The Espanca signary (original) (raw)

Excerpt from Catalogue Signs before the Alphabet - Part 3 Variety of texts, languages and scripts

2017

1. Variety of texts, languages and scripts ……….………………….…... 2 2. Accounting and administrative texts; juridical texts ……………… 3 3. Lexical lists …………………………………………………………………….. 4 4. Texts of historiographic intent ………………………………………… 4 5. Diffusion of the Cuneiform system: Anatolia, Elam, Urartu ……… 5 5.1 Anatolia ……………………………………………………………….. 5 5.2 Elam ……………………………………………………………….….. 5 5.3 Urartu …………………………………………………………….…… 7 5.4 Akkadian as international language of the late Bronze Age ………….…. 8 5.5 The Ugaritic alphabet; the Phoenician/Aramaic/Hebrew alphabet ..….…. 9 6. The Garshana and Irisagrig Archives (David. I. Owen) …………….….. 9

Towards a systematisation of Palaeohispanic scripts in Unicode: synthesising multiple transcription hypotheses into two consensus encodings

This work is a preliminary attempt at the systematisation of the Palaeohispanic scripts into the Unicode standard, which have the goal to establish the basic set of meaningful signs in a script or a group of closely-related scripts. With regard to the number of character sets needed to encode all the Palaeohispanic scripts, our proposal is to classify them into two groups, the north-eastern Iberian, that includes the north-eastern Iberian script itself and the Celtiberian script, and the southern Palaeohispanic that includes the south-eastern Iberian script, the south-western script and the Espanca script. The basic set of signs for the north-eastern Iberian group is relatively easy to establish, as this script, attested in more than 2,000 inscriptions and nearly a dozen abecedaries, is almost fully deciphered. On the other hand, the selection of a basic set of signs for the southern Palaeohispanic group is a more difficult task, since only less than two hundred southern inscriptions are currently known, no other abecedary than the one from Espanca is attested, and more than a third of the southern signs are identified merely with a conventional code, since scholars disagree about their values, or they are simply unknown.

Linguistic and Cultural Aspects of Disyllabic Signs in the Cretan Protolinear Script

The present study describes the ten attested signs of the Cretan Protolinear script which render disyllabic phonetic values, unlike the monosyllabic ones of the Consonant-Vowel type, which is the common phonetic pattern for the rest of the signs. The Cretan Protolinear script has been proposed as the script that all the Aegean scripts of Bronze Age evolved from. The linguistic affinity of these disyllabic signs to the Sumerian language is demonstrated, in terms of lexicographic reference, phonetic correspondence and pictographic resemblance. In addition, the description of these signs' phonetic features is accompanied by valuable cultural information, wherever available. INTRODUCTION The Cretan Protolinear script (henceforth CP) has been proposed as the script that all the Aegean scripts of Bronze Age (2 nd and 3 rd millennia BCE) evolved from [1-6]. These scripts include, among others [7], Linear A (henceforth LA), Cretan Hieroglyphics (henceforth CH) and Linear B (henceforth LB) syllabaries, the latter being the one that this work mostly focuses on. They are referred to as syllabaries because each of their signs usually renders one syllabic phonetic value of the pattern Consonant-Vowel (CV). Thus, each sign is a " syllabogram ". The Aegean scripts have been found mostly on clay-tablets, but also on other artifacts (pottery, seals, stone inscriptions), mainly in Crete and Peloponnese (LB). With the exception of most inscriptions of CH, the rest of them (LA and LB) are usually account-keeping documents, just like most cuneiform tablets of the Mesopotamian civilizations (e.g., Sumerian and Akkadian).

Preliminary proposal to encode the southern Palaeohispanic scripts for the Unicode standard. UTC Document Register L2/15-119, 2015.

This work is a preliminary proposal to encode the southern Palaeohispanic scripts in Unicode standard. Several scripts are grouped under the name of southern Palaeohispanic scripts: the south-eastern Iberian script, also known as southern or meridional Iberian script, the south-western script, also known as Tartessian or Sudlusitanian, and the Espanca abecedary. Despite their differences, these scripts show a similar degree of deciphering and the signs with comparable shapes have almost always the same value. The selection of characters for the Unicode standard of this script has been done taking into account an inventory of signs as large as possible, including all dual variants proposed for the south-eastern Iberian script. Nevertheless, the large set of hapax signs, especially in the south-western inscriptions, has not been usually taken into account in this proposal. One of the exceptions to this criterion are the exclusive signs attested in the Espanca abecedary, as their presence in an abecedary clearly justifies their autonomous existence. Following the usual criteria and main objectives of the Unicode standards, the multiple variants of each sign have not been included, but just the signs with different values.

The Greek Archaic Alphabet Alphabetica II The Vowel Harmonic in the Greek Archaic Alphabet

Anistoriton Journal, 2005

Addressing issues of origin in archaic alphabetic writing A multitude of questions and corresponding number of theories have been offered on the origin of our writing system, the alphabet. We have considered in detail the question of the systematic relationship of archaic alphabetic writing to other Mediterranean scripts in the context of Bronze age elsewhere [1]. Briefly, these results show that several ancient scripts namely Linear A, B and C (a term used for the Cypriotic syllabary [2]), Levantine Protolinear (related Levantine writing before 1050 BC), Phoenician abjad (after 1050 BC, the conventional date for delineation [3]) and Greek alphabet have related morphologies of corresponding symbols that produce a unique pattern of systematic relationships. Remarkably, among the countless theories, often based on preconceptions of political ideology, ethnicity, religion or even 'racial superiority' [4], there has been little attention paid on the characteristics of the alphabet qua organomenon, that is, as an organized system. Following our analyses of systematic relationships, we revisit here elements of the internal structure of the system, with a particular focus on vowels, in order to address the issues of origin, whether the system was an invention and the context of its genesis. The vowel harmonic It is generally agreed that the 23-letter script (A to Y) of Crete and the Doric islands is the earliest alphabet in the Aegean (Fig. 1) and indeed earliest full alphabet encoding both vowels and consonants [2, 5, 6]. Focusing on the internal structure of that script rather than the later Ionic alphabet that has become the basis for the more commonly known Greek alphabetic writing, it immediately becomes apparent that there are five vowels, A, E, I, O and Y, separated by arithmetically increasing intervals of consonants (3, 4, 5 and 6).This simple distribution creates a harmonic that might have served as a mnemonic device in the early days of transition between the syllabaries and the alphabet. Since we are treating the issue of the origin of the alphabet and its systematic relations to other scripts elsewhere, we will limit this communication to notes on the vowel harmonic consisting of these five symbols.