The Iberian scripts are the

Paleohispanic scripts The Paleohispanic scripts are the writing systems created in the Iberian Peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the dominant script. They derive from the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the Greco-Iberian alphabet, which is ...

that were used to represent the extinct

Iberian language The Iberian language is the language of an indigenous western European people identified by Ancient Greece, Greek and ancient Rome, Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre-Migration Era ...

. Most of them are typologically unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely

alphabetic An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given ...

.Ferrer, J., Moncunill, N., Velaza, J., & Anderson, D. (2017)
''Proposal to encode the Palaeohispanic script''
The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 4th or possibly the 5th century BCE, and the latest from end of the 1st century BCE or possibly the beginning of the 1st century CE.

Variants

There are two main graphic as well as geographic variants in the family: *

Northeastern Iberian script The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or simply Iberian, was the primary means of written expression for the Iberian language. It has also been used to write Proto-Basque, as evidenced by the Hand of Irulegi. The I ...

** Dual variant (4th century BCE and 3rd century BCE) (tentative) ** Non-dual variant (2nd century BCE and 1st century BCE) *

Southeastern Iberian script The southeastern Iberian script, also known as Meridional Iberian, was one of the means of written expression for the Iberian language, which was primarily written in the northeastern Iberian script and, to a lesser extent, by the Greco-Iberia ...

In the sense that the Iberian scripts are the scripts created for the Iberians to represent the Iberian language, the

Greco-Iberian alphabet The Greco-Iberian alphabet is a direct adaptation of an Ionic variant of a Greek alphabet to the specifics of the Iberian language, thus this script is an alphabet and lacks the distinctive characteristic of the paleohispanic scripts that presen ...

, a separate adaptation of the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...

, was also an Iberian script. It was used mainly in

Alicante Alicante (, , ; ; ; officially: ''/'' ) is a city and municipalities of Spain, municipality in the Valencian Community, Spain. It is the capital of the province of Alicante and a historic Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean port. The population ...

and

Murcia Murcia ( , , ) is a city in south-eastern Spain, the Capital (political), capital and most populous city of the autonomous community of the Region of Murcia, and the Ranked lists of Spanish municipalities#By population, seventh largest city i ...

. Likewise, neither the

southwestern script The Southwest Script, also known as Southwestern Script, Tartessian, South Lusitanian, and Conii script, is a Paleohispanic script used to write an unknown language typically identified as Tartessian. Southwest inscriptions have been found p ...

, very similar to southeastern Iberian script but used for the

Tartessian language Tartessian is an extinct Paleo-Hispanic languages, Paleo-Hispanic language found in the Southwest Paleohispanic script, Southwestern inscriptions of the Iberian Peninsula, mainly located in the south of Portugal (Algarve and southern Alentejo), ...

, nor the

Celtiberian script The Celtiberian script is a Paleohispanic script that was the main writing system of the Celtiberian language, an extinct Continental Celtic language, which was also occasionally written using the Latin alphabet. This script is a direct adap ...

, a direct adaptation of the

northeastern Iberian script The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or simply Iberian, was the primary means of written expression for the Iberian language. It has also been used to write Proto-Basque, as evidenced by the Hand of Irulegi. The I ...

used for the

Celtiberian language Celtiberian or Northeastern Hispano-Celtic is an extinct Indo-European language of the Celtic branch spoken by the Celtiberians in an area of the Iberian Peninsula between the headwaters of the Douro, Tagus, Júcar and Turia rivers and the ...

, are technically Iberian scripts. The northeastern Iberian script is often known simply as the Iberian script, because it is the script of 95% of known Iberian inscriptions. These have been found mainly in the northeastern quadrant of the

Iberian Peninsula The Iberian Peninsula ( ), also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in south-western Europe. Mostly separated from the rest of the European landmass by the Pyrenees, it includes the territories of peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, comprisin ...

, mostly along the coast from

Languedoc-Roussillon Languedoc-Roussillon (; ; ) is a former regions of France, administrative region of France. On 1 January 2016, it joined with the region of Midi-Pyrénées to become Occitania (administrative region), Occitania. It comprised five departments o ...

, but with a deep penetration on the

Ebro The Ebro (Spanish and Basque ; , , ) is a river of the north and northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, in Spain. It rises in Cantabria and flows , almost entirely in an east-southeast direction. It flows into the Mediterranean Sea, forming a de ...

valley. The southeastern Iberian script is poorly attested, and there are some gaps in the records: There are no positively identified symbols for /gu/, /do/, and /m/, for example. Unlike the

the decipherment of the southeastern Iberian script is not still closed, because there are a significant group of signs without consensus value. The southeastern inscriptions have been found mainly in the southeastern quadrant of Iberia: Eastern

Andalusia Andalusia ( , ; , ) is the southernmost autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community in Peninsular Spain, located in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, in southwestern Europe. It is the most populous and the second-largest autonomou ...

Albacete Albacete ( , , ) is a city and municipality in the Spanish autonomous community of Castilla–La Mancha, and capital of the province of Albacete. Lying in the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula, the area around the city is known as Los Llan ...

, and

Valencia Valencia ( , ), formally València (), is the capital of the Province of Valencia, province and Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Valencian Community, the same name in Spain. It is located on the banks of the Turia (r ...

. There is substantial graphic variation in the Iberian glyphs, and over the past several decades many scholars have come to believe that, at least in northeastern Iberian script (and recently also in Celtiberian script) some of this variation is meaningful. It appears that the original simple letters were assigned specifically to the voiced consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, whereas the voiceless consonants /t/ and /k/ were derived from /d/ and /g/ syllables with the addition of a stroke. (This is the so-called ''dual signary'' model: see the image at right). If correct, this innovation would parallel the creation of the Latin letter G from C by the addition of a stroke.

Typology

Excepting the

, the Iberian scripts are typologically unusual, in that they were partially

and partially

syllabic A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

: Continuants (

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

sounds like /s/ and

sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels a ...

s like /l/, /m/, and vowels) were written with distinct letters, as in Phoenician (or in Greek in the case of the vowels), but the non-continuants (the stops /b/, /d/, /t/, /g/, and /k/) were written with ''syllabic'' glyphs that represented both consonant and vowel together, as with Japanese

kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ...

. That is, in written Iberian, ''ga'' displayed no resemblance to ''ge,'' and ''bi'' had no connection to ''bo.'' This possibly unique writing system is called a "

semi-syllabary A semi-syllabary is a writing system that behaves partly as an alphabet and partly as a syllabary. The main group of semi-syllabic writing are the Paleohispanic scripts of ancient Spain, a group of semi-syllabaries that transform redundant plosi ...

". The southeastern script was written right to left, as was the

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 fo ...

, whereas the northeastern script reversed this to left to right, as in the

Origins

The Iberian scripts are classified as

for convenience and based on broad similarities, but their relationships to each other and to neighboring contemporaneous scripts, such as Greco-Iberian, are not firmly established. It is generally accepted that they were derived at least partly from the

and/or

, with which they share many similar-looking

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s. Some researchers conclude that the origin of the northern and southern Iberian scripts ultimately lies solely with the Phoenician alphabet; others believe the Greek alphabet also played a role; others still have suggested influences from Old Italic. It appears that either the glyphs themselves were changed, or that they assumed new values. For example, the southern glyph for /e/ derives from Phoenician ''‘

ayin ''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ''ʿayin'' 𐤏, Hebrew ''ʿayin'' , Aramaic ''ʿē'' 𐡏, Syriac ''ʿē'' ܥ, and Arabic ''ʿayn'' (where it is si ...

'' or Greek Ο, whereas northern /e/ resembles Phoenician '' he'' or Greek Ε, though the letter arguably had the value of /be/ in southern Iberian. However, it is clear that they had a common origin, and the most commonly accepted hypothesis is that the northeastern script derives from the southeastern script.

Notes

References

* Anderson, James M. (1988) Ancient Languages of the Hispanic Peninsula. * Correa, José Antonio (2004): , ''ELEA'' 4, pp. 75–98. * Correa, José Antonio (1992): , ''AIΩN'' 14, pp. 253–292. * Ferrer i Jané, Joan (2005
''Novetats sobre el sistema dual de diferenciació gràfica de les oclusives sordes i sonores''
''Palaeohispanica'' 5, pp. 957–982. * Gómez-Moreno, Manuel (1922): , 9, pp. 34–66. * Hoz, Javier de (1987): , ''Veleia'' 2–3, pp. 285–298. * Hoz, Javier de (1985): , pp. 443–453. * Maluquer de Motes, Joan (1968): , Barcelona. * Quintanilla, Alberto (1993): , pp. 239–250. * Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús (2004): , Vitoria-Gasteiz 2004, . * Rodríguez Ramos, Jesús (2002): , ''Zephyrus'' 55, pp. 231–245. * Untermann, Jürgen :

Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum ''Monumenta Linguarum Hispanicarum'' (Latin for "Records of the Hispanic Languages") is a series which compiles material relating to the paleo-Hispanic languages (languages spoken in Iberia before Latin). Begun in the 1960s and the first volume pu ...

, Wiesbaden. (1975): I Die Münzlegenden. (1980): ''II Die iberischen Inschriften aus Sudfrankreicht''. (1990): . (1997): . * Velaza, Javier (2004): , Madrid, pp. 95–114. * Velaza, Javier (1996): , Barcelona.

External links

Los primeros sistemas de escritura en la Península Ibérica (Course program)

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20081006160601/http://www.arqueotavira.com/Mapas/Iberia/Populi.htm Detailed map of the Pre-Roman Peoples of Iberia (around 200 BCE)
Links to images of inscriptions
*

*

*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Iberian Scripts Iberian writing Undeciphered writing systems Celtic languages Paleohispanic languages ru:Иберское письмо