Re: Introductions

Randall Hunt wrote:

>
> I've been on this fine list for about a year and feel it's time to
> introduce myself. My name is Randall Hunt and I make my living in graphic
> arts -- now mostly computer graphics, tho I owned a printing shop for ten
> years. I discovered this list while doing research for a children's book on
> the history of alphabets. I've had a number of questions on the subject
> that I would have put to this list but most of them were eventually
> resolved through diligent web research. I've become acutely aware of the
> limitations of using the web for factual material -- there is a lot of
> misinformation out there -- but since I live in central Arizona (USA,
> beautiful Jerome), I don't have ready access to extensive libraries. As I
> am nearing the end of my project, there remain a few items that I haven't
> been able to resolve completely. I would very much appreciate it if someone
> here could advise me.
>
> HIEROGLYPHICS
> * In popular literature it is given that an alphabetic equivalent for the
> letter, L, exists as the lion glyph. Yet academic literature omits the
> glyph from the twenty-four uni-consonantal signs, notwithstanding its
> apparent correlation in Champollion's decipherment. I have found two
> sources that state the lion represents the bi-consonant, RW. Is this
> correct?

Egyptian has no /l/. The lion is /rw/.

Champollion certainly wasn't perfect.

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

We do not know what, if anything, the names of the hieroglyphs were.

> 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?

Cross & Lambdin (1960) made the, to me highly dubious, claim that the
Mesopotamian cuneiform signs in the biscriptal Ugaritic abecedary
represented the first syllable of the Ugaritic letter names, and they
just happen to be fairly close to the familiar Hebrew (Phoenician)
names. I say, if the scribe was trying to write letter names, why not
write the entire name? Thus it's conceivable that just the syllables
given on that tablet are the letter names, but it seems unlikely.

> * 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?

No. The first letter and the 2nd & 3rd from last all represent the
consonant ' (aleph). The first is the glottal stop when followed by /a/,
the second is the glottal stop when followed by /i/ or a consonant, and
the third of the three is the glottal stop when followed by /u/. (That
last letter is a sibilant that doesn't occur in Semitic words.)

> 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?
>
> 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."
> One source implied this was a title of one of his books. Does anyone know
> if this is so, or can anyone tell me where/when he wrote this?

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...