| Phoenician | |
| States: | Canaan, North Africa, Cyprus, Iberia, Sicily, Malta and Sardinia |
| Script: | Phoenician alphabet |
| Era: | attested in Canaan proper from the mid-11th century BC to the 2nd century BC[1] |
| Familycolor: | Afro-Asiatic |
| Fam2: | Semitic |
| Fam3: | West Semitic |
| Fam4: | Central Semitic |
| Fam5: | Northwest Semitic |
| Fam6: | Canaanite |
| Iso2: | phn |
| Iso3: | phn |
| Linglist: | uga |
| Glotto: | phoe1239 |
| Glottoname: | Phoenician |
| Glotto2: | phoe1238 |
| Glottoname2: | Phoenician–Punic |
| Notice: | IPA |
Phoenician (; Phoenician [2]) is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
Phoenician belongs to the Canaanite languages and as such is quite similar to Biblical Hebrew and other languages of the group, at least in its early stages, and is therefore mutually intelligible with them.
The area in which Phoenician was spoken, which the Phoenicians called Pūt, includes the northern Levant, specifically the areas now including Syria, Lebanon, the Western Galilee, parts of Cyprus, some adjacent areas of Anatolia, and, at least as a prestige language, the rest of Anatolia.[3] Phoenician was also spoken in the Phoenician colonies along the coasts of the southwestern Mediterranean Sea, including those of modern Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and Algeria as well as Malta, the west of Sicily, southwest Sardinia, the Balearic Islands and southernmost Spain.
In modern times, the language was first decoded by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in 1758, who noted that the name "Phoenician" was first given to the language by Samuel Bochart in his Geographia Sacra seu Phaleg et Canaan.[4] [5]
The Phoenicians were the first state-level society to make extensive use of the Semitic alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is one of the oldest verified consonantal alphabet, or abjad.[6] It has become conventional to refer to the script as "Proto-Canaanite" until the mid-11th century BC, when it is first attested on inscribed bronze arrowheads, and as "Phoenician" only after 1050 BC.[7] The Phoenician phonetic alphabet is generally believed to be at least the partial ancestor of almost all modern alphabets.
From a traditional linguistic perspective, Phoenician was composed of a variety of dialects.[8] [9] According to some sources, Phoenician developed into distinct Tyro-Sidonian and Byblian dialects. By this account, the Tyro-Sidonian dialect, from which the Punic language eventually emerged, spread across the Mediterranean through trade and colonization, whereas the ancient dialect of Byblos, known from a corpus of only a few dozen extant inscriptions, played no expansionary role.[10] However, the very slight differences in language and the insufficient records of the time make it unclear whether Phoenician formed a separate and united dialect or was merely a superficially defined part of a broader language continuum. Through their maritime trade, the Phoenicians spread the use of the alphabet to the Maghreb and Europe, where it was adopted by the Greeks.[11] Later, the Etruscans adopted a modified version for their own use, which, in turn, was modified and adopted by the Romans and became the Latin alphabet.[12] In the east of the Mediterranean region, the language was in use as late as the 1st century BC,[13] when it seems to have gone extinct there.
Punic colonisation spread Phoenician to the western Mediterranean, where the distinct Punic language developed. Punic also died out, but it seems to have survived far longer than Phoenician, until the sixth century, perhaps even into the ninth century.[14]
See main article: Phoenician alphabet.
Phoenician was written with the Phoenician script, an abjad (consonantary) originating from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet that also became the basis for the Greek alphabet and, via an Etruscan adaptation, the Latin alphabet. The Punic form of the script gradually developed somewhat different and more cursive letter shapes; in the 3rd century BC, it also began to exhibit a tendency to mark the presence of vowels, especially final vowels, with an aleph or sometimes an ayin. Furthermore, around the time of the Second Punic War, an even more cursive form began to develop,[15] which gave rise to a variety referred to as Neo-Punic and existed alongside the more conservative form and became predominant some time after the destruction of Carthage (c. 149 BC).[16] Neo-Punic, in turn, tended to designate vowels with matres lectionis ("consonantal letters") more frequently than the previous systems had and also began to systematically use different letters for different vowels,[16] in the way explained in more detail below. Finally, a number of late inscriptions from what is now Constantine, Algeria dated to the first century BC make use of the Greek alphabet to write Punic, and many inscriptions from Tripolitania, in the third and fourth centuries AD use the Latin alphabet for that purpose.[17]
In Phoenician writing, unlike that of abjads such as those of Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew and Arabic, even long vowels remained generally unexpressed, regardless of their origin (even if they originated from diphthongs, as in bt pronounced as //beːt// 'house', for earlier *bayt-; Hebrew spelling has byt). Eventually, Punic writers began to implement systems of marking of vowels by means of matres lectionis. In the 3rd century BC appeared the practice of using final 'ālep to mark the presence of any final vowel and, occasionally, of yōd to mark a final long pronounced as /[iː]/.
Later, mostly after the destruction of Carthage in the so-called "Neo-Punic" inscriptions, that was supplemented by a system in which wāw denoted pronounced as /[u]/, yōd denoted pronounced as /[i]/, 'ālep denoted pronounced as /[e]/ and pronounced as /[o]/, ʿayin denoted pronounced as /[a]/ and hē and could also be used to signify pronounced as /[a]/.[18] This latter system was used first with foreign words and was then extended to many native words as well.
A third practice reported in the literature is the use of the consonantal letters for vowels in the same way as had occurred in the original adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet to Greek and Latin, which was apparently still transparent to Punic writers: hē for pronounced as /[e]/ and 'ālep for pronounced as /[a]/.
Later, Punic inscriptions began to be written in the Latin alphabet, which also indicated the vowels. Those later inscriptions, in addition with some inscriptions in Greek letters and transcriptions of Phoenician names into other languages, represent the main source of knowledge about Phoenician vowels.
The following table presents the consonant phonemes of the Phoenician language as represented in the Phoenician alphabet, alongside their standard Semiticist transliteration and reconstructed phonetic values in the International Phonetic Alphabet:[19] [20]
| Bilabial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Pharyngeal | Glottal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plain | emphatic | |||||||||
| Nasal | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| m /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| n /pronounced as /link// | ||||||||
| Stop / Affricate | voiceless | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| p /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| t /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| ṭ /pronounced as /link/◌/ | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| k /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| q /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| ʾ /pronounced as /link// | |||
| voiced | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| b /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| d /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| g /pronounced as /link// | |||||||
| Fricative | voiceless | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| s /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| ṣ /pronounced as /link/◌/ | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| š /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| ḥ /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| h /pronounced as /link// | ||||
| voiced | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| z /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| ʿ /pronounced as /link// | ||||||||
| Trill / Tap | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| r /pronounced as /link// | |||||||||
| Approximant | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| l /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| y /pronounced as /link// | Phoenician: {{script|Phnx| w /pronounced as /link// | |||||||
The system reflected in the abjad above is the product of several mergers. From Proto-Northwest Semitic to Canaanite, and have merged into, and have merged into, and, and have merged into . Next, from Canaanite to Phoenician, the sibilants and were merged as, and were merged as, and * and * were merged as *. For the phonetic values of the sibilants, see below. These latter developments also occurred in Biblical Hebrew at one point or another, except that merged into there.
The original value of the Proto-Semitic sibilants, and accordingly of their Phoenician counterparts, is disputed. While the traditional sound values are pronounced as /[ʃ]/ for, pronounced as /[s]/ for, pronounced as /[z]/ for, and pronounced as /[sˤ]/ for, recent scholarship argues that was pronounced as /[s]/, was pronounced as /[ts]/, was pronounced as /[dz]/, and was pronounced as /[tsʼ]/, as transcribed in the consonant table above. Krahmalkov, too, suggests that Phoenician *z may have been [dz] or even [zd] based on Latin transcriptions such as esde for the demonstrative z.
On the other hand, it is debated whether šīn and sāmek, which are mostly well distinguished by the Phoenician orthography, also eventually merged at some point, either in Classical Phoenician or in Late Punic.[21]
In later Punic, the laryngeals and pharyngeals seem to have been entirely lost. Neither these nor the emphatics could be adequately represented by the Latin alphabet, but there is also evidence to that effect from Punic script transcriptions.
There is no consensus on whether Phoenician-Punic ever underwent the lenition of stop consonants that happened in most other Northwest Semitic languages such as Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic (cf. Hackett vs Segert and Lyavdansky). The consonant pronounced as //p// may have been generally transformed into pronounced as //f// in Punic and in late Phoenician, as it was in Proto-Arabic.[22] Certainly, Latin-script renditions of late Punic include many spirantized transcriptions with ph, th and kh in various positions (although the interpretation of these spellings is not entirely clear) as well as the letter f for the original *p.[23] However, in Neo-Punic, *b lenited to /v/ contiguous to a following consonant, as in the Latin transcription lifnim for *lbnm "for his son".
Knowledge of the vowel system is very imperfect because of the characteristics of the writing system. During most of its existence, Phoenician writing showed no vowels at all, and even as vowel notation systems did eventually arise late in its history, they never came to be applied consistently to native vocabulary. It is thought that Phoenician had the short vowels pronounced as //a//, pronounced as //i//, pronounced as //u// and the long vowels pronounced as //aː//, pronounced as //iː//, pronounced as //uː//, pronounced as //eː//, pronounced as //oː//. The Proto-Semitic diphthongs pronounced as //aj// and pronounced as //aw// are realized as pronounced as //eː// and pronounced as //oː//. That must have happened earlier than in Biblical Hebrew since the resultant long vowels are not marked with the semivowel letters (bēt "house" was written bt, in contrast to Biblical Hebrew byt).
The most conspicuous vocalic development in Phoenician is the so-called Canaanite shift, shared by Biblical Hebrew, but going further in Phoenician. The Proto-Northwest Semitic pronounced as //aː// and pronounced as //aw// became not merely pronounced as //oː// as in Tiberian Hebrew, but pronounced as //uː//. Stressed Proto-Semitic pronounced as //a// became Tiberian Hebrew pronounced as //ɔː// (pronounced as //aː// in other traditions), but Phoenician pronounced as //oː//. The shift is proved by Latin and Greek transcriptions like rūs/ρους for "head, cape" /ruːʃ/ (Tiberian Hebrew rōš /roːʃ/,); similarly notice stressed pronounced as //o// (corresponding to Tiberian Hebrew pronounced as //a//) samō/σαμω for "he heard" /ʃaˈmoʕ/ (Tiberian Hebrew šāmaʻ /ʃɔːˈmaʕ/,); similarly the word for "eternity" is known from Greek transcriptions to have been ūlōm/ουλομ /ʕuːˈloːm/, corresponding to Biblical Hebrew ʻōlām עולם /ʕoːlɔːm/ and Proto-Semitic ʻālam /ˈʕaːlam/ (in Arabic: ʻālam عالم /ˈʕaːlam/). The letter Y used for words such as /ʔəʃ/ ys/υς "which" and /ʔət/ yth/υθ (definite accusative marker) in Greek and Latin alphabet inscriptions can be interpreted as denoting a reduced schwa vowel that occurred in pre-stress syllables in verbs and two syllables before stress in nouns and adjectives, while other instances of Y as in chyl/χυλ and even chil/χιλ for /kull/ "all" in Poenulus can be interpreted as a further stage in the vowel shift resulting in fronting (pronounced as /[y]/) and even subsequent delabialization of pronounced as //u// and pronounced as //uː//. Short pronounced as //*i// in originally-open syllables was lowered to pronounced as /[e]/ and was also lengthened if it was accented.
| Short | Long | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front | Back | Front | Back | ||
| Close | pronounced as //i// | pronounced as //u// | pronounced as //iː// | pronounced as //uː// | |
| Mid | pronounced as //eː// | pronounced as //oː// | |||
| Open | pronounced as //a// | pronounced as //aː// | |||
Stress-dependent vowel changes indicate that stress was probably mostly final, as in Biblical Hebrew. Long vowels probably occurred only in open syllables.
As is typical for the Semitic languages, Phoenician words are usually built around consonantal roots and vowel changes are used extensively to express morphological distinctions. However, unlike most Semitic languages, Phoenician preserved (or, possibly, re-introduced) numerous uniconsonantal and biconsonantal roots seen in Proto-Afro-Asiatic: compare the verbs kn "to be" vs Arabic كون kwn, mt "to die" vs Hebrew and Arabic מות/موت mwt and sr "to remove" vs Hebrew סרר srr.[24]
| Singular | Dual | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Masculine | Absolute | ∅ | m /-ēm/ | m /-īm/ |
| Construct | ∅ | ∅ /-ē/ | ∅ /-ē/ | |
| Feminine | Absolute | t /-(a/i/o)t/ | tm /-tēm/ | t /-ūt/ |
| Construct | t /-(a/i/o)t/ | tn /-tēn/ | t /-ūt/ |
The case endings in general must have been lost between the 9th century BC and the 7th century BC: the personal name rendered in Akkadian as ma-ti-nu-ba-a-li "Gift of Baal", with the case endings -u and -i, was written ma-ta-an-baa-al (likely Phoenician spelling *) two centuries later. However, evidence has been found for a retention of the genitive case in the form of the first-singular possessive suffix: /abiya/ "of my father" vs /abī/ "my father". If true, this may suggest that cases were still distinguished to some degree in other forms as well.
The written forms and the reconstructed pronunciations of the personal pronouns are as follows:[26]
Singular:
1st: // (Punic sometimes ), also attested as //
2nd masc. //
2nd fem. //
3rd masc. // , also [{{transl|sem|hy}}] (?) and //
3rd fem. //
Plural:
1st: //
2nd masc. //
2nd fem. unattested, perhaps //
3rd masc. and feminine //
Enclitic personal pronouns were added to nouns (to encode possession) and to prepositions, as shown below for "Standard Phoenician" (the predominant dialect, as distinct from the Byblian and the late Punic varieties). They appear in a slightly different form depending on whether or not they follow plural-form masculine nouns (and so are added after a vowel). The former is given in brackets with the abbreviation a.V.
Singular:
1st: // , also (a.V. // )
2nd masc. //
2nd fem. //
3rd masc. // , Punic, (a.V. // )
3rd fem. // , Punic (a.V. // )
Plural:
1st: //
2nd masc. //
2nd fem. unattested, perhaps //
3rd masc. // (a.V. // )
3rd fem. // (a.V. // )
In addition, according to some research, the same written forms of the enclitics that are attested after vowels are also found after a singular noun in what must have been the genitive case (which ended in pronounced as //-i//, whereas the plural version ended in pronounced as //-ē//). Their pronunciation can then be reconstructed somewhat differently: first-person singular // , third-person singular masculine and feminine // and // . The third-person plural singular and feminine must have pronounced the same in both cases, i.e. // and // .
These enclitic forms vary between the dialects. In the archaic Byblian dialect, the third person forms are h and w // for the masculine singular (a.V. w //), h // for the feminine singular and hm // for the masculine plural. In late Punic, the 3rd masculine singular is usually // .
The same enclitic pronouns are also attached to verbs to denote direct objects. In that function, some of them have slightly divergent forms: first singular // and probably first plural //.
The near demonstrative pronouns ("this") are written, in standard Phoenician, z [za] for the singular and [ʔilːa] for the plural. Cypriot Phoenician displays [ʔizːa] instead of z [za]. Byblian still distinguishes, in the singular, a masculine [zan] / [za] from a feminine [zuːt] / [zuː]. There are also many variations in Punic, including st [suːt] and zt [zuːt] for both genders in the singular. The far demonstrative pronouns ("that") are identical to the independent third-person pronouns. The interrogative pronouns are pronounced as //miya// or perhaps pronounced as //mi// "who" and pronounced as //muː// "what". Indefinite pronouns are "anything" is written mnm (possibly pronounced [miːnumːa], similar to Akkadian [miːnumːeː]) and mnk (possibly pronounced [miːnukːa]). The relative pronoun is a [ʃi], either followed or preceded by a vowel.
The definite article was pronounced as //ha-//, and the first consonant of the following word was doubled. It was written h but in late Punic also and because of the weakening and coalescence of the gutturals. Much as in Biblical Hebrew, the initial consonant of the article is dropped after the prepositions b-, l- and k-; it could also be lost after various other particles and function words, such the direct object marker and the conjunction w- "and".
Of the cardinal numerals from 1 to 10, 1 is an adjective, 2 is formally a noun in the dual and the rest are nouns in the singular. They all distinguish gender: , / [27] (construct state / ), , , , , , / , , / [28] [29] vs , ,[30] , , , , , ,[31] unattested, .[32] The tens are morphologically masculine plurals of the ones: / ,[29] [33] , , , , , , . "One hundred" is , two hundred is its dual form , whereas the rest are formed as in (three hundred). One thousand is . Ordinal numerals are formed by the addition of *iy .[34] Composite numerals are formed with w- "and", e.g. for "twelve".
The verb inflects for person, number, gender, tense and mood. Like for other Semitic languages, Phoenician verbs have different "verbal patterns" or "stems", expressing manner of action, level of transitivity and voice.The perfect or suffix-conjugation, which expresses the past tense, is exemplified below with the root p-ʻ-l "to do" (a "neutral", G-stem).[35]
Singular:
Plural:
The imperfect or prefix-conjugation, which expresses the present and future tense (and which is not distinguishable from the descendant of the Proto-Semitic jussive expressing wishes), is exemplified below, again with the root p-ʻ-l.
Plural:
The imperative endings were presumably pronounced as //-∅//, and [36] for the second-person singular masculine, second-person singular feminine and second-person plural masculine respectively, but all three forms surface in the orthography as // : . The old Semitic jussive, which originally differed slightly from the prefix conjugation, is no longer possible to separate from it in Phoenician with the present data.
The non-finite forms are the infinitive construct, the infinitive absolute and the active and passive participles. In the G-stem, the infinitive construct is usually combined with the preposition l- "to", as in "to do"; in contrast, the infinitive absolute (paʻōl) is mostly used to strengthen the meaning of a subsequent finite verb with the same root: "you will indeed open!",[36] accordingly / / "you will indeed do!".
The participles had, in the G-stem, the following forms:
The missing forms above can be inferred from the correspondences between the Proto-Northwest Semitic ancestral forms and the attested Phoenician counterparts: the PNWS participle forms are *.
The derived stems are:
Most of the stems apparently also had passive and reflexive counterparts, the former differing through vowels, the latter also through the infix -t-. The G stem passive is attested as pyʻl, < *;[36] t-stems can be reconstructed as ytpʻl /yitpaʻil/ (tG) and yptʻʻl /yiptaʻʻil/ (Dt).
Some prepositions are always prefixed to nouns, deleting, if present, the initial pronounced as //h// of the definite article: such are b- "in", l- "to, for", k- "as" and m- // "from". They are sometimes found in forms extended through the addition of -n or -t. Other prepositions are not like that: "upon", . "until", "after", "under",, "between". New prepositions are formed with nouns: lpn "in front of", from l- "to" and pn "face". There is a special preposited marker of a definite object (//?), which, unlike Hebrew, is clearly distinct from the preposition את (//).
The most common negative marker is (//), negating verbs but sometimes also nouns; another one is (//), expressing both nonexistence and the negation of verbs. Negative commands or prohibitions are expressed with (//). "Lest" is . Some common conjunctions are (originally perhaps //, but certainly // in Late Punic), "and", "when", and, "that; because; when". There was also a conjunction / ("also". (//) could (rarely) be used to introduce desiderative constructions ("may he do X!"). could also introduce vocatives. Both prepositions and conjunctions could form compounds.
The basic word order is verb-subject-object. There is no verb "to be" in the present tense; in clauses that would have used a copula, the subject may come before the predicate. Nouns precede their modifiers, such as adjectives and possessors.
Most nouns are formed by a combination of consonantal roots and vocalic patterns, but they can be formed also with prefixes (pronounced as //m-//, expressing actions or their results, and rarely pronounced as //t-//) and suffixes pronounced as //-ūn//. Abstracts can be formed with the suffix -t (probably pronounced as //-īt//, pronounced as //-ūt//).[37] Adjectives can be formed following the familiar Semitic nisba suffix pronounced as //-īy// y (e.g. ṣdny "Sidonian").
Like the grammar, the vocabulary is very close to Biblical Hebrew, but some peculiarities attract attention. For example, the copula verb "to be" is kn (as in Arabic, as opposed to Hebrew and Aramaic היה hyh) and the verb "to do" is pʿl (as in Aramaic פעל pʿl and Arabic فعل fʿl, as opposed to Hebrew עשה ʿśh, though in Hebrew פעל pʿl has the similar meaning "to act").
| ʾnk tbnt khn ʿštrt mlk ṣdnm bn ʾšmnʿzr khn ʿštrt mlk ṣdnm škb bʾrn z my ʾt kl ʾdm ʾš tpq ʾyt hʾrn z ʾl ʾl tptḥ ʿlty wʾl trgzn k ʾy ʾrln ksp ʾy ʾr ln ḥrṣ wkl mnm mšd blt ʾnk škb bʾrn z ʾl ʾl tptḥ ʿlty wʾl trgzn k tʿbt ʿštrt hdbr hʾ wʾm ptḥ tptḥ ʿlty wrgz trgzn ʾl ykn zrʿ bḥym tḥt šmš wmškb ʾt rpʾm | ʾanōk(ī) Tabnīt kōhēn ʿAštart mīlk Ṣīdūnīm bīn ʾEšmūnʿūzēr kōhēn ʿAštart mīlk Ṣīdūnīm šūkēb bāʾarūn ze(h) mī ʾata kūl ʾadōm ʾīš tūpaq ʾīyat hāʾarūn ze ʾal ʾal tīptaḥ ʿalōtīya waʾal targīzenī kī ʾīy ʾarū[]lanī kesep waʾal ʾīy ʾarū lanī ḥūreṣ wakūl manīm mašōd būltī ʾanōk(ī) šūkēb bāʾarūn ze ʾal ʾal tīptaḥ ʿalōtīya waʾal targīzenī kī tōʿebūt ʿAštart hadōbōr hīʾa wāʾīm pōtōḥ tīptaḥ ʿalōtīya waragōz targīzenī ʾal yakūn zeraʿ baḥayīm taḥat šamš wamīškōb ʾet Repaʾīm | ||
| Translation | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte, king of Sidon, the son of Eshmunazar, priest of Astarte, king of Sidon, am lying in this sarcophagus. Whoever you are, any man that might find this sarcophagus, don't, don't open it and don't disturb me, for no silver is gathered with me, no gold is gathered with me, nor anything of value whatsoever, only I am lying in this sarcophagus. Don't, don't open it and don't disturb me, for this thing is an abomination to Astarte. And if you do indeed open it and do indeed disturb me, may you not have any seed among the living under the sun, nor a resting-place with the Rephaites. | |||
| ΛΑΔΟΥΝ ΛΥΒΑΛ ΑΜΟΥΝ ΟΥ ΛΥΡΥΒΑΘΩΝ ΘΙΝΙΘ ΦΑΝΕ ΒΑΛ ΥΣ ΝΑΔΩΡ ΣΩΣΙΠΑΤΙΟΣ ΒΥΝ ΖΟΠΥΡΟΣ ΣΑΜΩ ΚΟΥΛΩ ΒΑΡΑΧΩ | Ladun liBal Amun u liribathōn Thīnīth phane Bal is nadōr Sōsīpatīos bin Zopuros samō kulō barakhō | lʾdn lbʿl ḥmn wlrbtn tnt pn bʿl ʾš ndr S. bn Z. šmʾ qlʾ brkʾ | lāʾadūn līBaʿl Ḥamūn wūlīrībatōn(ū) Tīnīt pāne Baʿl ʾīš nadōr S(osipatius) bīn Z(opyrus) šamōʾ qūlōʾ barakōʾ | ||
| Translation | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| To the master Baal Hammon and to our mistress Tanit, the face of Baal, [that] which consecrated Sosipatius, son of Zopyrus. He heard his voice and blessed him. | |||||
See main article: Punic language. The significantly divergent later form of the language that was spoken in the Tyrian Phoenician colony of Carthage is known as Punic and remained in use there for considerably longer than Phoenician did in Phoenicia itself by arguably surviving into Augustine of Hippo's time. Throughout its existence, Punic co-existed with the Berber languages, which were then native to Tunisia (including Carthage) and North Africa. It is possible that Punic may have survived the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in some small isolated area: the geographer al-Bakri describes a people speaking a language that was not Berber, Latin or Coptic in the city of Sirte in rural Ifriqiya, a region in which spoken Punic survived well past its written use.[40] However, it is likely that arabization of the Punics was facilitated by their language belonging to the same group (both being Semitic languages) as that of the conquerors and thus having many grammatical and lexical similarities.
The ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet that is still in irregular use by modern Berber groups such as the Tuareg is known by the native name Tifinagh, possibly a derived form of a cognate of the name "Punic".[41] Still, a direct derivation from the Phoenician-Punic script is debated and far from established since the two writing systems are very different. As far as language (not the script) is concerned, some borrowings from Punic appear in modern Berber dialects: one interesting example is agadir "wall" from Punic gader.
Perhaps the most interesting case of Punic influence is that of the name of Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula, comprising Portugal and Spain), which, according to one of the theories, is derived from the Punic I-Shaphan meaning "coast of hyraxes", in turn a misidentification on the part of Phoenician explorers of its numerous rabbits as hyraxes.[42] [43] Another case is the name of a tribe of hostile "hairy people" that Hanno the Navigator found in the Gulf of Guinea. The name given to those people by Hanno the Navigator's interpreters was transmitted from Punic into Greek as gorillai and was applied in 1847 by Thomas S. Savage to the western gorilla.
Phoenician, together with Punic, is primarily known from approximately 10,000 surviving inscriptions, supplemented by occasional glosses in books written in other languages. In addition to their many inscriptions, the Phoenicians are believed to have left numerous other types of written sources, but most have not survived.
Roman authors, such as Sallust, allude to some books written in the Punic language, but none have survived except occasionally in translation (e.g., Mago's treatise) or in snippets (e.g., in Plautus' plays). The Cippi of Melqart, a bilingual inscription in Ancient Greek and Carthaginian discovered in Malta in 1694, was the key which allowed French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélemy to decipher and reconstruct the alphabet in 1758. Even as late as 1837 only 70 Phoenician inscriptions were known to scholars. These were compiled in Wilhelm Gesenius's Scripturae linguaeque Phoeniciae monumenta, which comprised all that was known of Phoenician by scholars at that time.Some key surviving inscriptions of Phoenician are:
Since the bilingual Pyrgi Tablets were found in 1964 with inscriptions in both Etruscan and Phoenician dating from around 500 BC, more Etruscan has been deciphered through comparison to the more fully understood Phoenician.