Re: Mandombe

----- Original Message -----
From: Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>

> Den 10. jan. 2007 kl. 18.28 skrev Paul Bennett:
> >
> > I've never heard [that Greek descended from Demotic] before.
> I meant (or should have meant) Egyptian writing, not Demotic.
I thought so, but I've encountered stranger theories in otherwise sane
people, so I thought it best
to check.

> Isn't
> there an agreement that all those Levantine scripts have Egyptian
> origins, then? There may be a handful of characters here and there
> that were taken up from Cuneiform or invented, but generally the
> source is Egyptian, that's what I have always heard. For most of
> the
> characters we know it's easy to find the Egyptian parallels as
> well,
> in Hieroglyphs and Hieratic as well as in Demotic. You are not
> suggesting that the Phoenicians invented the whole thing?
I'm suggesting a middle ground between a purely Egyptian origin (or
rather an origin in the Kemet
culture, since the developments appear to have started in the Sinai
peninsula, but by Semitic people)
and a purely a posteriori origin.

The post-Heiratic "Wadi el-Hol" script (the aforementioned "sister" to
Demotic) is clearly much
closer to an abjad than Heiratic is (and as mentioned seems to have
been used for a Semitic
language), but it retains the use of rebus and probably ideographic
determinatives.

The Canaanite script, in contrast, seems to be a true abjad, which is
a clear innovation, and I feel
it contains enough inspiration from other contemporaneous scripts of
the near and middle east that to
claim it as a "pure" descendant of Wadi el-Hol is asking for trouble.

Perhaps startlingly[*], it looks like the Canaanite script borrows the
letter forms of Wadi el-Hol,
but translates the Egyptian "names" of the letters semantically
(instead of retaining their sound
values), providing new "names" and thereby new sounds for the same
sounds. For instance the sign
"head", representing the biliteral /tp/ in Egyptian, was translated to
"head" in Canaanite (/ra?iS/)
with the sound /r/ (and the modern name /reS/ in Hebrew).

I'd rather regard Canaanite as the script equivalent of a pidgin -- in
terms of both the
simplification process as well as the merging of elements from several
sources. I wonder whether this
means I should consider the Phoenecian script a creole...?

[*]Though see also the use of Sumerograms in Akkadian, and other
languages.




Paul