Paleohispanic Scripts - Origins

Origins

The paleohispanic semi-syllabaries clearly derive ultimately from an alphabet or alphabets circulating in the Mediterranean, but it is not known whether that was the Phoenician alphabet alone, or if archaic varieties of the Greek alphabet also played a role.

The only known full Paleohispanic signary, on the undated Espanca tablet (not completely readable, but clearly related to the southwestern and southeastern scripts), follows the Phoenician/Greek order for the first 13 of its 27 letters: Α Β Γ Δ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Π? ϻ Τ. The fact that southern paleohispanic /e/ appears to derive from the Phoenician letter ‘ayin, which gave rise to Greek Ο, while southern paleohispanic /o/ derives from another letter or was perhaps invented, suggests that the development of vowels in paleohispanic semi-syllabaries was independent of the Greek innovation. However, the order of what appears to be /u/ directly after Τ, rather than at the place of Ϝ, has suggested to some researchers a Greek influence. (In addition, the letter for /e/ in northeast Iberian resembles Greek Ε rather than the southeast Iberian letter.) The two sibilants, S and S', are attested, but there is one sign too few to account for a full 15-sign syllabary and all four of the letters M, M', R, and R' (not all of which can be positively identified with letters from the tablet), suggesting that one of ems or ars shown in the charts to the right is only a graphic variant.

The obvious question about the origin and evolution of these scripts is how a purely alphabetic script was changed into, or perhaps unconsciously reinterpreted as, a partial syllabary. It may be instructive to consider an unrelated development in the evolution of the Etruscan alphabet from Greek: Greek had three letters, Γ, Κ, and Ϙ, whose sounds were not distinguished in Etruscan. Nonetheless, all three were borrowed, becoming the letters C, K, and Q. All were pronounced /k/, but they were restricted to appear before different vowels — CE, CI, KA, and QU, respectively, — so that the consonants carried almost as much weight in distinguishing these syllables as the vowels did. (This may have been an attempt to overtly indicate the vowel-dependent allophony of Etruscan /k/ with the extra Greek letters that were available.) When the Etruscan alphabet was later adapted to Latin, the letter C stood for both /k/ and /g/, as Etruscan had had no /g/ sound to maintain the original sound value of Greek Г. (Later a stroke was added to C, creating the new Latin letter G.).

Something similar may have happened during the evolution of the Paleohispanic scripts. If writing passed from the Phoenicians through the Tartessians, and the Tartessian language did not have a /g/ or a /d/, that would explain the absence of a distinction between /g/ and /k/, /d/ and /t/ in the southeastern Iberian and later northeast Iberian scripts, despite it being clear that these were distinct sounds in the Iberian language, as is clearly attested in the Greco-Iberian alphabet and later use of the Latin alphabet. In Tartessian script, vowels were always written after the plosives, but they were redundant — or at nearly so — and thus it seems they were dropped when the script passed to the Iberians.

Among the velar consonants, southeastern Iberian ka/ga derives from Phoenician/Greek Γ, ke/ge from Κ, and ki/gi from Ϙ, while ko/go (perhaps coincidentally) resembles Greek Χ (pronounced ). Phoenician/Greek labial letter Β was the source of ba; the use of Π is uncertain but may have been the source of bi. (If Greek was used as a secondary source, Greek Φ would also have been available.) For the alveolars, Δ was the source of tu/du, Τ of ta/da, and Θ of ti/di.

• Espanca signary (Castro Verde).

• Tartessian or Southwest script. Fonte Velha (Bensafrim, Lagos).

• Southeastern Iberian script. Lead plaque from La Bastida de les Alcuses (Moixent).

• Greco-Iberian alphabet. Lead plaque from la Serreta (Alcoi).

• Northeastern Iberian script. Lead plaque from Ullastret.

• Celtiberian script. Luzaga plaque (Guadalajara, Spain).