Ross G Caldwell
Ross G Caldwell said:Come to think of it, that is a good question. What is the earliest list of names of the *letters*? (as opposed to just the letters themselves).
Ross
Here's one answer, from Joumana Medlej -
http://www.cedarseed.com/articles/alphabet.html
"For a long time it was believed that the names of the letters corresponded to the objects that inspired their creation. This mistake lives on in many circles that have only superficial knowledge of their history. The truth is the names assigned to the letters were only a mnemonic device (memory aid) created after they were already fully formed. They looked at the letters and tried to see in them a close-enough image of objects that started with this letter in their language, to make it easier to remember how to write them. The correspondences are therefore naturally constrained, as they only needed to fit enough to be efficient "flash cards". Let us look at the names in detail and correct some further misconceptions about the meanings of some of them.
Alef: "ox". Contrary to myth, there was never an "original" letter with upwards-pointing horns.
Beth: "house", more specifically the double-sloping roof house.
Guimel: probably a dialectal form for gamal, "camel", whose characteristic trait was the hump.
Daleth: a door. In the double-sloping roof houses of Byblos, the doors tended to be triangular in shape.
H�: this is not a word as nothing fitting could be found; it's merely the letter followed by the sound �, much like B is pronounced Bee.
Waw: the plural of this word designates the hooks placed on the ends of wooden posts, and to which the curtains of the Tabernacle were hung.
Zayin: this word is connected to a word still found in Hebrew and Arabic today, that means "to weigh", so it probably means "scale".
Kh�th: Not so much "wall" as its relative "enclosure, barrier".
T�th: connected to a root that means "to spin" or "to roll [into a ball of yarn]"
Y™d: A typically Phoenician word that means both "hand" and "arm" (and still does in Lebanese form eed today).
Kaf: "hand", and it mnemonically it makes sense to find this association coming right after the above.
Lamed: seems to designate the teacher's stick, definitely not a shepherd's goad.
M�m: "water".
Nžn: a large fish, more specifically a cetacean, and the shape of the letter does evoke the curved body of the dolphin which was common in the Mediterranean. This word had disappeared from Hebrew early on but was preserved by the Phoenician names of letters.
Samek: "support", more specifically a vine tutor that is usually made of a small tree of which only the horizontal branches were kept Ð a perfect match for the shape of this letter.
Ayin: "eye".
P�: "mouth".
TsadŽ: could designate a hunting or fishing tool.
Q™f: "ape".
Resh: Aramaised form of r™sh, "head".
Shin: "tooth".
Taw: this is a mark that two parties have agreed upon, cf Ezechiel IX, 4: "you shall mark with a taw".
Ross