The Phoenician alphabet developed from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which was created sometime between the 18th and 17th Centuries BC. The earliest known inscriptions in Phoenician come from Byblos and date back to the 1000 BC.
Notable Features - The Phoenician alphabet consists of 22 letters, many of which have a number of different forms, and does not indicate vowel sounds.
The names of the letters are the same as those used in Hebrew.
Origin
Proto-Canaanite, also known as Proto-Sinaitic, was the first consonant alphabet. Even a quick and cursory glance at its inventory of signs makes very apparent this script' Egyptian origin. It is thought that at round 1700 BC, Sinai was conquered by Egypt (for its turquoise mines and trade routes). Egyptian influence must have poured into the local West-Semitic speaking population, who, among other things, adopted a small number of hieroglyphic signs (probably no more than 22) to write down their language.
The process of adoption, though, is quite interesting. Egyptian hieroglyphs already have phonetic signs (in addition to logograms), but the Sinaitic people did not adopt these phonetic signs. Instead, they randomly chose pictorial Egyptian glyphs (like ox-head, house, etc), where each sign stood for a consonant. How did they decide which sign gets which consonant? A sign is a picture of an object, and the first consonant of the word for this object becomes the sound the sign represents. In short, this is called the acrophonic principle.
For example, the word for an ox is /'aleph/, which is the first sign on the left Proto-Canaanite column. It stood for the sound /'/, which is the glottal stop.
Phoenician was the immediate descendent of Proto-Canaanite. Its major change is the more linear (less curved) shapes of its signs. Other than this cosmetic change, everything else remained pretty much the same. South Arabian was also an early offshoot of Proto-Canaanite, as its letters are very different in shape and order from Phoenician.
There were many branches that sprang up from Phoenician, like Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Phoenician itself remained in use, in the form of Punic (more cursive), until about 200 AD.
This chart shows a comparison between the Proto-Canaanite, Phoenician, and Greek alphabets.
Phoenician Language Wikipedia
ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF ALL FILES
