{"id":205,"date":"2011-02-08T19:30:46","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T03:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=205"},"modified":"2011-04-03T21:42:20","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T04:42:20","slug":"samaritan-600-bc-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/08\/samaritan-600-bc-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Samaritan — ~600 BC, Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Samaritan "y"<\/p><\/div>\n

There is a joke among linguists about the difference between a dialect and a language: “a language is a dialect with a standing army”.
\nSimilarly, I think that the distinction between the first alphabet used to write Hebrew — what is commonly called “Old Hebrew script” — and Phoenician script is more a description of a cultural difference than a functional difference.\u00a0 To my eye, Old Hebrew script looks more like Phoenician<\/a> script than some of the different dialects of what is happily called Phoenician script.<\/p>\n

The Samaritans, like the other tribes of Israel, started out using the Phoenician\/Old Hebrew alphabet.\u00a0 Most of the tribes of Israel eventually switched over to using the Aramaic<\/a> alphabet, but the Samaritans kept using the Phoenician\/Old Hebrew alphabet.\u00a0 Over time, its glyphs evolved into a distinct variant.\u00a0 Note that there is still a one-to-one correspondence between Phoenician\/Old Hebrew and Samaritan, so Samaritan has more of a font difference with Phoenician than a fundamental difference in the writing system mechanics.<\/p>\n

The alert reader will notice that I used the present tense in the last sentence: there are still about 700 speakers of Samaritan in Israel and the West Bank.\u00a0 The glyph at the top is the modern version of the “yodh” character.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a joke among linguists about the difference between a dialect and a language: “a language is a dialect with a standing army”. Similarly, I think that the distinction between the first alphabet used to write Hebrew — what … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abjad","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}