Phoenician alphabet

noun

1

: an extinct northern Semitic alphabet used by the Phoenicians of Syria and their Carthaginian colonists from the 13th century b.c. and the immediate ancestor of the Greek alphabet

2

: the ancestor of the alphabets used by the Phoenicians and other contemporary Semitic inhabitants of western Syria that is held to be the earliest system of alphabetic writing

3

: the oldest Hebrew alphabet as distinguished from the square Hebrew or Aramaic alphabet

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