The Greek Alphabet.

By Thierry H. De Mortain

Mariage between the phoenician alphabet and the greek language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thierry H. De Mortain
• Release date: Oct 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781311867469

Thierry H. De Mortain

Interested in the origins of the alphabet and to the transition from phoenician to greek and then latin. I like traveling. Last holidays in the Cyclade island in Greece (of course). Married. Three children (two sons and one daughter).

Book preview

Published by Thierry H. De Mortain

Copyright 2012 Thierry H. De Mortain

[e-mail]

Revision 1 ; 7 th october 2012

Montigny-le-Bretonneux.

THE GREEK ALPHABET

MARIAGE BETWEEN THE PHOENICIAN ALPHABET AND THE GREEK LANGUAGE

Author : Thierry H. de Mortain.

The pictographic writing has a long tradition which is dated to the 3 rd millennium before Christ  and which developed in parallel in Egypt (hieroglyphs) and in Mesopotamia (cuneiform), and then gave birth and influenced all writing systems of the middle east like the protosinaitic, the pers, the Arab, the Hebraic and finally the Phoenician whose letters will propagate to the Latin alphabet, through the Greek alphabet.

Introduction :

I’m always astonished to read at the front page of a dictionary the following definition for letter A : first letter of the alphabet. Derisory definition for this letter which is reproduced billions of times worldwide in books, papers, in class rooms, on TV, on computers and cell phones.

I brought back from a travel in Japan in the late 80’s a fabulous book called ‘Remembering the Kanji’ . The Kanji is made of thousands of pictographic characters-coming most of the time from Chinese characters and which represent Japanese words. The book described how the Kanji character was made of elementary pictograms, each of these pictograms being a more or less analogical form of a word. Thus, the sun is written :

and the eye is written :

Indeed, these pictograms are far away from the reality with their cubical shape-the kanji characters where in general painted strokes , which prevents the use of circular lines, but at least they provide a mnemonic mean to remember them : the square shape sun is like crossed by a horizontal sun beam whereas