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ANCIENT SCRIPTS Β· TRANSLATOR

Phoenician Alphabet

The 22-letter ancestor of every alphabet you use today.

The 22-letter ancestor of the Latin alphabet - this chart uses 20 of them, and several modern letters share one sign.

ENCODING β†’
PHOENICIAN𐀏𐀍𐀄 π€Œπ€π€“π€„ π€‚π€‹π€‰π€‚π€Š
ANCIENT SCRIPTS

PLAY ANOTHER β†’

SCRIPTSAncient Scripts

Runes, Ogham, Phoenician, Cuneiform, Hieroglyphics - one console, five scripts.

5 SCRIPTSSCRIPTSOgham Alphabet

The early-medieval Irish alphabet, letter by letter.

αš›αš‘αšŒαšαš‹αšœ A TO ZSCRIPTSHieroglyphics Translator

Write your name the Ancient Egyptian way.

π“„Ώ-π“Šƒ A TO ZSCRIPTSCuneiform Translator

The world’s oldest writing system, one sign per letter.

𒀀𒁀𒁕 A TO Z

THE HISTORYΒ β—’

The Phoenician alphabet, in use from about the 12th century BC, was one of the first widely adopted alphabets and the ancestor of the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic scripts. Its 22 consonant signs, carried around the Mediterranean by traders, are ultimately why the letters on this page exist.

THE LONG ANSWERΒ β—’

Phoenician did not write vowels. Omniglot classes it flatly as an "abjad / consonant alphabet with no vowel indication."

The box above will still give you an A, an E, an I, an O and a U. That is a convenience we have added, not something the alphabet did, and it is the first of several liberties worth knowing about before you copy anything out of here.

Key Takeaways

  • Phoenician is an abjad: 22 letters, no vowel indication.
  • It ran right to left, and so does the box above, because Unicode classes these letters as right-to-left.
  • Our chart uses 20 of the 22 letters. Tet and Sade never appear.
  • Six letters do not survive a round trip: G, J, U, V, W and Y.
  • The Unicode Standard: an older form of it "is a forerunner of the Greek, Old Italic (Etruscan), Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts."

Phoenician has no vowels, so where do ours come from?

From consonant signs, pressed into service.

Omniglot's classification is unambiguous: an abjad, with "no vowel indication". A reader supplied the vowels from context, the way you can still read bldng as building.

Five arrive anyway:

You type You get Letter
A 𐀀 Alf
E 𐀄 He
I 𐀉 Yod
O 𐀏 Ain
U 𐀅 Wau

Since the script indicates no vowels at all, every one of those five signs is doing a job the script does not define. That is a straightforward consequence of the classification rather than a claim about what each letter originally sounded like, which is not something we can tell you from the sources we opened.

It also means the thing the box does best, turning your name into legible signs, is the thing the alphabet was least designed for.

Which of your letters do not come back?

Six of them, and they collect around just three signs.

Type a word in, read the signs, then convert them back. G, J, U, V, W and Y all arrive home as something else, because three signs are carrying more than one modern letter each:

Sign Letter Carries
𐀂 Gaml C and G
𐀅 Wau F, U, V and W
𐀉 Yod I, J and Y

Wau doing the work of four letters is the striking one. F, U, V and W are four distinct keys on your keyboard and one sign here, so whichever you type, 𐀅 comes back as an F.

CLICKIDY goes in and CLICKIDI comes out: the Y collapses into Yod alongside I and J, while the K survives on its own sign. Digits and punctuation are dropped rather than transliterated, so the round trip is about letters only.

The tool's own blurb says as much: several modern letters share one sign.

Two letters you can never produce

There are 22 Phoenician letters in Unicode, running from U+10900 to U+10915. This chart only ever emits 20 of them.

The two it never reaches are Tet (U+10908) and Sade (U+10911). We found no single English letter worth assigning to either, so no key on your keyboard produces them and nothing you type will ever contain one.

That is the same shape of compromise Ogham makes, where one traditional letter goes unused for exactly the same reason. Cuneiform makes it far harder, squeezing the alphabet onto fewer signs still. An alphabet built for one language always has a few signs the next language has no use for.

Those two idle signs also settle something about the collisions above. It is tempting to read them as simple arithmetic, 22 signs feeding an alphabet that now has 26. This chart refutes that on its own: a genuine squeeze would spend all 22 before doubling any of them up, and instead it leaves Tet and Sade untouched while piling four letters onto Wau. The mapping was made by what looked usable, not by running out of room.

It ran right to left, and so does the box

Omniglot gives the direction plainly: "right to left in hortizontal [sic] lines. Sometimes boustrophedon."

Here is the part that surprised us when we measured it. The output above really does run right to left, and we did not build that. Unicode's own property data classes these letters as right-to-left, so your browser reorders the run for display all on its own. We checked the rendered positions: type ABC and Alf lands furthest right, with Bet and Gaml stepping left from it.

So the signs and the reading order are both historically correct, which is more than we can usually claim. Copy the output and the order travels with it, because what is stored is the logical sequence and the direction is applied when it is drawn.

What no flat text box can give you is boustrophedon, the other option in that quote. It means alternating direction line by line, so you read the first line one way and the second back the other way, turning at each end like an ox ploughing a field. One box, one direction, so that is the part we genuinely cannot show you.

Why does this alphabet matter?

Because a very large share of the world's writing descends from it, including the alphabet you are reading now.

The Unicode Standard puts it carefully: an older form of the Phoenician alphabet "is a forerunner of the Greek, Old Italic (Etruscan), Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts among others, many of which are still in modern use." Omniglot goes further, saying "the origins of most alphabetic writing systems can be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet."

Omniglot dates its development from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet to the 15th century BC, and notes "there was considerable variation in their forms in different regions and at different times", so a single tidy chart of 22 fixed shapes is already a simplification before we add ours on top.

Frequently asked questions

How many letters are in the Phoenician alphabet?

Twenty-two. Omniglot gives the count and adds that "there was considerable variation in their forms in different regions and at different times". Unicode encodes those 22 letters from U+10900 to U+10915.

Did Phoenician have vowels?

No. Omniglot classes it as an "abjad / consonant alphabet with no vowel indication", so readers supplied vowels from context. The five vowels the box above produces are a convenience of our chart, not a feature of the script.

Why does the translator change some of my letters?

Because three signs each carry several modern letters: Gaml covers C and G, Wau covers F, U, V and W, and Yod covers I, J and Y. So G, J, U, V, W and Y all decode back as a different letter, while the rest survive intact.

Which way was Phoenician written?

Right to left, and sometimes boustrophedon, meaning the direction alternated on each line. The box above reproduces the right-to-left order, because Unicode treats these letters as strong right-to-left characters and the browser reorders them. Boustrophedon is the part a single text box cannot show.

Which alphabets came from Phoenician?

The Unicode Standard names Greek, Old Italic (Etruscan), Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac as descendants of an older form of it. That makes the Latin alphabet on your keyboard a distant relative of the signs in the box above.

Type your name into the box above and see which letters make it home. Then try Ogham, which loses four, or the rest of the scripts, each of which bends in a direction of its own.

Sources