Latin – Book and Sword

Latin

VENI VIDI VICI

A tomb relief depicting a man in a toga with six writing boards, Archaeologisches Museum, Schloss Eggenburg, Graz. Photo by Sean Manning, September 2015. A good long time ago, Julius Caesar faced the problem of how to boast about military achievements so great and so numerous that one war threatened to... Continue reading: VENI VIDI VICI

From Aleph Bet to Alphabet

Table with the Hebrew Samaritan Syriac Phoenician Greek etc. scripts side by side — An old chart of ancient abjads and alphabets, from a class handout. The Tin Eye reverse image search tool points to https://tmcdaniel.palmerseminary.edu/charts.html which suggests that it comes from Wilhelm Gesenius, Emil Kautzsch, and Arthur Ernest Cowley, *Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910)

The Greek alphabet is adapted from the consonantal writing systems of the Levant, and I used to have a vague idea that Greek got its vowel signs by adapting signs for Semitic consonants not present in Greek. Greek has no aspirated “s”, for example, so Greeks using the Northwest Semitic abjad to write Greek found that they did not need the sign shin ש for transcribing Greek consonants and could use it for something else. As I learn a bit of Aramaic I realize that the process was much more straightforward.