Phoenician writing system was an abjad [0], an alphabet where each symbol stands for consonant, vowels being implied or if symbols exist, they are optional. Where alphabet have vowels and consonants. Modern Arab, Hebrew and semitic languages have abjad.

Hieroglyph are pictograms/logographic scripts. One word for one logogram to represent one word.

They mostly talk about the fact that the Phoenician may have come from illiterate worker in the Canaan mines. Unable to learn hieroglyphs, they may have invented a simplified writing system leading to the Phoenician. The main interest is that the Phoenician abjad is not a construction from savant but by illiterate workers.

What do you mean by count? Various writing system exists in parallel, none really prevails on the other. Egyptians did not have an alphabet per se like Mandarin do not really have one either at least not really one that is reflected in the writing system.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

Egyptian hieroglyphs are absolutely not pictograms. It was the belief that they were that prevented decrypting them for so long, until the Rosetta Stone was found.

Neither are Chinese characters, BTW. Chinese is a syllabary, but with a lot of redundancy -- 1200 syllables, lots more characters -- and arbitrary, historical rules about which variant for a syllable may be used for each word.

Amazingly (at least it amazes me), most Mandarin speakers think that other Chinese "dialects" are just different ways to pronounce Mandarin, where in fact they are as different from Mandarin as various European languages are from Latin.

Many even think of the characters as pictograms with complicated rules about sharing with homonyms. People who know more than one Sinitic language know better.

I'm not an Egyptologist, but I can read hieroglyphs and can say with surety that Egyptian hieroglyphs are both pictographic AND alphabetic. It's actually an interesting system, where an alphabet (abjad, sort of) exists, but is not usually used in isolation from pictographic writing, nor can most Egyptian words be expressed entirely pictographically. For example, "Nile" is written "i t r w picture-of-water." "Sun" can be written as either a picture of the sun (with a single stroke added, indicating it is a logogram) or as "r ' picture-of-sun." The ' is the common transliteration for the arm hieroglyph, and my understanding is that it's likely pronounced something like the Arabic ayin.

Another crackpot theory by a non-native speaker. Chinese is logographic. You can't simultaneously claim that different dialects are seperate languages and also claim that they were secretly writing phonetically all this time. They wouldn't be mutually intelligible even in writing. Hand-waiving away a logographic system as a "syllabry with redundancy" is exactly the type of dumb semantic game I would expect from HackerNews. I guess you think a car is just a bicycle with more wheels and an engine too.

They are, in fact, not mutually intelligible, either phonetically or in writing.

That is what is so amazing about monolingual Mandarin speakers believing they should be.

Did you really just call somebody replying to you in English a "monolingual mandarin speaker". There have plenty of times where I have accidentally gone on Cantonese wikipedia and didn't notice until halfway through the article.

Compare the following from Cantonese Wikipedia:

粵文維基百科 係維基百科協作計劃嘅粵文版，由非牟利組織──維基媒體基金會喺2006年3月25號成立。

To "mandarin" Wikipedia

粵文維基百科是維基百科協作計劃的粵文版本，於2006年3月25日成立，由非營利組織──維基媒體基金會負責營運。

1. Save for 係, 嘅, and 喺, the former is perfectly valid Mandarin. Every other difference between the two texts are phrasing differences from then being written seperately by different people. If you did s/係/是/, s/喺/於/, and s/嘅/的/ and copy pasted the Cantonese version into regular Chinese Wikipedia nobody would notice.

2. Despite the fact that not a single word in those two excerpts would be pronounced the same, you can clearly see the same characters being used even if you can't read Chinese. This can not be the case if it were a "syllabary".

3. 係, 喺, and 嘅 are written differently not because they're pronounced different(so is every other character in the above excerpt) or even because they have a different meaning(they pretty much serve the same grammatical purpose as 是, 於, and 的), but because they have different etymologies and are different morphemes. This can only be the case if the writing system is logographic. It wouldn't be the case in either a logographic or ideographic system.

Mind you Cantonese Wikipedia is written exclusively by people like you who think Cantonese is a "language", and it's not some dying dialect(It's the second largest dialect and probably spoken by at least 50% of Chinese speakers who actually use Wikipedia and not some other wiki) like Scots so you can't claim that the people writing are just bad Cantonese speakers.

Comparing Wikipedia versions is not terribly useful, since formal written Chinese tends towards uniformity: previously 文言, now 普通话.

Spoken Chinese does not, and an accurate transcription of colloquial Cantonese is quite different from colloquial Mandarin: 係唔係佢哋嘅 vs 是不是他們的, and that's despite the grammar of the two sentences being identical (which is not normally the case either).

I was arguing against OP's case claim that Chinese is a "syllabary".

But even then your example is far more cherry picked than mine. Translated your phrase means "is it not theirs". It doesn't have any common nouns that aren't pronouns, adjectives, or even a verb that isn't is/是/係. You also managed to do something I couldn't even and provide an example where every word had the same exact grammatical meaning and were arranged in the same order in both examples. Really helps my point about logography more. If Chinese were ideographic and not logographic those words would be written the same. They're not because of differing etymologies.

The fact that you can only find colloquial examples that are significantly different is why it's a dialect. AAVE or Appalachian English are also near incomprehensible when spoken/written colloquially. Hell, I could even make the dumb arguement that liberals/conservatives speak a seperate language with something like your example. "was he Latino"/"were they latinx?"

Here I found the following sentence on a Cantonese bbs.

"推普滅粵係中國政府堅定不移的國策"

Perfectly valid Mandarin except for 係/是. You can't claim that a bbs comment complaining about the promotion of Mandarin, written on a forum dedicated to Cantonese of all things is formal language that's "tending towards" "mandarin".

Indeed. In general, you don’t need to know how the language sounds in order to read; pictographic scripts make this even easier in a way. I can imagine (not necessarily true) that a text in Chinese could be read as if it was in English.

There is a lot of not-quite-correct information about Egyptian hieroglyphs in the replies to this comment. Hieroglyphs are actually a hybrid system, incorporating uniliteral glyphs (representing a single consonant sound), bi- and triliteral glyphs (representing two or three consonants), and logograms, representing a full word or concept. They also include "determinatives," which are basically helpful pictures at the end of a word that tells you something about the category of the word. Sometimes, a word incorporates all three types of symbol. For example, the word "Ra," if it refers to the sun god, might have the two consonants r and ' (which is close to a), followed by a picture of the sun, followed by the seated god determinative.

So I guess the real answer here is that the Egyptian writing system incorporates elements of alphabets and logographs, used together. Vowels were (mostly) not marked, though some "consonants" are treated as vowels in transliteration. I'm not entirely sure what the distinction is there.

> I have been led to believe that the Phoenician writing system was a syllabary, and that the Greeks made an alphabet out of it.

My understanding is that it was an abjad, not a syllabary. An abjad has only consonants, not vowels. When a word is written, only its consonants get written, and the vowels are only implied. Hebrew and Arabic are abjads.

The Phoenician alphabet was preceded by the Ugaritic "alphabet", which was also an abjad.

A syllabary usually has many more symbols than an abjad or alphabet. If n denotes the number of phonemes in a language, then a syllabary has O(n^2) or O(n^3) symbols. In contrast, the Phoenician abjad has fewer symbols than even the English alphabet.

Both the Ugaritic "alphabet" and the Phoenician "alphabet" must have been derived from an earlier abjad, from which we do not have any preserved example.

The earlier, unknown, abjad, must have been used to write the same 27 consonants as in the Ugaritic alphabet, but using graphic signs similar to those used by the 22-sign Phoenician alphabet, which resemble in form the Egyptian signs.

There is no doubt that the Egyptian writing system was the inspiration for the first abjad, because both the method of writing only the consonants and the direction of writing were inherited from the Egyptians.

In Ugarit, in order to write on earth tablets, like in Mesopotamia, the original graphic signs used for the 27 consonants were replaced with cuneiform signs.

On the other hand, the Phoenicians deleted 5 letters, because their language was simplified and the 5 deleted consonants were eventually pronounced identically with other 5 consonants. It is supposed that the Phoenician pronunciation was simplified so much because it was used as a lingua franca for commerce, by many people.

This reduction in the number of consonants created later problems for other Semitic people, e.g. Hebrews and Arabs, who still pronounced distinctly some of the consonants that were deleted from the Phoenician alphabet, so they had to invent diacritics to mark the missing consonants (e.g. shin and sin in Hebrew).

Was hoping a message like this would be more prominent here.

Although the Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets come from the same area, they are discontinuous. However, the ordering being roughly the same, and following an earlier Egyptian ordering, is the big hint that they share at least inspirational descent from the same source.

Why that area of Lebanon? Byblos has been an Egyptian colony in that region for a very long time (~4600 years ago), ensuring continuous scribal presence. Scribes of that region are noted for intense multi-lingualism (as perusal of Ugaritic tablets is evidence of), so cross-pollination of scripts makes a lot of sense.

I haven't read through Goldwassers papers, but a lot of what they quote in the article seems to be unnecessary to explain the transmission of the abjad.

The orderings of the 27 consonants of the Ugaritic alphabet and of the 22 consonants of the Phoenician alphabet are identical, not just roughly the same.

The difference is just that 5 consonants are missing from the Phoenician alphabet in random places: between gamma and delta, between kappa and lambda, between mu and nu, between nu and xi, and between sigma and tau.

It is known with which other consonants the deleted consonants were merged. For example Ugaritic had "s" and unvoiced "th" like in "thin", while Phoenician pronounced both as "s" and kept only the sigma letter.

(I have used the names of the letters as used by the Greeks, as those are more familiar for most people)

The Ugaritic alphabet also used for certain purposes 3 supplementary signs, invented later, and which were added after the original 27 consonants.

Abjad, yeah. One story I heard was that Greeks since greeks lacked unvoiced velar/glottal stops as meaningful phonemes, they heard aleph as just a vowel, thus creating an actual alphabet.

I've no idea how well that story is supported, but abusing new technology for purposes it was never intended to fill does seem like an eternal human fact.

Wikipedia claims that matres lectionis appeared in the Phoenician system only rather late [0], and so I would presume after transmission to the Greeks. Consequently, could the Phoenician system really be called an abjad at the time that the Greeks borrowed it? See also [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Greek-deri...

A pure abjad doesn't have matres lectionis.

Yes, my mistake, and unfortunately your reply came an instant before I could delete my post to avoid wasting everyone’s time here.