[HN Gopher] Ancient Phoenician Shipwreck Recovered, Sank 2.6k Ye...
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Ancient Phoenician Shipwreck Recovered, Sank 2.6k Years Ago Off
Coast of Spain
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-01-16 20:25 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| A good book to read more or less related to this shipwreck:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Made-West-History/dp/059372...
| behnamoh wrote:
| How did people come up with alphabet? Phoenicians were one of the
| first to invent this technology, but I assume language existed
| way before that? How did that happen? Like, how did people agree
| on saying certain things to mean specific things? Starting from
| the mind of the first humans who didn't have language, how did we
| get to where we had language and it was so ubiquitous that even
| ancient civilizations like Phoenicians put it in writing?
| detourdog wrote:
| Realize that any successful language came from a close family
| with repeative daily tasks. To be successful they would need
| common terms to cooperate.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| This is basically unknown.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language
| gostsamo wrote:
| try to recreate reality and a limited but repeatable form. roar
| like a lion, sing like a bird. remove everything that a thing
| looks like in order to leave what it is. break it into
| components and try to recompose them in new ways. general
| principals of intelligence, I'd say.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > but I assume language existed way before that
|
| Way, way, way older.
|
| Writing is an _incredibly_ novel development. There are still
| today linguistic communities without writing, although they 're
| becoming much rarer. Writing was unknown in parts of the world
| until quite recently - the Aborigines of Australia didn't have
| it, nor did many pre-Columbian civilisations.
|
| It's a safe bet that writing first emerged out of a need for
| accounting and this thus closely tied to larger agricultural
| civilisations. That's why we find it in places like Mesopotamia
| and Egypt first. Of course, those weren't alphabets yet, but
| logosyllabic writing (characters could stand for either
| meanings or syllables). The alphabet is a specifically
| Phoenician innovation, although similar systems (such as
| abugidas), which are also phonetic, have emerged elsewhere.
| yread wrote:
| > the Aborigines of Australia didn't have it, nor did many
| pre-Columbian civilisations.
|
| No need to go that far, the Slavs didn't write down their
| languages until ~800s.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
| mseepgood wrote:
| People come up with new things all the time. It happens in this
| very moment, all around the world. I don't see how this is
| astonishing.
| naasking wrote:
| Unknown, but I'd hazard a guess that old cave art that depicts
| animals and sizes probably had sounds associated with them too.
| Humans like to tell stories, so probably cave art had oral
| history of some kind, and pictures probably became
| progressively more precise to handle progressively more complex
| stories, maybe about seasons, places, counting to keep track of
| things, etc.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The Phoenicians did not invent their alphabet, they inherited
| an older alphabet.
|
| Nevertheless they had a very important role in spreading the
| alphabetic writing system to many other populations, which was
| a consequence of their travels and commercial relations with
| everybody around the Mediterranean and even farther away.
|
| Because of this, the ancestry of the majority of the alphabetic
| systems, even of some far away in South Asia can be traced back
| to the Phoenician alphabet.
|
| Because of the importance of the commerce with Phoenicians and
| because of the many Phoenician colonies, the Phoenician
| language has also been spoken by many non-Phoenicians. This had
| as a consequence a simplification of the pronunciation of the
| Phoenician language, because for most foreigners it was
| difficult to pronounce some of the sounds specific to the
| Semitic languages.
|
| The result of this simplification in pronunciation was that the
| number of letters of the Phoenician alphabet has been reduced
| to 22 letters from the 27 letters of the older North-Semitic
| alphabet inherited by the Phoenicians, because some of the
| sounds that were written with different letters in the older
| alphabet have evolved towards an identical pronunciation, so
| eventually the redundant letters from each pair with the same
| pronunciation have been dropped.
|
| 22 letters is a too small number for most languages, which has
| forced those who have adapted the Phoenician alphabet to other
| languages to add supplemental letters, like in the Greek
| alphabet, then in the Latin alphabet.
|
| The small number of letters has created problems also for the
| writing of other Semitic languages, like Aramaic, Hebrew and
| Arabic, which did not have the simplified pronunciation of
| Phoenician. The older North-Semitic alphabet from which the
| Phoenician alphabet had been derived would have been perfect
| for such Semitic languages, but by the time when writing has
| spread from the Phoenicians to their Semitic neighbors the
| older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, exactly in the same
| way (and probably for the same reasons) as the Mycenaean
| writing had been forgotten in Greece (i.e. toward the end of
| the 2nd millennium BC there have been a few centuries of "Dark
| Ages" when much prior knowledge had been lost, after the
| destruction of many cities).
|
| Because the older Semitic alphabet had been forgotten, the
| Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters derived from the Phoenician
| alphabet through the Aramaic alphabet, despite the fact that
| this number was not enough to write all the consonants of
| ancient Hebrew. One Hebrew letter has now 2 variants
| distinguished with diacritic marks, i.e. "shin" and "sin",
| because originally it was used to write 2 different sounds, one
| of which no longer existed in Phoenician (modern Hebrew has
| lost that sound, so now "sin" and "samekh" are pronounced in
| the same way).
|
| Writing has been invented independently in many places around
| the world, but in almost all writing systems the written
| symbols have been used to denote either syllables or words.
|
| The Egyptian writing system and the alphabetic writing systems,
| all of which have been derived from the Egyptian writing
| system, are the exception.
|
| A subset of the symbols of the Egyptian writing system was used
| to denote single consonants, while the remainder were used to
| denote multiple consonants, regardless of which vowels were
| pronounced together with the consonants.
|
| The ancient Semitic alphabet has simplified the Egyptian
| writing system by retaining only the symbols that denote a
| single consonant. The ancient Semitic alphabet has retained
| thus the principle of writing only the consonants, and it has
| also inherited from the Egyptians the direction of writing from
| right to left, which has been preserved in the Hebrew and
| Arabic writing systems. Besides changing the meaning of some
| Phoenician letters from consonants to vowels, developing thus
| the first alphabetic writing system in the restricted meaning
| of the term "alphabet", i.e. with an approximately one-to-one
| mapping between all phonemes and letters, not only between
| consonants and letters, the Greeks have reversed the writing
| direction and this has been inherited in the other European
| writing systems.
| Loughla wrote:
| This is only tangentially related, but if you like history and
| ship wrecks and live near Kansas City, go to the Steamboat Arabia
| museum.
|
| They're digging up a steamboat that sunk, and they found after
| the river changed its course. It's super cool. When we went the
| last time we were driving across the states, one of the guys
| actually doing the excavating was there. He gave our kids a
| guided tour and talked about all the exhibits with them. It was
| super cool.
| martyvis wrote:
| FYI 2600 and 2.6k use the same number of characters.
| Bootvis wrote:
| It doesn't mean the same though, 2.6k implies somewhere between
| 2550 and 2650 years ago and 2600 an exact number of years.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 2600 only has 2 significant digits. It's not an exact number.
| defanor wrote:
| Unless the precision (resolution) is known (stated), it is
| unclear whether the trailing zeroes are significant or not,
| one may only guess (while such a guess looks reasonable in
| this case). A convention for writing that unambiguously is
| to avoid insignificant trailing zeroes: e.g., writing it as
| 26e2 or 2.6e3. Then the written number carries along its
| precision.
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