|
Hebrew Alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic languages, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze in Israel, Druze. It is an offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet, Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet. Historically, a different abjad script was used to write Hebrew: the original, old Hebrew script, now known as the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, has been largely preserved in a variant form as the Samaritan script, Samaritan alphabet, and is still used by the Samaritans. The present ''Jewish script'' or ''square script'', on the cont ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hebrew Language
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until after 200 CE and as the liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. The language was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, and is the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival. It is the only Canaanite language, as well as one of only two Northwest Semitic languages, with the other being Aramaic, still spoken today. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Semitic Language
Proto-Semitic is the Linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed common ancestor of the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the linguistic homeland for Proto-Semitic: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa. The Semitic language family is considered part of the broader macro-family of Afroasiatic languages. Dating The earliest attestations of any Semitic language are in Akkadian language, Akkadian, dating to around the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (see Sargon of Akkad) and the Eblaite language, but earlier evidence of Akkadian comes from personal names in Sumerian language, Sumerian texts from the first half of the third millennium BC. One of the earliest known Akkadian inscriptions was found on a bowl at Ur, addressed to the very early pre-Sargonic king Meskiagnunna of Ur (–2450 BC) by his queen Gan-saman, who is thought to have been from Akkad. The earli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-Semitic
Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the linguistic homeland for Proto-Semitic: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa. The Semitic language family is considered part of the broader macro-family of Afroasiatic languages. Dating The earliest attestations of any Semitic language are in Akkadian, dating to around the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (see Sargon of Akkad) and the Eblaite language, but earlier evidence of Akkadian comes from personal names in Sumerian texts from the first half of the third millennium BC. One of the earliest known Akkadian inscriptions was found on a bowl at Ur, addressed to the very early pre-Sargonic king Meskiagnunna of Ur (–2450 BC) by his queen Gan-saman, who is thought to have been from Akkad. The earliest text fragments of West Semitic are snake spells in Egyp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sha (Cyrillic)
Sha, alternatively transliterated Ša (Ш ш; italics: ) is a letter of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative , like the pronunciation of sh in "ship". More precisely, the sound in Russian denoted by ш is often falsely transcribed as a palatoalveolar fricative, but is actually a voiceless retroflex fricative . It is used in every variation of the Cyrillic alphabet for Slavic and non-Slavic languages. In English, Sha is romanized as sh or as š, the latter being the equivalent letter in the Latin alphabets of Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian and Lithuanian. History Sha has its earliest origins in Phoenician Shin and is possibly linked closely to Shin's Greek equivalent: Sigma (Σ, σ, ς). (The similar form of the modern Hebrew Shin (ש), which is probably where the Cyrillic letter was actually derived from, derives from the same Proto-Canaanite source). Sha already possessed its current ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoenician Alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean basin. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age, sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as well as Old Aramaic. It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Śawt
Śawt ሠ is a letter of the Geʽez script, descended from Epigraphic South Arabian , in Geʽez representing ś. It is reconstructed as descended from a Proto-Semitic voiceless lateral fricative , like the Welsh pronunciation of the ll in llwyd. It survived only in South Semitic as an independent phoneme. See also * Ḍäppa ፀ *Proto-Semitic * Sat (letter) ሰ *Shin (letter) Shin (also spelled Šin (') or Sheen) is the twenty-first and penultimate letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''šīn'' 𐤔, Hebrew ''šīn'' , Aramaic ''šīn'' 𐡔, Syriac ''šīn'' ܫ, and Arabic ''sīn'' . The Phoenician ... {{DEFAULTSORT:Sawt Ge'ez language ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glagolitic Alphabet
The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saints Cyril and Methodius, Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessaloniki, Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius of Thessaloniki, Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzantine Emperor Michael III in 863 to Great Moravia after an invitation from Rastislav of Moravia to spread Christianity there. After the deaths of Cyril and Methodius, their disciples were expelled and they moved to the First Bulgarian Empire instead. The Early Cyrillic alphabet, which developed gradually in the Preslav Literary School by Greek alphabet scribes who incorporated some Glagolitic letters, gradually replaced Glagolitic in that region. Glagolitic remained in use alongside Latin in the Kingdom of Croatia (925–1102), Kingdom of Croatia and alongside Cyrillic until the 14th century in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old South Arabian Alphabet
The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian: ; modern ) branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE, and remained in use through the late sixth century CE. It is an abjad, a writing system where only consonants are obligatorily written, a trait shared with its predecessor, Proto-Sinaitic, as well as some of its sibling writing systems, including Arabic and Hebrew. It is a predecessor of the Ge'ez script, and a sibling script of the Phoenician alphabet and, through that, the modern Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. History The earliest instances of the Ancient South Arabian (''ASA'') script are painted pottery sherds from Raybun in Hadhramaut in Yemen, which are dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE. It is an abjad script, meaning that only consonants are usually written in the script, with vowels inferred from context; it shares this feature both with its predecessor, the Proto-Sinaitic script, and modern Semitic languages. It is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glagolitic Sha
The Glagolitic script ( , , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzantine Emperor Michael III in 863 to Great Moravia after an invitation from Rastislav of Moravia to spread Christianity there. After the deaths of Cyril and Methodius, their disciples were expelled and they moved to the First Bulgarian Empire instead. The Early Cyrillic alphabet, which developed gradually in the Preslav Literary School by Greek alphabet scribes who incorporated some Glagolitic letters, gradually replaced Glagolitic in that region. Glagolitic remained in use alongside Latin in the Kingdom of Croatia and alongside Cyrillic until the 14th century in the Second Bulgarian Empire and the Serbian Empire, and later mainly for cryptographic purposes. Glagoliti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Encyclopaedia Judaica
The ''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' is a multi-volume English-language encyclopedia of the Jewish people, Judaism, and Israel. It covers diverse areas of the Jewish world and civilization, including Jewish history of all eras, culture, Jewish holiday, holidays, Hebrew language, language, Torah, scripture, and Halakha, religious teachings. First published in 1971–1972, by 2010 it had been published in two editions accompanied by a few revisions. The ''Encyclopaedia Judaica'' was also published on CD-ROM. The CD-ROM version has been enhanced by at least 100,000 hyperlinks and several other features, including videos, slide shows, maps, music and Hebrew pronunciations. While the CD-ROM version is still available, the publisher has discontinued producing new copies for sale. The encyclopedia was written by Israelis, Israeli, Americans, American and European professional subject specialists. History Preceding attempts Between 1901 and 1906 ''The Jewish Encyclopedia'' had been publishe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Letter (alphabet)
In a writing system, a letter is a grapheme that generally corresponds to a phoneme—the smallest functional unit of speech—though there is rarely total one-to-one correspondence between the two. An alphabet is a writing system that uses letters. Definition and usage A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a ''multigraph (orthography), multigraph''. Multigraphs include ''digraphs'' of two letters (e.g. English ''ch'', ''sh'', ''th''), and ''trigraphs'' of three letters (e.g. English ''tch''). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H, Greek eta , an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
