The Origins of Writing and the Alphabet as a Derivation from Syllabic Script - 9 - LEXILINE JOURNAL 561

[In amended form later published as a book under the title Ancient Signs]

H. Cypriot Syllabary, Linear B Signs and Ancient Greek Terms

The signs of the Cypriot Syllabary and the Linear B Signs used in this work are taken from the Aegean Font, which does not reproduce online via Blogger, so I use scans for online purposes.

Software for the Aegean Font in Microsoft Word was the BabelMap Unicode Character Map for Windows, BabelMap Version 6.0.0.2, Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7Build, Copyright (c) Andrew West 2002-2010, http://www.BabelStone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html.

The Aegean Font is from George Douros, Kolokotroni 3, Larissa 41223, Greece, as Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts, Copyright (c) George Douros 2010, and provides:

"Fonts in ‘Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts’ are offered free for any use; they may be opened, edited, modified, regenerated, posted, packaged and redistributed."

As concerns the Aegean font as written at BabelMap:

"Aegean covers the following scripts and symbols supported by The Unicode Standard 5.2: Basic Latin, Greek and Coptic, Greek Extended, some Punctuation and other Symbols, Linear B Syllabary, Linear B Ideograms, Aegean Numbers, Ancient Greek Numbers, Ancient Symbols, Phaistos Disc, Lycian, Carian, Old Italic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Cypriot Syllabary, Phoenician, Lydian, and Archaic Greek Musical Notation.

Aegean allocates in the Supplementary Private Use Plane 15, the following scripts and symbols, as yet unsupported by Unicode: Cretan Hieroglyphs, Cypro-Minoan, Linear A, the Arkalochori Axe, Ancient Greek and Old Italic variant alphabets.

In this version:

• Cretan Hieroglyphs are redesigned and expanded to cover signs on seals.

• Cypro-Minoan is entirely new and in agreement with the latest edition of the inscriptions.

• Idalion, Akanthou, Eteocypriot, Ancient and Recent Paphian variants of the Cypriot Syllabary are available as its Open Type Stylistic Sets I-V."

Useful for the Cypriot syllabary was T.B. Mitford, The Tsepsis Stele and some Others, St. Andrews University, http://campus.usal.es/~revistas_trabajo/index.php/0544-3733/article/viewFile/2769/2810

Palaeolexicon -- a word study tool of ancient languages -- was used as the source for Cypriot and Linear B words as found in the Cypriot Syllabic Word Index http://www.palaeolexicon.com/default.aspx?static=12&wid=305# and the Linear B Word Index http://www.palaeolexicon.com/default.aspx?static=12&wid=305#.