“Learn Phoenician” is an attempt to familiarize the reader, in particular college and school students, with the Phoenician language, its form, sound, meaning, writing style and its literature. Phoenician still lives in the dialects spoken in Lebanon today, adding wealth to everyday language. Lebanon was the homeland of the Phoenicians, Canaanites who spoke a semitic tongue similar to Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. They were skillful sailors that did not leave a port unvisited. They offered the world the letters of their alphabet gratis. That was a different kind of peaceful expansion.
Their everyday use of the language due to their extensive commercial activities throughout the world of their days must have yielded a large hoard of literature of all kinds. But what we find available is so little. The rest is either still buried under the ruins or is left in the dark chambers of museums for reasons unknown.
The book is full of Phoenician documents of the short type that give a good idea about their language. We have retyped most of the documents in an easy way to read in a font based on the latest styles of Phoenician writing. Also, we included translations of the scripts and a glossary of terms. The reader will hear the letters of the alphabet, practice the way they are written and get acquainted with sentence structure and lots of grammar.
Throughout the book there are practice exercises and a whole chapter of exercises for assessment.
