CANAANITE ALPHABET—PRAETORIUS. 601 
changed into a polyphone syllabic sign, as explained above. The 
suppression of ia seems to have been the easier as the syllabic signs 
for ie, 11, 10, and iu were entirely or nearly absent. 
But there were in Cypriote alongside the sign for syllable-forming 
u also the syllabic signs for ua, ué, ui, and uo. These also are not rep- 
resented in the Canaanite alphabets known to us; they have been 
suppressed by the polyphone syllabic sign Y, which was changed from 
the Cypriote T. I surmise, however, that this disappearance took 
place gradually; that the original Canaanite alphabet possessed a 
sign related to the Cypriote ué which survived for a long time in 
private writing, although it is completely absent from inscriptions. 
In the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft, 
Vol. LVIII, p. 461 f., I have shown that the South Semitic sign for 
u, @, as regards its form, absolutely can not be derived from the 
Canaanite Y, but that it is easily explained from the Greek digamma- 
sign F[, Latin F. Nor can the Greek digamma, Latin F, be dis- 
cerned in the Canaanite alphabet. I closed the discussion with the 
words: “ Thus the agreement of the Greek digamma with the South 
Semitic wau points to the existence of some sign for w in the oldest 
time in Canaan, but which did not come to us from Canaan itself.” 
I recognize in the Cypriote syllabic sign for ué the missing Canaanite 
sign. This looks like, I, $, X. Whether this sign was already 
simplitied by the Canaanites to J, 4, J, or by the Greeks, can not be 
known; for the South Semitic @ can also be easily explained from 
the Cypriote form of the sign. 
I thus assume that there were once in Canaan two signs for u (w): 
Y (from Cypriote Y) and =, J, or something similar. Both signs 
seem to have been considered in Canaan as mere variants and had 
but one place in the firmly established succession of letters in the 
alphabet. So also they could have had but one sound value in 
Canaan. The Greeks, however, adopted the two signs with separate 
sound values, one as digamma, the other as upsilon. This obviated 
the treating of both signs as mere variants; each obtained its own 
place. Digamma remained in the sixth place of the Greek alphabet, 
while upsilon was placed toward the end. There was evidently : 
hesitancy to disturb the traditional numerical values of the letters, 
corresponding to their firmly established order of succession at the 
beginning of the alphabet where the frequently used small numbers 
were ranged. The two closely related signs must therefore be 
separated. 
T am inclined to consider it as a mere accident that the Greeks 
chose Y as a vowel and digamma as a consonant, and do not think that 
the original Cypriote values of the corresponding signs played any 
part in this choice. It is also evidently accidental that digamma 
sooner or later disappeared from both the Canaanite and Greek alpha- 
bets (but not from the South Semitic alphabet). 
