Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

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THE ALPHABET omikron, to represent the vowel o; in some alphabets, however, particularly of the eastern family, it represented only the short vowel, while another sign, omega, probably created from the same omikron, came to represent the long open o, and was placed at the very end of the Greek alphabet.
Greek Sibilants The Greek voiced sibilant, &, was expressed, as already mentioned, by the Semitic zayin. The Semitic samekh, which still existed in the Theran and the Etruscan alphabets, was retained, as xei with the value of x, in the eastern Ionic alphabet, while the name samekh, which became (perhaps by metathesis from an Aramaic form, otherwise unknown, simkha) sigma, was transferred to the letter derived from the Semitic shin. The Greek sound s was represented in the various Greek alphabets by symbols derived from two Semitic letters, that is either by signs descended from the trade, or by san, the prototype of the classical sigma derived from the Semitic shin-sin-san. Tsade and san do not both appear together in any Greek alphabet, but they do appear in the Etruscan. The letter tsade is found mainly in Crete, Thera and Melos, in Phocis, in the Peloponnesus and in its colonies.
Additional Consonantal Signs The addition of the new consonantal signs is likewise remarkable, inasmuch as the signs were not the same in the various alphabets or had a different phonetic value. The letter phi, employed to express the unvoiced labial aspirate ph, was the earliest in general use; it was placed after the upsilon. The unvoiced velar aspirate kh was expressed by the symbol
X or t, which followed the phi in the order of the letters of the Greek alphabet, but in the western group it was used to express the x-sound. The letter psi, employed to denote the combination ps, became later standardized for this purpose and constituted the last letter but one of the Greek alphabet; this symbol, however, was used in the western alphabets to denote the sound kh.
Beside these general additions, some local alphabets had their own additional letters; for instance, the alphabets of Halicarnassus, Ephesus, Teos and Thrace had a T-like sign to express the double s.
As to the origin of the additional consonantal signs, there are two main theories; according to some scholars they were borrowed from other scripts, for instance, the Cypriote syllabary or the South Semitic scripts; according to other scholars, they are differentiations from other letters, the ph being formed from teth-theta or from qoph-koppa; the kh from kaph-kappa or from teth-theta, and the ps from ph or from waw-upsilon. It is, however, more probable that they were artificial creations.