Wikipedia:Wikifun/Answers/Question 3

I think the Phoenicians wrote the ṣādē though that looks way too easy... Phoenician alphabet then the table. Maycontainpeanuts 22:33, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I take that back. (I feel a fool now) Maycontainpeanuts 03:35, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Referring to the Phoenician alphabet page again, they wrote the aleph for what John Wells would write a '?' for. First, I searched for John Wells > John Wells (linguist) - the developer of X-SAMPA > X-SAMPA and found that '?' in X-SAMPA is a glottal stop. Next, I went over to Hebrew alphabet (which is a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet) and looked for glottal stops. There are three letters in modern Hebrew which are (possibly) glottal stops but only aleph has been a glottal stop from the earliest stages (Biblical and Mishnaic). So I went back to the Phoenician alphabet page for the aleph symbol. Maycontainpeanuts 04:24, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Glottal stop

I went to John Wells, and found out there that he was the inventor of X-SAMPA. Having a bit of linguistic experience, I recognized that ? is used as a symbol for a glottal stop, which was confirmed on that page. Now, I just needed to figure out what the glottal stop was in the Phoenician alphabet. I didn't seem to be getting anywhere reading that page or Phoenician languages until I did a search for the terms "glottal phoenician". That led me to Aramaic alphabet, where I found that that the Aramaic alphabet was a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet. From this, I surmise that the character we are searching for is . Looking back, I should have figured out what the transliteration column was referring to on Phoenician alphabet. That page could use it. --timc | Talk 19:56, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The Aleph was the correct answer; I got this from the article A, which can be found from "what links here" on X-SAMPA. Eugene van der Pijll 01:30, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)