Talk:Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

Diagram of P-H alphabet at top upper right of page

It appears (at least to me IMHO) that the diagram of P-H at the top upper right is inauthentic (the letters are much too thick and smoothly curved) and misleading. It was clearly created from the very late and unrepresentative 135 CE coins of Bar Kokhba. Much better representations of what P-H looked liked, such as the Silver Scroll inscriptions, Tel Dan, Siloam Tunnel, and Mesha's Stone are all available. For example, see link1 and link2.

It would be possible to create a better jpeg or svg from one of those jpegs. I would suggest Tel Dan and Mesha's Stone as providing the most suitable scripts (circa 8th century BCE). In any case, this article deserves a better looking illustration. Please discuss. -- PraeceptorIP (talk) 22:24, 30 June 2015 (UTC)

@PraeceptorIP: I agree, and unfortunately in eight years this has not been resolved.

Also, for you and other editors, here's an archive of your second link, which is now dead: link2. Daask (talk) 11:58, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

"Meaning of letters"

The table of letters section has a meaning column. There are no reliable sources for this, I have not found any, and according to this presentation there is no modern academic support/basis for it.Yaakovaryeh (talk) 22:56, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

We don't know for sure what the letter names of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet were, though some people have tried to reconstruct them, triangulating backward from later information, and forward from Proto-Sinaitic acrophony etc. AnonMoos (talk) 18:43, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Mental gymnastics

“ ancient Hebrew inscriptions in Phoenician letters". article is Paleo Hebrew. how Re they ancient Hebrew inscriptions if they’re in PHOENICIAN? Lebanesebebe123 (talk) 01:58, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Article needs comparison with Phoenician

Article needs comparison with Phoenician at the time to be able to really be able to call it a separate language. Otherwise article should be edited to discuss the history of Israeli revisionism regarding Phoenician and how Paleo Hebrew came into existence. Lebanesebebe123 (talk) 02:00, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Apartheid must be preserved even in identical ancient scripts! This article make no sense at all and is not encyclopaedic. If there's one script shared by different languages/dialects, then there should be one article. }|{ Moilleadóir Moilleadóir 06:07, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Whatever -- Phoenician and Hebrew were clearly separate (but related) languages, as you can see if you look at Zellig Harris' "A Grammar of the Phoenician Language", where Phoenician has a Yiph`il verb conjugation where Hebrew has a Hiph'il conjugation, the separate 3rd person masculine plural pronoun word has a last letter "t", the 3rd person masculine plural object/possessive suffix sometimes has a letter "n" before the final "m" letter (never in Hebrew), the relative particle is spelled aleph-shin (as opposed to either aleph-shin-resh or a prefixed shin in Hebrew), and in some cases in a consonant cluster, "n" assimilates to a following consonant more often than occurs in Hebrew -- plus several more minor differences. There would probably be many more differences between the two languages if more were known about their vowel sounds.

As for the alphabets, the Hebrew alphabet was borrowed from Phoenician, and in the 900s B.C. they were almost identical, but they developed differences over time. One of the main such diverging developments was that Hebrew started using matres lectionis, or the use of letters to write long vowel sounds in certain contexts. (Originally all the letters wrote consonant sounds, of course.) Phoenician basically had no matres lectionis until a late period in North Africa (usually called "Punic"). AnonMoos (talk) 11:19, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

P.S. In the 19th century and well into the 20th century, most of the leading scholars in the linguistics and epigraphy of ancient Hebrew were Europeans and Americans of Christian backgrounds... AnonMoos (talk) 15:52, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Not a linguist, but everything I've read is that the Canaanite "languages" would've been pretty much mutually intellible dialects (or ethnolects/sociolects/topolects, whatever) rather than discrete languages. I think what the prior two commenters were aiming towards is that we should not succumb to "the narcissism of small differences." Getting back to the subject of the article, as you said the abjads were "almost identical." Now, wouldn't that be the point of a comparison with Phoenician, to show whatever those assumed differences are between them that make them less than wholly identical? (btw, the exact same svg file of the abjad(s) is even used for both articles!)

Certainly the abjad for Hebrew was supplanted by an Aramaic-derived script and the abjad for Punic evolved into " neo-Punic" (but used to write what its speakers seemed to have called the "chanani" language, i.e. Canaanite, into the Christian period in North Africa.) If there are in-fact no differences between paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician abjads, then it make sense to combine the articles and address the attending historiographic issues of that led some scholars to separate the abjad into supposedly distinct series. 2600:1700:8D70:1490:69D1:263F:FB41:8E5F (talk) 20:17, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

That's a bit of original research. If there's a critical mass of sources which discuss a "Paleo-Hebrew" that phenomenon will likely end up having an article. Andre🚐 01:09, 7 September 2024 (UTC)