Re: Introductions

At 13:19 -0700 2003-09-26, Randall Hunt wrote:

>I discovered this list while doing research for a children's book on
>the history of alphabets.

How interesting.

>I would very much appreciate it if someone here could advise me.

I'll try. Partly because I lived in Tucson for many years. ;-)

>HIEROGLYPHICS
>* In popular literature it is given that an alphabetic equivalent for the
>letter, L, exists as the lion glyph.

Because the mouth is used for the R. So if you're doing an alphabet
cipher for Latin, it works very well.

>I have found two sources that state the lion represents the
>bi-consonant, RW. Is this correct?

The recumbant lion stands for rw 'lion' but is also used for the
sound /l/ especially in foreign words. /r/ and /l/ are often mixed
up, as for instance in Japanese. Think of her as Kriopatra.

>* One might assume that the alphabetic (uniliteral) glyph values derive
>acrophonically.

Best not to assume.

>Is this so, and if so, is there somewhere a list of those original
>words? Would it be accurate to use such words as the "names" of the
>glyphs? Or is it either meaningless or impossible to attribute
>"names" to the glyphs?

I don't think we have evidence for the "names" of the, ah, characters
in Egyptian. It's possible to look them up, though. Gardiner says of
the "m" owl "cf. Coptic moulaj".

>UGARITIC
>* Speaking again of names, I've never seen names attributed to the
>Ugaritic characters. Would it be fair to say that since Ugaritic was
>a semitic language, the names of the letters were probably similar
>to those of the later Phoenician letters?

Some names are, actually attested. I've a list somewhere. We used
those and reconstructed (with agreement of some Ugariticists) and you
can see them in the Unicode code chart. See
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10380.pdf

>* Of the final three characters in the Ugaritic alphabet, used particlarly
>for writing Hurrian, am I correct to believe that the first two were vowels
>and the third was a sibilant, not a vowel?

That's correct.

>LATIN
>* Emperor Claudius introduced three new letters to the Latin alphabet
>(although they were abandoned after his passing): digamma inversum,
>antisigma, and ??? Can anyone tell me what that third letter was called?

aspiratio.

>Miscellaneous
>* I've been unable to locate the exact origin of the popular quote by
>Alphonse de Lamartine, "Letters are symbols which turn matter into spirit."

He said it in 1858. Or 1865. Apparently it is quoted in Basic
Typography by John R. Biggs (1968).
--
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com