Phoenician Translator
Type English and see it in Phoenician letters, each Latin letter replaced by the Phoenician letter it descends from, written right to left as the Phoenicians wrote. Vowels use the five letters the Greeks later turned into vowels. The tool reads Phoenician back to text approximately.
How to use the phoenician translator
- Type a name, word or sentence. The Phoenician letters appear right to left as you type.
- Use ordinary spelling: sh and ts each get one letter; c and k share kāp; v, w and u share wāw.
- To read Phoenician, switch to Phoenician to text and paste the letters.
- Copy the result, or type letters directly on the Phoenician keyboard.
Examples
| Carthage | 𐤊𐤀𐤓𐤕𐤇𐤀𐤂𐤄 |
| Hannibal | 𐤇𐤀𐤍𐤍𐤉𐤁𐤀𐤋 |
| Alphabet | 𐤀𐤋𐤐𐤇𐤀𐤁𐤄𐤕 |
About Phoenician
The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most alphabets in use today. It appears fully formed around 1050 BC in the port cities of the Levant, Byblos, Tyre and Sidon, and its 22 letters were carried by Phoenician traders across the Mediterranean. The Greeks borrowed it around 800 BC, the Etruscans took it from the Greeks, and the Romans from the Etruscans, which is how it became the Latin alphabet on this page. Aramaic scribes adapted it in the east, and from Aramaic descend the Hebrew square script and, through Nabataean, the Arabic script. Even the word "alphabet" is Phoenician at one remove: alpha and beta are Greek renderings of ʾālep and bēt, the ox and the house.
Phoenician is an abjad: it writes consonants only. Readers supplied the vowels from their knowledge of the language, as readers of Hebrew and Arabic still do. It was written from right to left, without spaces in early inscriptions, sometimes with a dot or stroke between words in later ones. The letter shapes were simple linear strokes suited to carving and to the reed pen, and each letter had a name that was a word beginning with its sound: gīml a throwing stick, dālet a door, mēm water, ʿayin an eye. Those names survived through Greek and Hebrew, and the order of the letters, ʾālep, bēt, gīml, dālet, is still the order of the alphabet you learned as a child.
This translator maps each English letter to the Phoenician letter it descends from, which is the approach most charts and this site's name cards take. b is bēt 𐤁, d is dālet 𐤃, g is gīml 𐤂, h is ḥēt 𐤇, k and c are kāp 𐤊, l is lāmed 𐤋, m is mēm 𐤌, n is nūn 𐤍, p and f are pē 𐤐, q is qōp 𐤒, r is rēš 𐤓, s and x are sāmek 𐤎, t is tāw 𐤕, z is zayin 𐤆. The sound sh has its own letter, šīn 𐤔, and ts is written with ṣādē 𐤑, so both pairs are matched before single letters. Since the script has no vowels, a, e, i, o and u take ʾālep 𐤀, hē 𐤄, yōd 𐤉, ʿayin 𐤏 and wāw 𐤅: those are the very consonants the Greeks reassigned to vowel sounds to make alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron and upsilon. j and y share yōd, and v and w share wāw. One letter, ṭēt 𐤈, has no Latin descendant in common use and is not produced. Case is ignored, and digits and punctuation pass through unchanged.
The result is displayed right to left. The letters come from the Phoenician block that Unicode added in version 5.0 at U+10900, and they are marked as right-to-left characters, so a copied string keeps its direction when pasted into a document or a message, provided the device has a font for it. Decoding runs the table backwards and is approximate, because several English letters share a Phoenician one: kāp comes back as k, pē as p, sāmek as s, wāw as w and yōd as y, and the vowel stand-ins come back as the vowels they usually represent. "Carthage" encodes as 𐤊𐤀𐤓𐤕𐤇𐤀𐤂𐤄 and decodes as "karthage".
That example also shows the limit of the tool. It writes the English word Carthage in Phoenician letters; the Phoenicians themselves called the city Qart-ḥadašt, "new town", and wrote it 𐤒𐤓𐤕𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕 with no vowels at all. A translation into the Phoenician language would need its vocabulary and grammar, which are known mainly from inscriptions and from its close relative Hebrew, and a genuine Phoenician spelling of any word would drop the vowels this tool writes in. Use the page to see how the alphabet works, to write a name or a motto in the letters your own alphabet came from, or to read a chart, and treat the output as English in Phoenician dress.
Frequently asked questions
Does this translate English into the Phoenician language?
No. It writes English words in Phoenician letters, matching each Latin letter to its Phoenician ancestor. Phoenician was a Semitic language close to Hebrew, with its own words and grammar, and it wrote no vowels; a real Phoenician spelling of "Carthage" is 𐤒𐤓𐤕𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕, Qart-ḥadašt. The tool gives you the alphabet, not the language.
How can it write vowels if Phoenician had none?
It uses the five consonant letters that the Greeks reassigned to vowels when they borrowed the alphabet: ʾālep 𐤀 for a, hē 𐤄 for e, yōd 𐤉 for i, ʿayin 𐤏 for o and wāw 𐤅 for u. This is the convention most charts follow. A Phoenician scribe would simply have left the vowels out.
Why is the output written right to left?
Because Phoenician was. The letters in the Unicode Phoenician block are right-to-left characters, so the browser lays them out that way and the direction survives copying and pasting. The first letter of your text is the rightmost letter of the result.
Why does decoding change some letters?
Several English letters share one Phoenician letter. c and k both become kāp, f and p both become pē, s and x both become sāmek, u, v and w all become wāw, and i, j and y all become yōd. Reading back, the tool picks k, p, s, w and y, so "Carthage" returns as "karthage". The letters themselves carry no record of which English letter was meant.
Which Phoenician letter does each English letter map to?
a ʾālep, b bēt, c and k kāp, d dālet, e hē, f and p pē, g gīml, h ḥēt, i, j and y yōd, l lāmed, m mēm, n nūn, o ʿayin, q qōp, r rēš, s and x sāmek, t tāw, u, v and w wāw, z zayin; sh is šīn and ts is ṣādē. ṭēt is the one Phoenician letter the tool never produces, since no English letter descends from it directly.
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