Customer Reviews

Grammar of the Phoenician Language (American Oriental Series, Vol 8) (American Oriental Series, Vol 8)

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The major drawback of this book from my standpoint is that all of the Phoenician samples have been transliterated into the Hebrew alphabet. I'm not sure whether this was the original intent of the author or was a later cost-saving measure on the part of the publisher. Thus there is a peculiar section on "The Alphabet" which in fact never presents a single Phoenician character. Aside from this problem, the treatment appears to be straightforward and thorough, although I didn't keep the book long enough to find out just how clear the explanations are. You might find this book of use if you are interested strictly in comparative linguistics, or perhaps travelling back in time and conversing with some Phoenicians. But for reading Phoenician inscriptions, it is of quite limited utility.

Although this book is written for scholars of semitic languages who would have a good knowledge of Hebrew grammar, it can easily be adapted for a beginner's use. The book does write the Phoenician in the Hebrew alphabet and it does use some Hebrew grammatical terms, but it just took me a few outside resources to become accustomed to these peculiarities. And this is hardly a hassle, because Hebrew writing is used in nearly all Phoenician grammars and scholarly texts and the language is so similar to Hebrew that the terminology is bound to be the same. The comprehensive glossary in the back is very useful for reading inscriptions. My only major complaint is that the book doesn't have any section with inscriptions, which are hard to find anywhere apart from buying a specialized book. Besides this, it just takes is a bit of outside research to fully utilize this book, and the price is a lot better than the alternatives.