Re: Thagojian Alphabet

On 5 Oct 2003 at 4:12, John Cowan wrote:

> Paul Bennett scripsit:
>
> > In the first column is the standard ASCIIfication of the
> > standard romanisation of each letter, followed by the
> > conventional phonetic reading of that letter, in X-Sampa. In
> > the ASCIIfication, the usual conventions apply: an single
> > quote after a letter should be read as an acute accent, and
> > a double quote should be read as a diaresis.
>
> Can you explain just how these letters map to Coptic?  Some equivalences
> are clear, but the /u/ in sixth position would be digamma, which AFAIK
> Coptic doesn't have.
To say it was "based on" Coptic was perhaps an oversimplification, and perhaps a
flat-out lie. It's found largely in northern Egypt, and around the mediteranean coast
up to the Holy Land. At it's core, it's based on Greek, with borrowings from both
Coptic and Hebrew. The position of {u} matches the position of digamma, but it's not
clear how the glyph (which looks like a roman "S") originated. No, seriously, even
IRL I don't remember exactly what happened.

Maybe the following table might help the reader come to their own conclusion about
the origin of the script. It includes the name of each character and the Unicode for
the source glyph, and the source script where it isn't Greek. Also, I missed "rou" out
of my previous list, due to a minor brain malfunction.

a   /A/    alpha  0391
b   /b/    beta   0392
g   /g/    gama   0393
d   /d/    delta  0394
e   /e/    ei     0395
u   /u/    ua     ???? Origin Unknown
ty  /t_j/  tyeta  0396
e'  /E/    e'i    0397
th  /T/    theta  0398
i   /i/    iota   0399
e"  /@/    e"da   05D9 From Hebrew
k   /k/    kapa   039A
l   /l/    lama   039B
m   /m/    mu     039C
n   /n/    nu     039D
n'  /N/    n'ai   05E2 From Hebrew
ky  /k_j/  kyei   039E
o   /o/    omi"   039F
p   /p/    pei    03A0
r   /r\/   rou    03A1
s   /s/    sima   03A3
lh  /K/    lhadi  05E6 From Hebrew
t   /t/    tou    03A4
i"  /1/    i"pyi  03A5
ph  /f/    phei   03A6
kh  /x/    khei   03A7
py  /p_j/  pyei   03A8
o'  /O/    o'me"  03A9
s'  /S/    s'ei   03E2 From Coptic
h   /h/    hori"  03E8 From Coptic
q   /?/    qori"  03EC From Coptic

Note that these are the dictionary forms of the names. In ordinary discourse, they'd
usually be Gender 4 (inanimate) or Gender 5 (abstractions) depending on context,
taking either a final -n or -p.




Paul Bennett

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