Phoenician alphabet online – generator and translator
Phoenician alphabet – enter text and see an approximate 22-letter rendering read right to left. Discover its influence on the Greek alphabet.
22 signs and not one vowel
What does it mean that Phoenician is an abjad?
Phoenician belongs to the family of scripts called abjads, and that label says the most about it. An abjad records only the consonantal skeleton of a word and leaves the rest to the reader: the missing sounds were supplied by anyone who knew the language, and the text runs from right to left. Its small inventory was much easier to master than the extensive sign systems used in Mesopotamian cuneiform.
How are letters turned into signs?
The generator maps every Latin letter to the nearest Phoenician sign, so 26 letters must fit into 22 signs — C and K both become 𐤊, while F, U, V and W all become 𐤅. Phoenician characters are right-to-left in Unicode, so the browser lays the result out in its historical order by itself.
Example: the word REBUS
The word “REBUS” gives 𐤓𐤄𐤁𐤅𐤎 and the name “MARIA” gives 𐤌𐤀𐤓𐤉𐤀. The first sign of the rendering sits on the right of the screen, exactly as Phoenician inscriptions were read. You can reproduce both examples with the working tool above.
Phoenician sign mapping used by the generator
The top row shows the letter and the bottom row the sign that replaces it. Letters sharing a single sign are visible at a glance: that is what happens when a 26-letter Latin alphabet is fitted onto 22 consonantal signs.
| Letter | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | SZ | CZ | CH |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sign | 𐤀 | 𐤁 | 𐤊 | 𐤃 | 𐤄 | 𐤅 | 𐤂 | 𐤇 | 𐤉 | 𐤉 | 𐤊 | 𐤋 | 𐤌 | 𐤍 | 𐤏 | 𐤐 | 𐤒 | 𐤓 | 𐤎 | 𐤕 | 𐤅 | 𐤅 | 𐤅 | 𐤊𐤎 | 𐤉 | 𐤆 | 𐤔 | 𐤑 | 𐤇 |
How do you read the signs back?
Each sign has one default letter, so reading back can lose information. “REBUS” written as 𐤓𐤄𐤁𐤅𐤎 comes back as “rebws”, because 𐤅 defaults to W. That captures a real difficulty: without vowels the same string of signs could hide several different words.
Where do the letter names come from?
The signs are named after the objects whose shapes gave rise to them: aleph is an ox, bet a house, mem water. The Greeks borrowed the signs together with the names — hence alpha and beta — and reused consonants absent from Greek to write vowels. That produced the first alphabet recording consonants and vowels alike.
See also: Egyptian hieroglyphs · Runes
History and interesting facts
Stable by about the eleventh century BCE, the Phoenician alphabet had 22 consonant letters and was written right to left. Readers supplied vowels from language and context. Trade contacts among eastern Mediterranean communities helped the script spread. Greek users adopted its order and many letter shapes, repurposing some signs to represent vowels. Phoenician therefore occupies an important place in the history of Greek and, indirectly, Latin writing, although the languages and their spelling rules remained different.
What this tool does not do
The output renders modern letters in Phoenician signs; it is not a text in the Phoenician language. The tool does not strip vowels for you, does not apply historical spelling and does not reproduce the local varieties whose letter shapes differed at Byblos, Carthage or on Cyprus.
History and legacy
Inscriptions from the Levantine coast attest the script from roughly the eleventh century BCE, and the sarcophagus of Ahiram at Byblos is among its most famous monuments. Phoenician trade routes carried the signs across the Mediterranean. From this alphabet descend the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew scripts — and, through Greek and Etruscan, the Latin letters you are reading now.