The Aramaeans in Ancient Syria

language and script 77

played an important role in advancing the phoenician variant of the
alphabet in palestine, Syria, and transjordan. the reduced set of twenty­
two letter­signs (“graphemes”) of that particular script was more suitable
for the inventory of distinctive consonantal sounds (“phonemes”) of a
canaanite language like phoenician than for aramaic, which had initially
preserved some of the older Semitic consonantal phonemes already lost
in canaanite. earlier variants of this type of script—structurally closer to
some of the 2nd­millennium cuneiform alphabets, which still contained
proper letters for these phonemes—would have been a more practical
choice, but they were apparently forgotten by then or at least eclipsed by
the phoenician variant.
Since not every consonant that can be reconstructed for the earliest
attested stages of aramaic was thus represented by a proper letter­sign
in the alphabet accepted by the aramaeans, some letters served at least
double duty: {z} for /z/ and /ð/; {š} for /š/, /θ/, and presumably also /ś/
or, in the tell fekheriye inscription, {s} for /s/ and /θ/; {ṣ} for /ṣ/ and
/θ̣/ (arabic /ẓ/); and {q} for /q/ and the reflex of the proto­Semitic lateral
*/ṣ́/ (arabic /ḍ/), whose pronunciation in early aramaic, however, remains
controversial. Samʾalian spelling generally agrees with the standard vari­
ant of Syrian aramaic reflected by the Sefire inscriptions.

2.3 The Rise of Vowel Letters

the original type of the West Semitic alphabet was purely consonantal
and did not indicate any vowels. While this practice of writing survived
for a considerable period of time in phoenician scribal schools, other
spelling traditions in Syria­palestine employed, to an increasing degree,
the graphemes {h}, {w}, and {y} for indicating long vowels (“plene spell­
ing”), thereby reducing the amount of ambiguity. hence, {h} could denote
the laryngeal /h/ as well as the vowels /ā/ and /ɛ̄/, {w} served for the glide
/w/ as well as the vowel /ū/ (later also regularly /ō/), and {y} could indi­
cate the glide /y/ as well as the vowel /ī/ (later also habitually /ē/).19 this
innovation is generally attributed to the aramaeans, since it occurred first
in aramaic inscriptions, but was soon thereafter adopted by other scribal

19 the grapheme {ʾ}, by contrast, did not yet serve as a vowel letter for /ā/ although
it was in certain cases preserved in historical spelling when the loss of the consonant /ʾ/
produced a long vowel, especially in the so­called “emphatic state.”