Woodard examines the origin of the Greek alphabet and treats the advent of the alphabet script as a point which lies along an unbroken continuum of Greek literacy. Woodard argues that those persons responsible for adapting the Phoenician consonantal script for Greek use were scribes accustomed to writing Greek with the syllabic script of Cyprus.
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."..a very learned, thorough and informed work, and [Woodard's] conclusions are well worth considering."--New England Classical Journal
."..will interest linguists and historians of writing."--Religious Studies Review
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A benchmark in Classical, as well as linguistic, scholarship
18 July 2003
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
The Book Description above covers the basic trajectory of the book in some detail, so I will not elaborate any further on that. What the Description does not mention is the cross-platform of this book, which attempts to speak to linguists as well as classicists, and which does so in a highly articulate and clear manner. This book is an enormous feat of lucid scholarship that proposes no more than an argument (albeit one that is painstakingly well-informed), that makes other recent attempts in this field seem bombastic and naive by comparison (see for example Barry Powell's recent 'Homer and the Origin of the Alphabet'). This book's cogently argued pursuit of the vexed question of the history of the transmission of the Phoenician script to the Greeks is a very welcome addition that for the first time attempts to cast light on the black hole of missing evidence from between 1100 to c. 750 BC. In this regard it is the only book of its kind available in any language, and its clear method of argumentation from fact will no doubt secure it a high position among scholarship on the topic. One example should suffice to explain why. While the book does not engage the question of how a 12th century Phoenician dotted omicron appears in a Greek alphabet of the 8th century (whereas the Phoenicians had ceased to use it around 1100 BC), Woodard's book is so far the only attempt to account for how such a thing could actually happen: by exploring the thesis that a history of transmission existed between two different scribal cultures on the island of Cyprus.
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