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73-609: Ancient North Arabian ( ANA ) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Arabia and south Syria from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. The term "Ancient North Arabian" is defined negatively. It refers to all of the South Semitic scripts except Ancient South Arabian (ASA) regardless of their genetic relationships. Many scholars believed that

146-465: A featural system uses symbols representing sub-phonetic elements—e.g. those traits that can be used to distinguish between and analyse a language's phonemes, such as their voicing or place of articulation . The only prominent example of a featural system is the hangul script used to write Korean, where featural symbols are combined into letters, which are in turn joined into syllabic blocks. Many scholars, including John DeFrancis (1911–2009), reject

219-529: A "South-Central" group which together with Aramaic forms Central Semitic. The Deir Alla Inscription and Samalian have been identified as language varieties falling outside Aramaic proper but with some similarities to it, possibly in an "Aramoid" or "Syrian" subgroup. It is clear that the Taymanitic script expressed a distinct linguistic variety that is not Arabic and not closely related to Hismaic or Safaitic, while it can tentatively be suggested that it

292-576: A characterization of hangul as a featural system—with arguments including that Korean writers do not themselves think in these terms when writing—or question the viability of Sampson's category altogether. As hangul was consciously created by literate experts, Daniels characterizes it as a "sophisticated grammatogeny " —a writing system intentionally designed for a specific purpose, as opposed to having evolved gradually over time. Other grammatogenies include shorthands developed by professionals and constructed scripts created by hobbyists and creatives, like

365-408: A common ancestor to the exclusion of ASA is also something which has yet to be demonstrated. The hypothesis that all ANA alphabets derive from a single ancestor gave rise to the idea that the languages which these scripts express constitute a linguistic unity, a so-called ANA language . As a hypothetical language or group of languages, Ancient North Arabian forms one branch of the North Arabian group,

438-416: A component related to the character's meaning, and a component that gives a hint for its pronunciation. A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent either syllables or moras —a unit of prosody that is often but not always a syllable in length. The graphemes used in syllabaries are called syllabograms . Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, since

511-545: A different status as such, rather being a normal sequence of a short vowel and a glide. Suchard proposes that: "*s, both from original *s and original *ṯ, then shifted further back to a postalveolar *š, while deaffrication of *ts and *dz to *s and *z gave these phonemes their Hebrew values, as well as merging original *dz with original *ḏ. In fact, original *s may have been realized as anything between [s] and [ʃ] ; both values are attested in foreign transcriptions of early Northwest Semitic languages". In Proto-Northwest Semitic

584-481: A different symbol is needed for every syllable. Japanese, for example, contains about 100 moras, which are represented by moraic hiragana . By contrast, English features complex syllable structures with a relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters —making for a total of 15–16,000 distinct syllables. Some syllabaries have larger inventories: the Yi script contains 756 different symbols. An alphabet

657-418: A five-fold classification of writing systems, comprising pictographic scripts, ideographic scripts, analytic transitional scripts, phonetic scripts, and alphabetic scripts. In practice, writing systems are classified according to the primary type of symbols used, and typically include exceptional cases where symbols function differently. For example, logographs found within phonetic systems like English include

730-746: A form of the Aramaic language , spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region of the Levant, northern regions of the Arabian peninsula and southern regions of Anatolia, and gradually drove most of the other Northwest Semitic languages to extinction. The ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and parts of the Tanakh are written in it. Hebrew was preserved, however, as a Jewish liturgical language and language of scholarship, and resurrected in

803-427: A huge area from southern Syria to Yemen. In 1937, Fred V. Winnett divided those known at the time into five rough categories A, B, C, D, E. In 1951, some 9000 more inscriptions were recorded in south-west Saudi Arabia which have been given the name 'Southern Thamudic'. Further study by Winnett showed that the texts he had called 'Thamudic A' represent a clearly defined script and language and he therefore removed them from

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876-467: A separate branch of Northwest Semitic (alongside Canaanite) or a dialect of Amorite. Central Semitic is a proposed intermediate group comprising Northwest Semitic and Arabic . Central Semitic is either a subgroup of West Semitic or a top-level division of Semitic alongside East Semitic and South Semitic . SIL Ethnologue in its system of classification (of living languages only) eliminates Northwest Semitic entirely by joining Canaanite and Arabic in

949-408: A set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script . The concept of the grapheme is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. Likewise, as many sonically distinct phones may function as the same phoneme depending on speaker, dialect, and context, many visually distinct glyphs (or graphs ) may be identified as the same grapheme. These variant glyphs are known as

1022-542: A spoken language, this functions as literacy in a second, acquired language. A single language (e.g. Hindustani ) can be written using multiple writing systems, and a writing system can also represent multiple languages. For example, Chinese characters have been used to write multiple languages throughout the Sinosphere —including the Vietnamese language from at least the 13th century, until their replacement with

1095-893: Is U+10A80–U+10A9F: Writing system Writing systems are generally classified according to how its symbols, called graphemes , generally relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systems, which include alphabets and syllabaries , use graphemes that correspond to sounds in the corresponding spoken language . Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes , and are typically classified into three categories. In general, pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, while abjads only have letters representing consonants, and abugidas use characters corresponding to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras . By contrast, logographic (alternatively morphographic ) writing systems use graphemes that represent

1168-493: Is a set of letters , each of which generally represent one of the segmental phonemes in a spoken language. However, these correspondences are rarely uncomplicated, and spelling is often mediated by other factors than just which sounds are used by a speaker. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta , the names for the first two letters in the Greek alphabet . An abjad is an alphabet whose letters only represent

1241-438: Is a visual and tactile notation representing language . The symbols used in writing correspond systematically to functional units of either a spoken or signed language . This definition excludes a broader class of symbolic markings, such as drawings and maps. A text is any instance of written material, including transcriptions of spoken material. The act of composing and recording a text may be referred to as writing , and

1314-468: Is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. In an abugida, there may be a sign for k with no vowel, but also one for ka (if a is the inherent vowel), and ke is written by modifying the ka sign in a consistent way with how la would be modified to get le . In many abugidas, modification consists of

1387-451: Is defined as a potentially permanent means of recording information, then these systems do not qualify as writing at all, since the symbols disappear as soon as they are used. Instead, these transient systems serve as signals . Writing systems may be characterized by how text is graphically divided into lines, which are to be read in sequence: For example, English and many other Western languages are written in horizontal rows that begin at

1460-414: Is even less dating evidence in the case of Hismaic. Safaitic is the name given to the alphabet and variety of Old Arabic used by tens of thousands of ancient nomads in the deserts of what are now southern Syria, north-eastern Jordan, and northern Saudi Arabia. Occasionally, Safaitic texts are found further afield, in western Iraq, Lebanon, and even at Pompeii . They are thought to have been carved between

1533-431: Is marked by a prefixed *n(a)-. It is mediopassive which is a grammatical voice that subsumes the meanings of both the middle voice and the passive voice. In other words, it expresses a range of meanings where the subject is the patient of the verb, e.g. passive, medial, and reciprocal. The stem of the suffix conjugation is *naqṭal-, and the stem of the prefix conjugations is *-nqaṭil-; as is the case with stative G-stem verbs,

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1606-586: Is no evidence of contact between China and the literate peoples of the Near East, and the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches for representing aspects of sound and meaning are distinct. The Mesoamerican writing systems , including Olmec and the Maya script , were also invented independently. The first known alphabetic writing appeared before 2000 BC, and was used to write a Semitic language spoken in

1679-559: Is of fundamental importance in human history as the source and ancestor of the Greek alphabet , the later Latin alphabet , the Aramaic ( Square Hebrew ), Syriac , and Arabic writing systems, Germanic runes , and ultimately Cyrillic . From the 8th century BC, the use of Imperial Aramaic by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (935–608 BC) and the succeeding Neo-Babylonian Empire (612–539 BC) and Achaemenid Empire (539–332 BC),

1752-926: Is spoken in modern dialects with an estimated one million fluent speakers by endangered indigenous populations scattered throughout the Middle East, most commonly by the Assyrians , Gnostic Mandeans , the Arameans (Syriacs) of Maaloula and Jubb'adin , and Mizrahi Jews . There is also an Aramaic substratum in Levantine and Mesopotamian Arabic . Phonologically , Ugaritic lost the sound *ṣ́ , replacing it with /sˁ/ ( ṣ ) (the same shift occurred in Canaanite and Akkadian ). That this same sound became /ʕ/ in Aramaic (although in Ancient Aramaic, it

1825-650: Is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Geʽez script used in some contexts. It was coined as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels ( b.  1951 ), who borrowed it from the Ethiopian languages. Originally proposed as a category by Geoffrey Sampson ( b.  1944 ),

1898-575: Is the alphabet which seems to have been used by the inhabitants of the oasis known in antiquity as Dūma and later as Dumat Al-Jandal and al-Jawf. It lies in northern Saudi Arabia at the south-eastern end of the Wādī Sirḥān which leads up to the oasis of Azraq in north-eastern Jordan. According to the Assyrian annals Dūma was the seat of successive queens of the Arabs, some of whom were also priestesses, in

1971-477: Is the basic, most common, unmarked stem. The G-stem expresses events. The vowel of the prefix of the prefix conjugations in Proto-Northwest Semitic was *-a- and the stem was *-qṭul- or *-qṭil-, as in *ya-qṭul-u 'he will kill', while the stem of the suffix conjugation had two *a vowels, as in *qaṭal-a 'he has killed'. The G stative is like the fientive but expressing states instead of events. For

2044-614: Is the same as that of the D-stem, and similarly, the participle is to be reconstructed as *musaqṭilum. All of the stems listed here, except the N-stem, could bring forth further derivation. The "internal passive stems" (Gp, Dp, and Cp; Hebrew passive qal , puʕal , and hɔp̄ʕal ) aren't marked by affixes, but express their passivity through a different vowel pattern. The Gp prefix conjugation can be reconstructed as *yu-qṭal-u 'he will be killed'. Reflexive or reciprocal meanings can be expressed by

2117-996: Is used in various models either as a synonym for "morphographic", or as a specific subtype where the basic unit of meaning written is the word . Even with morphographic writing, there remains a correspondence between graphemes and the sounds of speech, but the pronunciation values of the units of meaning is not what is being encoded firstly by the writing system. Many classifications define three primary categories, where phonographic systems are subdivided into syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental ) systems. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras . Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes—or more technically to diaphonemes . Alphabets are generally classified into three subtypes, with abjads having letters for consonants , pure alphabets having letters for both consonants and vowels , and abugidas having characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. David Diringer proposed

2190-440: Is used throughout the study of writing systems, the precise interpretations of and definitions for concepts often vary depending on the theoretical model employed by the researcher. A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements which, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. All writing systems require

2263-428: The allographs of a grapheme: For example, the lowercase letter ⟨a⟩ may be represented by the double-storey | a | and single-storey | ɑ | shapes, or others written in cursive, block, or printed styles. The choice of a particular allograph may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument used, the stylistic choice of the writer, the preceding and succeeding graphemes in

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2336-923: The Late Bronze Age , which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic , and by the Iron Age by Sutean and the Canaanite languages ( Hebrew , Phoenician / Punic , Edomite and Moabite ). The term was coined by Carl Brockelmann in 1908, who separated Fritz Hommel 's 1883 classification of Semitic languages into Northwest ( Canaanite and Aramaic ), East Semitic ( Akkadian , its Assyrian and Babylonian dialects, Eblaite ) and Southwest ( Arabic , Old South Arabian languages and Abyssinian ). Brockelmann's Canaanite sub-group includes Ugaritic , Phoenician and Hebrew . Some scholars now regard Ugaritic either as belonging to

2409-495: The Latin alphabet and Chinese characters , glyphs are made up of lines or strokes. Linear writing is most common, but there are non-linear writing systems where glyphs consist of other types of marks, such as in cuneiform and Braille . Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya script were often painted in linear outline form, but in formal contexts they were carved in bas-relief . The earliest examples of writing are linear: while cuneiform

2482-656: The Levant and Mesopotamia . The Taymanitic alphabet is probably mentioned as early as c. 800 BC when the regent of Carchemish (on what is now the Turkish-Syrian border) claimed to have learned it. About the same time an Assyrian official west of the Euphrates reported that he had ambushed a caravan of the people of Taymāʾ and Sabaʾ (an ancient South Arabian kingdom, Biblical Sheba ) because it had tried to avoid paying tolls. There are two Taymanitic inscriptions dated to

2555-662: The Sinai Peninsula . Most of the world's alphabets either descend directly from this Proto-Sinaitic script , or were directly inspired by its design. Descendants include the Phoenician alphabet ( c.  1050 BC ), and its child in the Greek alphabet ( c.  800 BC ). The Latin alphabet , which descended from the Greek alphabet, is by far the most common script used by writing systems. Several approaches have been taken to classify writing systems, with

2628-560: The Tengwar script designed by J. R. R. Tolkien to write the Elven languages he also constructed. Many of these feature advanced graphic designs corresponding to phonological properties. The basic unit of writing in these systems can map to anything from phonemes to words. It has been shown that even the Latin script has sub-character features. In linear writing , which includes systems like

2701-408: The ampersand ⟨&⟩ and the numerals ⟨0⟩ , ⟨1⟩ , etc.—which correspond to specific words ( and , zero , one , etc.) and not to the underlying sounds. A logogram is a character that represents a morpheme within a language. Chinese characters represent the only major logographic writing systems still in use: they have historically been used to write

2774-404: The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (with these graphemes corresponding to various phonemes), punctuation marks (mostly non-phonemic), and a handful of other symbols, such as numerals. Writing systems may be regarded as complete if they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system cannot represent

2847-622: The varieties of Chinese , as well as Japanese , Korean , Vietnamese , and other languages of the Sinosphere . As each character represents a single unit of meaning, many different logograms are required to write all the words of a language. If the logograms do not adequately represent all meanings and words of a language, written language can be confusing or ambiguous to the reader. Logograms are sometimes conflated with ideograms , symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas; most linguists now reject this characterization: Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, which include

2920-709: The 19th century, with modern adaptations, to become the Modern Hebrew language of the State of Israel . After the Muslim conquests of the 7th century, Arabic began to gradually replace Aramaic throughout the region. Classical Syriac-Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Assyrian Church of the East , Syriac Orthodox Church , Chaldean Catholic Church , and other churches of Syriac Christians . It

2993-478: The 20th century due to Western influence. Several scripts used in the Philippines and Indonesia, such as Hanunoo , are traditionally written with lines moving away from the writer, from bottom to top, but are read horizontally left to right; however, Kulitan , another Philippine script, is written top-to-bottom in columns arranged right-to-left. Ogham is written bottom-to-top and read vertically, commonly on

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3066-638: The Ancient South Arabian alphabet. Hismaic is the name given to the Old Arabic texts carved largely by nomads in the Ḥismā desert of what is now southern Jordan and north-west Saudi Arabia, though they are occasionally found in other places such as northern Jordan and parts of northern Saudi Arabia outside the Ḥismā. They are thought to date from roughly the same period as the Safaitic, i.e. first century BC to fourth century AD, though there

3139-522: The Canaanite group, the series of Semitic interdental fricatives become sibilants : *ð ( ḏ ), *θ ( ṯ ) and *θ̣ ( ṱ ) became /z/ , /ʃ/ ( š ) and /sˤ/ ( ṣ ) respectively. The effect of this sound shift can be seen by comparing the following words: Proto-Northwest Semitic had three contrastive vowel qualities and a length distinction, resulting in six vocalic phonemes: *a, *ā, *i, *ī, *u, and *ū. While *aw, *ay, *iw, *iy, *uw, and *uy are often referred to as diphthongs, they do not seem to have had

3212-494: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the 20th century. In the first several decades of modern linguistics as a scientific discipline, linguists often characterized writing as merely the technology used to record speech—which was treated as being of paramount importance, for what was seen as the unique potential for its study to further the understanding of human cognition. While certain core terminology

3285-603: The Thamudic 'pending file' and gave them the name 'Taymanite', which was later changed to 'Taymanitic'. The same was done for 'Thamudic E' by Geraldine M.H. King, and this is now known as 'Hismaic'. However, Thamudic B, C, D and Southern Thamudic still await detailed study. Old North Arabian script was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for Ancient North Arabian

3358-635: The act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading . The relationship between writing and language more broadly has been the subject of philosophical analysis as early as Aristotle (384–322 BC). While the use of language is universal across human societies, writing is not—having first emerged much more recently, and only having been independently invented in a handful of locations throughout history. While most spoken languages have not been written, all written languages have been predicated on an existing spoken language. When those with signed languages as their first language read writing associated with

3431-415: The addition of a vowel sign; other possibilities include rotation of the basic sign, or addition of diacritics . While true syllabaries have one symbol per syllable and no systematic visual similarity, the graphic similarity in most abugidas stems from their origins as abjads—with added symbols comprising markings for different vowel added onto a pre-existing base symbol. The largest single group of abugidas

3504-566: The addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c.  800 BC . Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic and Malay: the term derives from the traditional order of the Arabic alphabet 's letters 'alif , bā' , jīm , dāl , though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic . An abugida

3577-583: The consonantal sounds of a language. They were the first alphabets to develop historically, with most that have been developed used to write Semitic languages , and originally deriving from the Proto-Sinaitic script . The morphology of Semitic languages is particularly suited to this approach, as the denotation of vowels is generally redundant. Optional markings for vowels may be used for some abjads, but are generally limited to applications like education. Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through

3650-694: The corner of a stone. The ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet was also written from bottom to top. Northwest Semitic languages Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant . It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age . It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age . The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic , dating to

3723-523: The earliest true writing, closely followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs . It is generally agreed that the two systems were invented independently from one another; both evolved from proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3200 BC, with the earliest coherent texts dated c.  2600 BC . Chinese characters emerged independently in the Yellow River valley c.  1200 BC . There

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3796-402: The eighth and seventh centuries BC. Hasaitic is the name given to the inscriptions — mostly gravestones — which have been found in the huge oasis of Al-Hasa in north-eastern Saudi Arabia at sites like Thāj and Qatīf, with a few from more distant locations. They are carved in what may be an ANA dialect but expressed in a slightly adapted form of another member of the South Semitic script family,

3869-908: The emphatics were articulated with pharyngealization. Its shift to backing (as opposed to Proto-Semitic glottalization of emphatics) has been considered a Central Semitic innovation. According to Faber, the assimilation *-ṣt->-ṣṭ- in the Dt stem in Hebrew (hiṣṭaddēḳ ‘he declared himself righteous’) suggests backing rather than glottalization. The same assimilation is attested in Aramaic (yiṣṭabba ‘he will be moistened’). Three cases can be reconstructed for Proto-Northwest Semitic nouns ( nominative , accusative , genitive ), two genders (masculine, feminine) and three numbers (single, dual, plural). Proto-Northwest Semitic pronouns had 2 genders and 3 grammatical cases . nominative Reconstruction of Proto-Northwest Semitic numbers. The G fientive or G-stem (Hebrew qal )

3942-429: The first century BC and the fourth century AD, though these limits can be no more than suggestions based on the fact that none of the approximately 35,000 texts known so far seems to mention anything earlier or later than these limits. Taymanitic is the name given to the variety of Northwest Semitic and ANA script used in the oasis of Tayma . This was an important stopping point on the caravan route from South Arabia to

4015-424: The form inherited from Proto-Semitic (i.e. *yuqaṭṭil-u), or as *-a-, which is somewhat supported by evidence from Ugaritic and Hebrew (*yaqaṭṭil-u). The C-stem (Hebrew hip̄ʕil ) more often than not expresses a causative meaning. The most likely reconstructions are *haqṭil- (from older *saqṭil-) for the stem of the suffix conjugation and *-saqṭil- for the stem of the prefix conjugations. The reconstructed prefix vowel

4088-473: The hand is to the right side of the pen. The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew , came to be written right-to-left . Scripts that historically incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically in columns arranged from right to left, while a horizontal writing direction in rows from left to right became widely adopted only in

4161-580: The late third millennium to the mid-second millennium BC and the language of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions dated to the first half of the second millennium otherwise constitute the earliest traces of Northwest Semitic, the first Northwest Semitic language attested in full being Ugaritic in the 14th century BC. During the early 1st millennium, the Phoenician language was spread throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists , most notably to Carthage in today's Tunisia . The Phoenician alphabet

4234-519: The mid-sixth century BC, since they mention the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus (556–539 BC), who spent ten years of his seventeen-year reign in Taymāʾ. Thamudic is a name invented by nineteenth-century scholars for large numbers of inscriptions in ANA alphabets which have not yet been properly studied. It does not imply that they were carved by members of the ancient tribe of Thamūd. These texts are found over

4307-441: The most common based on what unit of language is represented by each unit of writing. At the highest level, writing systems are either phonographic ( lit.   ' sound writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of sound in a language, or morphographic ( lit.   ' form writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of meaning, such as words or morphemes . The term logographic ( lit.   ' word writing ' )

4380-412: The oases (Dadanitic, Dumaitic, Taymanitic) and by the nomads (Hismaic, Safaitic, Thamudic B, C, D, and possibly Southern Thamudic aka Thamudic F) of central and northern Arabia . Dadanitic was the alphabet used by the inhabitants of the ancient oasis of Dadan (Biblical Dedān, modern Al-`Ula in north-west Saudi Arabia), probably some time during the second half of the first millennium BC. Dumaitic

4453-647: The other being Proto-Arabic . They are distinguished from each other by the definite article , which in Arabic is ʾal- , but in ANA is h- . They belong to a different branch of the Semitic languages than the Ancient South Arabian languages . The validity of this hypothesis has been called into question. This is particularly the case for Taymanitic , which has been determined to be a Northwest Semitic language. Safaitic and Hismaic are also now considered forms of Old Arabic due to shared features. The Ancient North Arabian scripts were used both in

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4526-482: The prefix conjugation of stative roots, the vowel of the prefix was *-i- and it contained an *a vowel, e.g. *yi-kbad-u 'he will become heavy', while the second vowel of the suffix conjugation was either *-i-, as in *kabid-a 'he is/was/will be heavy', or *-u-, as in *ʕamuq-a 'it is/was/will be deep'. Whether the G-stem stative suffix conjugation has *i or *u in the stem is lexically determined. The N-stem (Hebrew nip̄ʕal )

4599-507: The prefix vowel is *-i-, resulting in forms like *yi-nqaṭil-u 'he will be killed'. The D-stem (Hebrew piʕel ) is marked by gemination of the second radical in all forms. It has a range of different meanings, mostly transitive. The stem of the suffix conjugation is *qaṭṭil-, and the same stem is used for the prefix conjugations. It is not clear whether the Proto-Northwest-Semitic prefix vowel should be reconstructed as *-u-,

4672-483: The script. Braille is a non-linear adaptation of the Latin alphabet that completely abandoned the Latin forms. The letters are composed of raised bumps on the writing substrate , which can be leather, stiff paper, plastic or metal. There are also transient non-linear adaptations of the Latin alphabet, including Morse code , the manual alphabets of various sign languages , and semaphore, in which flags or bars are positioned at prescribed angles. However, if "writing"

4745-411: The spoken language in its entirety. Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing systems consisting of ideograms and early mnemonic symbols. The best-known examples include: Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human history. The first writing systems emerged during the Early Bronze Age , with the cuneiform writing system used to write Sumerian generally considered to be

4818-451: The text, the time available for writing, the intended audience, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting. Orthography ( lit.   ' correct writing ' ) refers to the rules and conventions for writing shared by a community, including the ordering of and relationship between graphemes. Particularly for alphabets , orthography includes the concept of spelling . For example, English orthography includes

4891-444: The top of a page and end at the bottom, with each row read from left to right. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left, with the animal and human glyphs turned to face the beginning of the line. The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally from side to side, or vertically. Prior to standardization, alphabetic writing could be either left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL). It

4964-489: The units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes . Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands respectively. A writing system also includes any punctuation used to aid readers and encode additional meaning, including that which would be communicated in speech via qualities of rhythm, tone, pitch, accent, inflection, or intonation. According to most contemporary definitions, writing

5037-452: The various ANA alphabets were derived from the ASA script, mainly because the latter was employed by a major civilization and exhibited more angular features. Others believed that the ANA and ASA scripts shared a common ancestor from which they both developed in parallel. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the various ANA scripts descend from the monumental ASA alphabet, but that they collectively share

5110-560: Was more closely related to Northwest Semitic. The time period for the split of Northwest Semitic from Proto-Semitic or from other Semitic groups is uncertain. Richard C. Steiner suggested in 2011 that the earliest attestation of Northwest Semitic is to be found in snake spells from the Egyptian Pyramid Texts , dating to the mid-third millennium BC. Amorite personal names and words in Akkadian and Egyptian texts from

5183-435: Was most commonly written boustrophedonically : starting in one (horizontal) direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. The right-to-left direction of the Phoenician alphabet initially stabilized after c.  800 BC . Left-to-right writing has an advantage that, since most people are right-handed , the hand does not interfere with text being written—which might not yet have dried—since

5256-409: Was not linear, its Sumerian ancestors were. Non-linear systems are not composed of lines, no matter what instrument is used to write them. Cuneiform was likely the earliest non-linear writing. Its glyphs were formed by pressing the end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not by tracing lines in the clay with the stylus as had been done previously. The result was a radical transformation of the appearance of

5329-413: Was written with qoph ), suggests that Ugaritic is not the parent language of the group. An example of this sound shift can be seen in the word for earth : Ugaritic /ʔarsˁ/ ( ’arṣ ), Punic /ʔarsˁ/ ( ’arṣ ), Tiberian Hebrew /ʔɛrɛsˁ/ ( ’ereṣ ), Biblical Hebrew /ʔarsˁ/ ( ’arṣ ) and Aramaic /ʔarʕaː/ ( ’ar‘ā’ ). The vowel shift from *aː to /oː/ distinguishes Canaanite from Ugaritic. Also, in

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