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 The Lowest Protocol

The Phoenician Stock

Brave sailors, smart merchants, fierce pirates, the Phoenicians were the lords of all the sea routes within the Mediterranean and towards the Atlantic coasts of Africa and Europe.

For the dynamic Phoenician businessmen, learning the thousands ideograms used by their neighbours was an annoying waste of time -- and time was money!

We don't know exactly how the process evolved, but we know that around the 13th century b.C. the solution to this problem was up and running: a short list of 22 letters (possibly derived from Akkadic or Egyptian signs) was all that the Phoenicians needed to represent the consonants of their language.

The alphabet was a best seller: all the neighbors of Phoenicians adopted it and, with minor modifications, still use it today.

The most important "localization" was introduced in Greece at early times: a few Phoenician-specific consonant signs, that would have been useless in Greek, were redefined to represent the vowels. These were not present in the first time because in Semitic languages (like Phoenician, Arabic and Hebrew) words are basically identified by their consonants, the vowels having a secondary role.


The Arabic Alphabet

  • Introduction to the Arabic alphabet: the letters, their name and transliteration in English and French spelling.
  • ISO 8859-6, an Arabic 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
  • Picture showing the ASMO character set.
  • Picture showing an alternative Arabic character set (7-bit, based on ASCII).
  • Arabic fonts from Yamada (Mac).
  • Persian font from Yamada (Mac).
  • Urdu font for Windows.
  • Arabic Typer is an utility to type Arabic in Windows (Visual Basic source available).
  • ArabTeX is an Arabic version of the popular TeX typesetting software, (by Professor Klaus Lagally, Stuttgart).
  • Documentation for using the Arabic script on Macintosh.

    The Armenian Alphabet

  • Armenian fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).

    The Cyrillic Alphabet

  • Introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet: the letters, their name, and audio files with the Russian pronunciation.
  • ISO 8859-5, a Cyrillic 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
  • Russian fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).
  • Old Church Slavonic font from Yamada (Mac).
  • Documentation about the configuration of WWW browsers for Cyrillic character sets (includes Lynx, Mosaic and Netscape).
  • Documentation for using the Cyrillic script with various operating systems and applications. Focuses on the KOI-8 character set.
  • Documentation and software for using the Cyrillic script on Macintosh.
  • Documentation and software for using the Cyrillic script with various operating systems: MS Windows and DOS, OS/2, Linux, Macintosh.

    The Futhark Alphabet

  • Introduction to the Fuþark runes.
  • Introduction to the Fuþark runes and their magic.
  • Runic fonts from Yamada (Mac).
  • TrueType runic font (Windows).

    The Georgian Alphabet

  • Georgian fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).
  • Georgian fonts (TrueType), that may be nicely previewed and downloaded.

    The Greek Alphabet

  • Introduction to the Greek alphabet: the letters, their name and Modern Greek transliteration.
  • ISO 8859-7, a Greek 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
  • Greek fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).
  • Coptic fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).

    The Hebrew Alphabet

  • Introduction to the Hebrew alphabet: the letters in printed and manuscript form, their transliteration and audio files with Modern Hebrew sounds.
  • ISO 8859-8, a Hebrew 8-bit character set, with a BDF font, is one of the ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup.
  • Hebrew fonts from Yamada (Mac and Postscript).
  • Hebrew fonts for Windows, Mac and Unix.

    The Latin Alphabet

  • The Latin alphabet in its original application: writing the Latin language. A chapter in Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar
  • Latin 8-bit character sets, in various national sauces, stuffed with BDF fonts, are the main ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup -- a classic of Internet cuisine.
  • Chinese pinyin font from Yamada (Mac).
  • Icelandic fonts from Yamada (PC and Mac).
  • Turkish font from Yamada (Mac).
  • Vietnamese fonts from Yamada (Mac).
  • Basque pronunciation.
  • Croatian pronunciation.
  • Estonian pronunciation.
  • Slovenian pronunciation.


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    Page by Marco Cimarosti. Last updated: March 10, 1997.