The earliest certain ancestor of " A " is aleph ( also called ' aleph ), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet ( which, by consisting entirely of consonants, is an abjad rather than a true alphabet ).

It was derived from the Phoenician letter Aleph Aleph.

It was derived from the Phoenician letter Dalet 20px.

The digraph ' għ ' ( called għajn after the Arabic letter name ʻayn for غ ) is considered separate, and sometimes ordered after ' g ', whilst in other volumes it is placed between ' n ' and ' o ' ( the Latin letter ' o ' originally evolved from the shape of Phoenician ʻayin, which was traditionally collated after Phoenician nūn ).

It was derived from the Phoenician letter He He.

The letter Ε was taken over from the Phoenician letter He ( x12px ) when Greeks first adopted alphabetic writing.

In archaic Greek writing, its shape is often still identical to the Phoenician letter.

The initial sound value of Ε was determined by the vowel occurring in the Phoenician letter name He, which made it a natural choice for being reinterpreted from a consonant symbol to a vowel symbol denoting an sound.

It was derived from the Phoenician letter heth 20px.

It was derived from the Phoenician letter Gimel Gimel.

It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh ( 16px ).

Lambda is related to the Phoenician letter Lamed Lamedh.

The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu ( Μ, μ ).

However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means " fish " in some of these languages.

* Aleph or Alef is the first letter of the Semitic abjads descended from Proto-Canaanite, Arabic alphabet, Phoenician alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet

The Greek alphabet ( and by extension its descendants such as the Latin, the Cyrillic and the Coptic ), was a direct successor of Phoenician, though certain letter values were changed to represent vowels.

However, according to a theory by Theodor Nöldeke from 1904, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script.

While a Phoenician origin for the Greek alphabet is certain, the earliest Greek inscriptions match Phoenician letter forms from the late 9th or 8th centuries BC -- and, in any case, the Phoenician alphabet properly speaking wasn't developed until around 1050 BC ( or after the Bronze Age collapse ).

In popular usage, abjads often contain the word " alphabet " in their names, such as " Arabic alphabet " and " Phoenician alphabet ".

All of these are believed to be Canaanite names, and at least two are Phoenician ( Northern Canaanite ).

This point of view ignores the possibility that Hadad and Melqart are the same god with different names because of different languages and cultures, Hadad being Canaanite and Melqart being Phoenician.

The Phoenician name of the people recalls one of the Homeric names of the Greeks, Danaoi with the-m plural, whereas the Luwian name Hiyawa probably goes back to Hittite Ahhiyā ( wa ), which is, according to most interpretations, the " Achaean ", or Mycenaean Greek, settlement in Asia Minor.

Like the names of most other Greek letters, the name of beta was adopted from the acrophonic name of the corresponding letter in Phoenician, which was the common Semitic word * bayt (' house ').

Tripoli had a number of different names as far back as the Phoenician age.

* F L Benz, Personal names in the Phoenician and Punic inscriptions.

In Phoenician and Aramaic inscriptions of Egyptian names containing nfr, the nfr element is rendered npy, and the closely related Hebrew language would presumably transcribe the name the same way.

Not all Hebrew names are strictly Hebrew in origin ; some names may have been borrowed from other languages since ancient times, including from Egyptian, Aramaic, Phoenician, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, German, and English.

The place names of the Maghreb come from a variety of origins, mostly Arabic and Berber, but including a few derived from Phoenician, Latin, and several other languages.

The supposed Sanchuniathon claimed to have based his work on " collections of secret writings of the Ammouneis discovered in the shrines ", sacred lore deciphered from mystic inscriptions on the pillars which stood in the Phoenician temples, lore which exposed the truth — later covered up by invented allegories and myths — that the gods were originally human beings who came to be worshipped after their deaths and that the Phoenicians had taken what were originally names of their kings and applied them to elements of the cosmos ( compare euhemerism ) as well as also worshipping forces of nature and the sun, moon, and stars.

The name is derived from the Northwest Semitic root zbl, common in 2nd millennium BC Ugaritic texts as an epithet ( title ) of the god Baal, as well as in Phoenician and ( frequently ) in biblical Hebrew in personal names.

According to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but the names of the letters would have remained the same.

Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters.

When the Phoenician alphabet was adapted to Greek, the names of five letters were pronounced with initial vowels by the Greeks and used acrophonically to represent vowels.

The first " true alphabet " in this sense is believed to be the Greek alphabet, which is a modified form of the Phoenician alphabet.

The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called " Proto-Canaanite " before ca.

The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge ' ez alphabet ( an abugida ) is descended.

The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin ( via the Old Italic alphabet ), Cyrillic ( via the Greek alphabet ) and Hebrew ( via Aramaic ).

Alpha was derived from aleph, which in Phoenician means " ox ".

Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, has to say for Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox — which, unlike Hesiod, the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities.

It certainly maintained strong Phoenician sympathies, for it was its refusal to join the philhellene league of Onesilos of Salamis which provoked the revolt of Cyprus from Achaemenid Persia in 500-494BC, when Amathus was besieged unsuccessfully and avenged itself by the capture and execution of Onesilos.

In Lebanon, the right-wing Guardians of the Cedars, a fiercely nationalistic ( mainly Christian ) political party which opposes the country's ties to the Arab world, is agitating for " Lebanese " to be recognized as a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect, and has even advocated replacing the Arabic alphabet with a revival of the ancient Phoenician alphabet, which lacks a number of characters to write typical Arabic phonemes present in Lebanese, and lost by Phoenician ( and Hebrew ) in the second millennium BC.

Here alone is preserved a summary of the writings of the Phoenician priest Sanchuniathon of which the accuracy has been shown by the mythological accounts found on the Ugaritic tables, here alone is the account from Diodorus Siculus's sixth book of Euhemerus ' wondrous voyage to the island of Panchaea where Euhemerus purports to have found his true history of the gods, and here almost alone is preserved writings of the neo-Platonist philosopher Atticus along with so much else.

The Tartessian language from the southwest of the Iberian peninsula, written in a version of the Phoenician script in use around 825 BC, which John T. Koch has claimed to be able to readily translate, has been accepted by a number of philologists and other linguists as the first attested Celtic language, but the linguistic mainstream continues to treat Tartessian as an unclassified ( Pre-Indo-European?

Under Alexander the Great, this force turned east, and in a series of three decisive battles, routed the Persian forces and took their empire, which included Egypt and the Phoenician lands.

The 1st century Greek author Philo of Byblos may preserve elements of Iron Age Phoenician religion in his Sanchuniathon., to which the prophets, martyrs and other pious people will go at the time of their death.

Northern Canaanites are commonly thought to develop into Phoenicians by the 8th century BC-a claim which has recently been verified by genetic comparison analysis of ancient Canaanite and Phoenician burial sites in modern Lebanon.

After gradual decline of its strength, Phoenician city states on the Lebanese coast were conquered outright by the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia, which organized it as a satrapy, though many of Phoenician colonies continued their independent existence-most notably Carthage.