ibn al-Khatt al-Musnad. 1989. Dar Ṭlās lil-Dirāsāt wa al-Terjamah wa al-Nashr. Damascus. First Edition.

So the only source of the claim is a paper from 1989 in Arabic; I was not able to find a single trace of it.

3) Max Müller was one of Englands leading experts on Sanskrit in the late 19th century. He was born in todays Germany, but moved to England at the age of 29 to spend the rest of his life there. I could not find a work concerning the Phoenicians, but in his 1882 lecture "India, What can it teach us" he mentiones the phoenician alphabet in this way:

Every one who writes a letter owes his alphabet to the Romans and Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learned it in Egypt.

To me this does not sound as if he believed that the Phoenicians inherited their script from southern Arabia.

4) The edit was made by an IP whose edit list show in total 14 (fourteen) edits; there are no signs of expertise or training in the field.

To sum up: the source is bad, the claim is of minor importance and most probably wrong and the editor most probably had no clue of what he was talking about. Therefore I will delete the edit. greetings, Uwaga budowa (talk) 13:22, 20 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Is not an entirely different system: it’s Phoenician system renamed to Paleo Hebrew following the founding of Israel in 1948. If it is going to be listed as a child system of Phoenician, there needs to be a real discussion on here about what makes it its own distinct system, like the other child systems. Otherwise it’s the same exact system just with a different name. And that is political and not factually based argument. Israeli revisionism is changing the name and contributions of ancient Phoenician culture and language. Use of the term "Paleo-Hebrew alphabet" is due to a 1954 suggestion by Solomon Birnbaum, who argued that "[to apply the term Phoenician [from Northern Canaan, today's Lebanon] to the script of the Hebrews [from Southern Canaan, today's Israel-Palestine] is hardly suitable". Lebanesebebe123 (talk) 02:14, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.google.com/search?q=Wilhelm+Gesenius+Canaanite+to+Hebrew+alphabet+Chart&oq=Wilhelm+Gesenius+Canaanite+to+Hebrew+alphabet+Chart+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigATIHCAUQIRigATIHCAYQIRiPAtIBCDc5NThqMGo3qAIUsAIB&client=ms-android-tmus-us-rvc3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 Ameninhat (talk) 21:09, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you're referring to those "vowels" depicted at the bottom of the table, those are the Hebrew niqqud vocalic diacritics. They are not attested in Phoenician and are a later innovation. Il Qathar (talk) 15:41, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The 1830s work of Wilhelm Gesenius, which was purposely omitted/excluded by Gottigen University faction founders of Nazism, shows that the so called Canaanite/Phoenician (Western Canaanite) alphabet did/does have vowels, from which Greek was derived. Ameninhat (talk) 00:22, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Greek "H" is derived from a Phoenician consonant, and only eventually it became a vowel. The ʔalep was a glottal stop (again, a consonant), adopted as an "A" by the Greeks. "O" was derived from the consonant ʕayin. The other two, yod and waw, are semi-consonants /j/ and /w/, respectively, and were adopted by Greeks for the vocalic sounds of iota and ypsilon. This already known, but none of those are vowels in the Phoenician script, which is simply not an alphabet but an abjad (a consonantal script).

A study from 1830's doesn't add to what has been extensively studied ever since, with increasing more evidence than Gesenius ever imagined. Il Qathar (talk) 15:38, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I know it is an old version but, some times, an old computer is all you can have when working at so many different places. It is strange the fact that hieroglyphs are perfectly displayed on the Egyptian hieroglyphs article.

I had to use Mozilla Firefox 101.0.1 (64-bit) to solve the issue (which is old, too).

Ironically, most of the fonts I installed are provided by the Google Fonts project.

George Rodney Maruri Game (talk) 23:55, 22 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"According to Herodotus, the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet—phoinikeia grammata 'Phoenician letters'—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet. Herodotus claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. He estimates that Cadmus lived 1600 years before his time, while the historical adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was barely 350 years before Herodotus."

-- Wadjmose (~1500BC), son of Thutmose I, is the earliest reference to a Cadmus. Wadj in Wadjmose is mistranslated from the Snake Goddess Wadjet instead of the correct snake goddess Kadesh (with an egg/s); but he would correspond to the earlier Cadmus, son of Ogyges, and not the Sidonian Prince.

The timeline for the Sidonian Prince, son of Agenor, who went to Thebes, Greece, is that he was a contemporary of Amenhotep III(1391–1353 BC), while it was still under control of the Egyptians. This timeline would refer to Linear B as the Phoenician Alphabet of Cadmus; The undeciphered Cypro-Minoan could also be considered a lesser candidate for this timeline.

Note: Agenor is a near name match to Thutmose 2, Aa-Kheper-eN-Re; he was probably named after Thutmose 2, who most likely conquered the City of Sidon; His son Thutmose III also conquered the Phoenicians. 150.195.202.73 (talk) 14:59, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]