History of Matres lectionis

	Revision 5 . . October 19, 2001 6:08 pm by Anatoly Vorobey [converting to standard names of Hebrew letters; using circumflex accents all over them is non-standard. If anyone wishes to resurrect the accents ,PLEASE use the HTML entities!]
	Revision 4 . . October 19, 2001 1:12 pm by J Hofmann Kemp [Italicized biblio. titles, but think the format leaves something to be desired...]

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According to Sass (5), already in the Middle Kingdom there were some cases of matres lectionis, i.e. consonant graphemes which were used to transcribe vowels in foreign words, namely in Punic (Jensen 290, Naveh 62), Aramaic and Hebrew (hê, wâw, jôd; sometimes even 'âlep; Naveh 62). Naveh (ibid.) notes that the earliest Aramaic and Hebrew documents already used matres lectionis. Some scholars argue that therefore the Greeks must have borrowed their alphabet from the Arameans. But the practice has older roots: the Semitic cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit (13th ct. BC) already has matres lectionis (Naveh 138).

According to Sass (5), already in the Middle Kingdom there were some cases of matres lectionis, i.e. consonant graphemes which were used to transcribe vowels in foreign words, namely in Punic (Jensen 290, Naveh 62), Aramaic and Hebrew (he, waw, jod; sometimes even aleph; Naveh 62). Naveh (ibid.) notes that the earliest Aramaic and Hebrew documents already used matres lectionis. Some scholars argue that therefore the Greeks must have borrowed their alphabet from the Arameans. But the practice has older roots: the Semitic cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit (13th ct. BC) already has matres lectionis (Naveh 138).