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The Letter-order of the Semitic Alphabets in Africa and the Near East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

A. M. Honeyman
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Extract

The Ethiopic syllabary employed for writing the classical Ge'ez and also, with certain modifications, the contemporary South Semitic vernaculars of East Africa, was formed by super-imposing a system of auxiliary vowel-marks upon a basic consonantal alphabet; this alphabet occurs, alongside of the syllabic script, in the Old Ethiopic inscriptions of the Axumite Kingdom in the fourth century of our era, and is a derivative of the Sabaeo-Minaean or Old South Arabic script found in the monuments of the south-west Arabian kingdoms. But although the Ethiopic syllabary is thus genetically connected with the other main branches of the Semitic alphabet, the traditional order of the signs, in which the consonantal component and the accompanying vowel are the primary and secondary determining factors respectively, does not agree with that of any Semitic alphabet hitherto known. There is no old or reliable native tradition as to the reason underlying the order of the signs; no help is to be had from numerical signs, which elsewhere, as will shortly appear, afford valuable testimony to the order of the letters; for Ethiopic borrowed Greek alphabetic signs for this purpose, while the South Arabian inscriptions used single strokes for the units, and for higher denominations the initial letters of the native words for five, ten, hundred, &c. The mnemonic word-groups reconstructed by Bauer and others are open to objection on grounds of language and sense. Other external criteria yield only tentative and inconclusive results, and the subject has accordingly remained one of speculation and controversy.

Résumé

L'ORDRE DES LETTRES DES ALPHABETS SÉMITIQUES EN AFRIQUE ET EN PROCHE-ORIENT

Une série de dalles de pavage gravées qui ont été mises à découvert à Hajar Kohlan, l'emplacement de l'antique Timna‘, ville capitale du royaume sud-arabique de Qataban, au cours de fouilles entreprises en 1951, démontrent l'ordre des lettres—inconnu jusqu'ici—du commencement de l'alphabet qatabanien d'environ 300 ans avant J.-C. En dehors de quelques divergences significatives, l'ordre est celui du syllabaire éthiopique qui est dérivé d'un original alphabétique sud-arabique. Le principe fondamental à la base de l'ordre qatabanien des lettres et le nouvel arrangement de l'alphabet de l'ancien éthiopique, qui a été effectué probablement vers le quatrième siècle de l'ère chrétienne, est celui du rapprochement graphique. La raison pour l'importance de ce principe est son utilité pédagogique, et son influence est visible dans le quasi-alphabet cunéiforme ougaritique du milieu du deuxième millénaire avant notre ère. L'ordre de cet alphabet est essentiellement celui des alphabets phénicien, hébraïque, grec et aramaïque d'une époque plus récente. Dans un contexte sémitique cet alphabet de 22 lettres ne subit aucun changement pendant deux millénaires et fut adopté par les arabes. Le contact avec les populations non-arabes au cours de l'expansion islamique et la conscience linguistique qui en résulta, ont fait que des facteurs phonétiques et linguistiques, aussi bien que des considérations de la graphique, ont joué un rôle dans la détermination de l'ordre des lettres de l'alphabet arabe augmenté, plus particulièrement dans les parties du monde islamique en dehors du Maghreb.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , April 1952 , pp. 136 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1952

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References

page 136 note 1 For details and further bibliography see Dillmann-Bezold-Crichton, , Ethiopic Grammar (1907), 15–32Google Scholar; Diringer, , The Alphabet (1947), 223–34Google Scholar; Février, Histoire de l'Écriture (1948), 275–88Google Scholar; Driver, , Semitic Writing (1948), 144–8Google Scholar; Ullendorff, in Africa, 1951, 207–17Google Scholar.

page 136 note 2 Dillmann, op. cit., 33; Höfner, , Altsüdarabische Grammatik (1943), 13–17Google Scholar.

page 136 note 3 ZDMG lxvii (1913), 501–2Google Scholar; Bartels, ibid, lxix (1915), 52-8; cf. Ullendorff, loc. cit., 210.

page 138 note 1 Driver, op. cit. 181, n. 5; for this divergence from the usual North Semitic letter-order no adequate explanation has been provided.

page 139 note 1 Thus we do not exclude the possibility that the order of the letters varied at different periods or in different regions of the South Arabian area. But the inconvenience of upsetting a long-established convention is such, even where numerical values are not associated with the letters of the alphabet, that re arrangement is rarely resorted to except where a major break has taken place in the whole cultural tradition. And the discrepancies between the Qatabanian and the Ethiopic systems are not such as to necessitate the hypothesis of a different order in the Ethiopic archetype from that found at Timna'.

page 140 note 1 Cf. Höfner, op. cit., § 12.

page 140 note 2 In that order, whereas the Qatabanian alphabet begins the group with'.

page 140 note 3 i.e. the sign with the etymological value of z and d, the sound of z, and a shape deriving from that of South Arabian d.

page 141 note 1 Cf. supra, n. I on p. 159.

page 141 note 2 Cf. Littmann, , Deutsche Aksum-Expedition, Bd. IV, Sabäische, Griechische und Altabessinische Inschriften (1913). TafelviGoogle Scholar.

page 141 note 3 Viz. q, w, z, y, g, ṭ, ḍ, ṣ.

page 141 note 4 Ullendorff, loc. cit. 211.

page 142 note 1 This table is reproduced by permission from The Old Testament and Modern Study, ed. Rowley, H. H. (1951), p. xivGoogle Scholar. Detailed discussion of the tablet will be found in The Manchester Guardian of 4 March 1950, pp. 6 and 4Google Scholar; Gordon, in Orientalia, xix (1950), 574–6Google Scholar; Virolleaud, in GLECS, v (1950), 57–60Google Scholar, with observations by Herdner, Dhorme, and Cohen.

page 144 note 1 See especially Boyer's article on ‘Fundamental Steps in the Development of Numeration’ in Isis, xxxv (1944), 153–68Google Scholar, with the literature there cited.

page 144 note 2 Theophanes, , Chronographia, Paris ed., p. 314Google Scholar.

page 146 note 1 Thus the vowel-letters w and y, were transferred to the end of the alphabet. They preserved their former relative order and were preceded by the other ambivalent sign h as also in the Maghreb. The unvoiced sibilants were placed after the voiced sibilant z, and were followed in turn by the emphatic sibilants and dentals in their pairs arranged as before by form rather than phonetic disposition. The ‘auxiliary’ letters k, l, m, n, were transferred en bloc to precede h. Contrast Weil's statement in Enc. Islam I (1913), 68Google Scholar.

page 147 note 1 Note, however, that the table does not reproduce the characteristic Maghrebi forms and variant diacritic punctuation of certain letters.

page 147 note 2 Brockelmann, in ZDMG, lxix (1915), 383–4Google Scholar; cf. Schwarz, ibid. 59-62.

page 147 note 3 Brockelmann, : Geschichte der Arabischen Literatur Supplementband, i (1937), 159Google Scholar; see also Bd. i (1913), 100.

page 147 note 4 Cf. Weil, loc. cit. It is worth noting that the considerations which led al-Khalil to place s and z, q and k beside each other were operative also in the production of the regnant tradition of Arabic alphabetical order.

page 147 note 5 The substance of this paper was communicated to the XXIInd International Congress of Orientalists in Istanbul on 20 September 1951.