Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

A-Z 671
is made up purely of consonants (usually three consonants), between
which different patterns of vowels, representing different grammatical
inflexions, are interdigitated.
(Sampson, 1985, p. 85)
Nevertheless, it is possible to indicate vowel value in two ways: (1) some consonant
letters can be used also to indicate vowels, and these are referred to as matres lectionis,
‘mothers of reading’; (2) tiny dots and dashes above, below, or within the consonant
letters can be used to indicate pronunciation very precisely. This is known as pointing,
and is used in modern Israel, for instance, to assist learner readers. The Arabic version of
Semitic script, which, unlike modern Hebrew, has a cursive form, i.e. the letter shapes
have been adapted so that whole words can be written without taking the pen from the
paper, can be written down almost as quickly as shorthand because of the absence of
letters for vowels. Semitic scripts are written from right to left.
The Arabic and modern Hebrew alphabets descend from one of two traditions of
forming Semitic letter shapes, namely the eastern or Aramaic tradition. The other is
known as the western or Canaanite tradition, and this was used by the Phoenicians. It is
almost certain that it was this version of the Semitic alphabet which gave rise to the
Greek, since the Phoenicians were the only Semitic people who traded and hence
travelled overseas, and since the Greeks, who had colonies in ancient Phoenicia, called
their alphabet Phoenician letters.
The Greeks used six of the Semitic letters, , to stand for vowels. It was
important for the Greeks to be able to indicate vowels, because Greek is a European
language and so vowels are used to indicate lexical contrasts. In addition, some Greek
words begin with vowels and some contain sequences of two or more vowels. Of the five
Semitic letters mentioned above, only one, , had a value, /w/, which also existed as a
phoneme in Greek. From , the two Greek letters were developed to stand for
/w/ and /u/ respectively. Of these, /w/ was lost in later spoken Greek so that the letter /F/
became obsolete. The Greeks used for /a/, for /e/, < > for /h/, for /i/ and
for /o/ (Sampson, 1985, pp. 100–101).
The Greeks very soon stopped writing every line from right to left; instead, they would
use boustrophedon (ox-turning) style, writing the first line from right to left, the second
from left to right, and so on, as if ploughing a field. The direction of the letters varied
with the direction of the writing, so that when a convention of writing only from left to
right was finally adopted, the shapes of the Greek letters became mirror images of their
original Semitic counterparts (allowing for other shape-changing developments, of
course). Thus Semitic , , became Greek , , (ibid., p.
103).
The Etruscans, who lived in Etruria, north of Rome, borrowed the Greek alphabet, and
the Romans acquired it from them in about 650 BC. It is from the Roman adaptation of
the Greek alphabet that the various modern European writing styles and typefaces
descend. It is also believed that the runic futharks, named, like the alphabet, on the basis
of the sounds represented by its initial graphs (f u th a r k), descended from the Roman
alphabet, because they resemble several alphabetic inscriptions, dated from between the
fourth and first centuries BC, found in the North Italic Alps. However, some runic figures