The Writing Systems of the World FLORIAN COULMAS Ory Basil Blackwell ox HIBLIOTEGA DE LA UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA b8 Semitic Writing: Syllables or Consonants? Semitic languages are spoken in western Asia. The group of languages so classified comprises the great literary languages: Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Ethiopic, as well as several other languages of the Middle East. They are characterized by many similarities and common elements in their phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The grouping of the Semitic languages and thcir scripts is usually based on their geographic distribution: the eastern group (sometimes also referred to as north-eastern) in Mesopotamia, the northern (or north- western) group in Syria and Palestine, and the southern group in Arabia and Ethiopia. These last two groups are often collectively referred to as West Semitic (Driver 1976). The writing of the languages of the eastern group, of which Akkadian is the most important member, is at the heart of the cuneiform tradition discussed in chapter 5, It always remained a very involved system, making use of both cenemic syllable signs and pleremic word signs and determinatives, Similarly the Egyptian system, despite decisive advances in the direction of a cenemic system, never discarded word signs or determinatives. Both cuneiform and thc Egyptian hieroglyphics came to the threshold of a purely cenemic system. However, the final step was taken neither in Egypt nor in Mesopotamia, but in the region between these ancient centers of writing which extends from the Sinai peninsula to northern Syria. In this chapter, the term Semitic writing is used to refer to systems that were developed in this western region rather than to the cuneiform writing of eastern Semitic languages.Writing Systems HISTORICAL BACKGROUND s now generally agreed that the first writing system free of determin- ves and logographic signs which could easily be transferred from one guage to another was used by the Phoenicians in northern Syria cre it was created in the second half of the second millennium. How- , the transitory steps leading from logographic and syllabic writing phonemic writing are not so well understood. This is due to the con- ing diversity of scripts that came into existence then in the eastern diterranean and to the fact that certain archeological findings have jed unequivocal interpretation. As Diringer (1968: 146) has pointed out, already the literati of classical eece and Rome adhered to conflicting theories about the origin of hahetic writing, attributing it variously to each of the most ancient rary cultures: Egypt and Assur; the Hebrews or the Phoenicians (that western Semitic peoples living in between these centers); and also to ycenae or Crete. The fact that all of these various hypotheses were iously discussed highlights an important aspect of the region in- sited by the western Semitic peoples: it was at the international cross- ids of influences from powerful and flourishing adjacent cultures. ‘The ding ports at the eastern Mediterranean coast were in contact with ypt, Crete, the Aegean islands, Anatolia and also with peoples further st. The ensuing cultural multiplicity, the many languages that came o contact with each other, as well as the knowledge of the existence of ferent writing systems such as Egyptian, Assyrian and Hittite must ve created the ideal conditions for experimenting with ncw possibili- s and simplifications,” The many new forms of writing that evolved in ria, Palestine and Sinai bear witness to the prolific cultural develop- ont of this region in the second millennium. Two places of special -erest are Byblos on the Syrian coast and Ugarit further to the north. ‘ch cities attracted a great deal of attention because after their scovery they were considered far some time to be possible birth places Old Semitic writing, the former being the excavation site of inscrip- ms testifying to Egyptian influence, and the latter the place where the neiform alphabet was discovered. Both finds date from the middle of e second millennium. While constituting important steps in the velopment of Scmitic writing, the scripts of Byblos and Ugarit both esent problems which are still waiting for a solution. Semitic Writing: Syllables or Consonants? 139 The Ugaritic script was deciphered shortly after its discovery in 1929 Gegert 1983),? making available a host of excavated documents of various kinds. None of these, however, provided any clues as to how the Usgatitic system came into existence. Diringer (1968: LSOff) gives expres- sion to the now commonly accepted view that its creators borrowed the idea for consonant writing from an already existing West Semitic alphabet,‘ while they devised letters consisting of wedge-shaped elements as they were used to writing on clay. Thus the Ugaritic alphabet, which consists of twenty-seven consonant letters and three alephs for the glottal stop preceding /a/, /i/ and /u/, offers little by way of an explanation for the origin of Old Semitic consonant writing. Byblos was one of the most ancient cultural centers of the Phoeni- cians, Intensive contacts with Egypt were attested in the third millen- nium. On historical grounds it is, therefore, a plausible assumption that the seript of the Byblos inscriptions originated under Egyptian influ- ence. The system consists of at least 114 signs and is hence thought to be a syllabary.5 Graphical similarities suggest that more than twenty signs have been borrowed from the Egyptian hicroglyphic script, but the readability of the Byblos script is still a matter of dispute. Dhorme (1948), one of the decipherers of Ugaritic, claims to have deciphered the script which he regards as a ‘plethoric’ syllabary: that is, a system whereby different signs have the same syllabic value (Diringer 1968: 115). The language of the Byblos inscriptions, according to Dhorme, is Phoenician. However, Dhorme’s purported decipherment is not uni- versally accepted among Semitic scholars. Instead, his claims have met with reactions ranging from outright rejection (Sobelman 1961) to cautious optimism (Friedrich 1966) at best. Another important, but no less problematic, potential key to under- standing the origin of Old Semitic consonant writing is the Proto- Sinaitic script which was discovered on the Sinai peninsula in 1904, On the basis of archeological evidence, the inscriptions were dated to the fifteenth century. The question that the discovery of this script raised was whether it could possibly be the missing link between the beginning of consonant phoneme representation in Egyptian hicroglyphic writing and its systematic completion in Semitic writing. The close geographic proximity of the Sinai to Egypt made such a solution historically plaus- ible and hence very attractive. As early as 1916, the British Egyptologist Gardiner identified a recurrent group of signs as the name of the Canaanite goddess Ba’alat