Here you go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet. You really need to improve your scholarship skills. Anyone could have found that in less than five minutes. It's actually an abjad, not a true alphabet, because it has no vowels. As I explained, they're not necessary in the Semitic languages (or any of the Afroasiatic family) because there's no such thing as two words that are the same except for the vowels.
The Aramaic abjad and the Greek alphabet were both derived from the Phoenician abjad. The Hebrew and Arabic abjads were derived from the Aramaic.
I know of these links. The Phoenecian were older than the Hebrew, and lasted for a 1000 years after the Hebrew emerged - where are their alphabetical books? All that your link shows is a small stone ethching of a few words, which contain no dates or verifiable historical references, and we are told this is a pre-Hebrew alphabetical writing. Further, if you examine the charts, the Phoenecian and Canaanite possess no 'V' - while the Hebrew does. The margin of datings here are so small, centuries only, which cannot be reliable which came first. I would gladly accept those references if they were backed by at least a similar display of writings as the Hebrew - but this is not the case. Europe has a doctrinal and historical track record for negating all that is Hebrew - so one should thread with caution here.
It appears that all phonetic alphabets, abjads and abugidas (a syllabary in which the symbol for the consonant is modified to show the vowel, rather than a separate symbol for every combination as in Japanese) except Korean are ultimately traceable to Egyptian writing, often by way of Phoenician.
So how do you account for the total vacuum of alphabetical books in comparison to the Hebrew ancient archives, from nations far older, and which have never been subject to dispersals? Don't you see hard copy proof as more superior proof to such opinions?
The Phoenicians were a widely-traveled people, just at the time when the Bronze Age was in full glory in Eurasia and civilizations were in need of a writing system. Even the Devanagari script appears to be an offshoot of the writing systems of Mesopotamia, although I haven't studied it enough to explain the details.They weren't doing fancy math with the census, just basic arithmetic.
The Phoenecians were allys of the Israelites, employed in the building of the
1st temple, and worked for King's Solomon's navy: where are their alphabetical books?
The Greeks managed to calculate pi,
Yes, this was perhaps the best forerunner to math - but this was at a later well developed time.
so with determination and plenty of time, such calculations can be done without a positional decimal system or a symbol for zero. But mathematics as we know it could not be developed until Fibonacci brought the Indo-Arabic system to Europe; the calculations were too cumbersome to do very many.
I agree the zero had no real mathematical significance in Arabia - it just stood for nothingness or none. It became a legitimate math factor later, in Europe.
you're confusing it with a numbering system. The choice of symbols doesn't matter, it's how you organize them that makes the difference. The Hebrew, Greek and Roman numbering systems do not have positional significance. In Roman numerals, a V is five, no matter where it appears in a numeral. In our system, the symbol "5" can stand for five, fifty, five hundred, or five decillion; or five tenths, five hundredths or five decillionths; depending on its position in the numeral. And a positional numbering system doesn't work very well without a symbol for zero. They tried just leaving a blank space, but that was very unsatisfactory and easily misinterpreted. It doesn't matter whether you're using the Indo-Arabic symbols, letters of your alphabet, or new symbols you just made up for the purpose. It's the organization that matters, not the particular symbols.
Math developed as time evolved. But for its time, the Cencus of 3 million, with cross-checking ability, is a remarkable thing. This was 3,500 years ago, when there were no alphabetical books. It also shows that the numbers and calculation systems in the Hebrew were not wanting - not necessarilly as advanced math - but well advanced for its time.
y got it directly from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians were great sailors and had a huge trading economy all over the Mediterranean. Everyone from the Egyptians to the Iberians traded with them and picked up bits of their culture.
What we have from this period is only bits of commercial reciepts of sales and transactions - which cannot be deemed alphabetical. Here, we also have an ancient book which claims, incidently, that they were written by the Hebrews [Moses] before re-entering Canaan. What reason do we have to disregard this - there is no proof to contradict it - canan was not Monotheistic?
The Greeks had already developed their written language by the time they came in contact with the Jews.
The Greeks never had alphabetical writings before 300 BCE, the date of the first trabnslation of the Hebrew bible. This took 70 years, and the Josephus docs says they got their alpha beta from the Hebrew. You win if you can produce a Greek alphabetical writings before 300 BCE - bit I cannot accept opeinions made 100's and 1000's of years later, with no proof at all.
Besides, the early civilizations didn't do that much writing. After all, only a tiny percentage of their population could read and write. The more recent civilizations had more written works so more of them have been discovered. With the earlier writing systems we're often limited to inscriptions on stone. Sometimes there are clay tablets, but they're pretty fragile.
I'm not sure what you mean by early civilizations, but let's just regard the period 3ooo years ago - here, we find a host of Hebrew books issued every 100 years - what is the problem with other civilizations of this period? I conclude there is none now because there was none at any time then.
Consider that the Etruscans had a major civilization contemporaneously with Greece and Rome, and they had a written language. Yet so few examples of their writing have survived that we can't even figure out what family their language belonged to.Read that entire article about the Phoenician abjad (although they call it an "alphabet"), it explains all of this.
Contemporary with Rome does not mean much. How do you know this is even true - they are stated by writings from about 1,500 CE.
You keep trying to make a shortcut. No one said that the Hebrew writing system was derived directly from Egyptian. It is descended from Phoenician, which is descended from an earlier Proto-Canaanite abjad. As the article explains, that earlier set of symbols is clearly derived from Egyptian.
The article 'says' so - but it does not offer any proofs.
You're talking to the wrong guy. I've studied Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. All of the kana symbols are stylized forms of Chinese characters.You're not paying attention. I already told you that in the Afroasiatic language family it is not necessary to write vowels, because for any combination of consonants, there is only one word. It's not like English, where bat, bait, bet, beet, bit, bite, boat, bought, but, bout and butte are all different words.I'm not even sure what you mean because I can't understand that sentence. You seem to keep interchanging the word "alphabet" and "letter," which is very confusing.
My position on the Japanese is limited to the alphabets being some 90% the same as the Hebrew with regard their design. With regard the Indian writings, there is a similar equivalence in ancient word 'meanings'.
In any case, how much Hebrew have you studied? More than I have? I can read a little of it; on my own powers-of-three fluency scale I'm about a 3.5 in Hebrew. But you give me a page without the vowel markings (which are used for instruction and in the liturgy) and I'm lost.
I studied Hebrew and Indian. The Hebrew does not need seperate vowels - this occured by the Greeks. The ancient Hebrew did not have seperate vowels or numerals, and this is not required today. Here, the english discarded the Greek/latin mode and adopted the ancient Hebrew mode - where the vowels are alphabets again. Otherwise the english would have a seperate list of the vowels, which have to be attached to the alphabets to result in a sound. Now it is placed adjacent to the alphabets - same as the ancient Hebrew. Like, A and Alef are vowels and alphabets in the Hebrew and the English, while in the Greek - the A was a seperate letter, like a symbol [a dash -] which is imposed on the alphabet.
Is slavery and exile the only way that members of one nation travel to another nation? Egyptian civilization went through many periods of prosperity, and Jewish migrants traveled there to find work. Duh?
This was to negate any reason for the vacuum of Egyptian alphabetical books as a possible reason. I stand by it.
I know at least twenty Christians who would call you a heretic and a blasphemer and start praying for your soul, for doubting their literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. They insist that all non-aquatic animals on the entire planet drowned and were repopulated from Noah's menagerie. There used to be one here; I don't remember his name so I don't know if he's still around. Probably not, we were not very kind to him because he kept breaking the forum rules and using the bible as evidence for his assertions.I'm not well-versed in biblical lore. When exactly was Noah's time? The Hebrew people differentiated from the Canaanites around 2000BCE, IIRC.
Anyone who does not follow the Gospels or Quran is a heretic. Why would you determine European Christian views the right source for explaining anything of a book they at no time observed, cannot read, and which predates the Gospels by 1000's of years? That is a good way to go astray: Europe does a stratch job of anything it cannot connect to the Gospels.
Nonetheless, we have to bear in mind that names are subject to fashion. You can't always expect the people who lived a thousand years ago to give their babies the same names that their descendants use today. Today there are Jews named Robert, Craig, Keith and Stewart.Of course they used them. But Shakespeare created far more figures of speech than he borrowed from biblical sources. He singlehandedly enriched our language.
Names are the primal factor for determining their datings. All of the names listed in the Noah genealogies are regarded authentic.