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The Alphabet
El Abjadıyye
Following Said Akl's ideal of how to create the perfect alphabet, I managed to create a second version of the Bachir Lebanese Alphabet - inspired by the Aklian alphabet - replacing the old one. The following alphabet was created according to several grounds suggested by Akl.
Akl used his logic of read-to-understand; One should read in order to understand, and not learn how to read - thus, understanding - in order to be able to read. Like in Arabic, for example.
Akl explains that each phoneme should have its own letter, eliminating hence the problem of pronunciation. For instance, c and s have the same sound of /s/ in many european languages like English - as in star, ceiling, best, cell. To Akl, this is regarded as inefficient and wasteful of time to learn.
He added that to represent a new sound that has no letter - for example the sound /ʃ/ as in share, wash, shame - a new letter should be created, rather than combining two letters. Hence, for instance, the letter c - mestacfa (hospital), cebbeek (window).
The new alphabet is composed of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters. The sounds of some letters, especially the Greek and Cyrillic, have been modified for the phonetic requirements of Lebanese. The introduction of Greek letters solved the problem of diacritics as well as other issues like sounds that only occur in Lebanese.
Below is the new alphabet, with the phonetic representation of each letter according to the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) along with an example in Lebanese.
The Origin of Some Letters
Letter
Λ λ
Ԑ ԑ
Γ γ
Origin
Greek, derived from the Phoenician letter Lamedh
Cyrillic, reversed Ze З
Greek, derived from the Phoenician letter Gimel
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