|
|iso15924=Mero |iso15924 note=Mero, 100: Meroitic Hieroglyphs Merc, 101: Meroitic Cursive }} The Meroitic script is an alphabetic script, used to write the Meroitic language of the Kingdom of Meroë in Sudan. It was developed in the Napatan Period (about 700–300 BCE), and first appears in the 2nd century BCE. For a time, it was also possibly used to write the Nubian language of the successor Nubian kingdoms. Its use was described by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (c. 50 BCE). Although the Meroitic alphabet did continue in use by the Nubian kingdoms that succeeded the Kingdom of Meroë, it was replaced by the Coptic alphabet with the Christianization of Nubia in the sixth century CE. The Nubian form of the Coptic alphabet retained three Meroitic letters. The script was deciphered in 1909 by Francis Llewellyn Griffith, a British Egyptologist, based on the Meroitic spellings of Egyptian names. However, the Meroitic language itself has yet to be translated. In late 2008 the first complete royal dedication was found,〔("Sudan statues show ancient script" ) (BBC 16 December 2008)〕 which may help confirm or refute some of the current hypotheses. The longest inscription found is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. ==Form and values== There were two graphic forms of the Meroitic alphabet: monumental hieroglyphs, and a cursive. The majority of texts are cursive. Unlike Egyptian writing, there was a simple one-to-one correspondence between the two forms of Meroitic, except that in the cursive form, consonants are joined in ligatures to a following vowel i. The direction of cursive writing was from right to left, top to bottom, while the monumental form was written top to bottom in columns going right to left. Monumental letters were oriented to face the beginning of the text, a feature inherited from their hieroglyphic origin. Being primarily alphabetic, the Meroitic script worked differently than Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some scholars, such as Harald Haarmann, believe that the vowel letters of Meroitic are evidence for an influence of the Greek alphabet in its development. There were 23 letters in the Meroitic alphabet, including four vowels. In the transcription established by Griffith and later Hintze, they are: *a appears only at the beginning of a word *e was used principally in foreign names *i and o were used like vowels in the Latin or Greek alphabets. The fourteen or so consonants are conventionally transcribed: *ya, wa, ba, pa, ma, na, ra, la, cha, kha, ka, qa, sa, da. These values were established from evidence such as Egyptian names borrowed into Meroitic. That is, the Meroitic letter which looks like an owl in monumental inscriptions, or like a numeral three in cursive Meroitic, we transcribe as m, and it is believed to have been pronounced as (). However, this is a historical reconstruction, and while m is not in much doubt, the pronunciations of some of the other letters are much less certain. The three vowels i a o were presumably pronounced /i a u/. Kh is thought to have been a velar fricative, as the ''ch'' in Scottish ''loch'' or German ''Bach.'' Ch was a similar sound, perhaps uvular as ''g'' in Dutch ''dag'' or palatal as in German ''ich''. Q was perhaps a uvular stop, as in Arabic ''Qatar''. S may have been like ''s'' in ''sun''. An /n/ was omitted in writing when it occurred before any of several other consonants within a word. D is uncertain. Griffith first transcribed it as ''r,'' and Rowan believes that was closer to its actual value. It corresponds to Egyptian and Greek /d/ when initial or after an /n/ (unwritten in Meroitic), but to /r/ between vowels, and does not seem to have affected the vowel a the way the other alveolar obstruents t n s did. Comparing late documents with early ones, it is apparent that the sequences ''sel-'' and ''nel-,'' which Rowan takes to be /sl/ and /nl/ and which commonly occurred with the determiner ''-l-,'' assimilated over time to ''t'' and ''l'' (perhaps /t/ and /ll/). The only punctuation mark was a word and phrase divider of two to three dots. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Meroitic alphabet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|