{"id":208,"date":"2011-02-10T20:30:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-11T04:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=208"},"modified":"2011-04-03T21:39:01","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T04:39:01","slug":"paleohispanic-scripts-600-bc-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/10\/paleohispanic-scripts-600-bc-spain\/","title":{"rendered":"Paleohispanic scripts — 450 BC, Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Celtiberian "bu"<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the places the Phoenicians colonized was the Mediterranean side of Spain, and their writing system spread around that peninsula.\u00a0 Like in Italy, there were quite a few different, mostly related scripts.\u00a0 Unlike in Italy, there wasn’t a hugely successful culture in the vicinity which talked about its neighbours and whose manuscripts got copied and recopied by monks in later years; their own writers also didn’t leave as much behind.\u00a0 Less is known about the tribes on the Iberian peninsula than the Italian one.<\/p>\n

The scripts that are best understood are the Levantine scripts, which descended from Phoenician<\/a>.\u00a0 There is a northern set and a southern set, but their differences are — scholars believe — mostly just in glyph shape, not in the fundamental structure.\u00a0 (The Celtiberian branch in the northeast dropped two characters.)<\/p>\n

While these scripts are clearly the children of Phoenician, Phoenician might not be all that eager to claim them.\u00a0 Indeed, they might look<\/em> like Phoenician, but they act<\/em> very differently.\u00a0 Instead of being an abjad like their parent, instead of being a forward-looking syllabary or even one o’ them avant-guard alphabets, these scripts are a bastard love-child combination of syllabary and alphabet.\u00a0 They have vowels!\u00a0 They have consonants!\u00a0 They have syllables!<\/p>\n

All the vowels have their own glyphs.\u00a0 All of the consonants that you can say continuously (the continuants<\/em>, like “m”, “l”, and “r”) are individual letters.\u00a0 All the ones that you can’t (the occlusives<\/em>, like “b”, “k”, and “t”) only get a glyph if they are paired with a vowel.\u00a0 For example, you have glyphs for “a”, “m”, and “ba”, but not for “b” or “ma”.<\/p>\n

Greek<\/a> script was also used on the Iberian peninsula, with almost no change.\u00a0 They left some letters out and included a short vertical mark to the “r” symbol to make it “trilled r”.\u00a0 It’s most striking feature is how few letters it has: sixteen, fifteen if you consider the trill mark as a modifier and count the trilled “r” glyph as the same as the untrilled “r” glyph.<\/p>\n

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

One of the places the Phoenicians colonized was the Mediterranean side of Spain, and their writing system spread around that peninsula.\u00a0 Like in Italy, there were quite a few different, mostly related scripts.\u00a0 Unlike in Italy, there wasn’t a hugely … 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":[18,28,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-interesting","category-syllabaries-language-types"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208","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=208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}