Cretan scripts

The font Aegean is required to correctly display all used symbols.

Recognized linear writing systems appear during the second millennium BC. Short inscriptions found in Serabit el-Khadim, in the Sinai Peninsula, and in Wadi el-Hol, South Nile, dating from the 18 - 15th century BC, are considered as an evolutionary, Proto-Semitic link between Egyptian hieroglyphs and later Semitic abjads (Flinders-Petrie and Currelly 1906; Gardiner 1916; Colless 2010; 2014; Goldwasser 2010; Haring 2020). According to the mainstream theory, a group of illiterate miners from Canaan, working in the turquoise mines of Sinai and speaking a Semitic language, borrowed a few Egyptian characters and naively gave them names and phonetic values. For instance, a sign that looked like a house was named Bet and got the phonetic value /b/ because they called a house /bet/ in their language.

Gardiner took the first seminal steps in deciphering the Proto-Semitic scripts in the early 20th century (Gardiner 1916). Based on the similarity of the graphical forms, he established the link between the Phoenician letters and some Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite glyphs representing intermediate forms in this evolution. A few years earlier, John Peters had deduced the names of the Phoenician characters (Peters 1901), and Theodor Nöldeke proposed acrophony for their phonetic value and pronunciation (Nöldeke 1910). The initial phoneme of a letter’s name became the phonetic value of the grapheme.

Since then, the Phoenician alphabet has been thought to be a phonetic one. Every character represents a phoneme. The Phoenicians eliminated all previously used logograms and ideograms and kept only sound-coding signs. Although some resemblance between those signs and some Egyptian hieroglyphs has occasionally been recognized, this is not considered sufficient to qualify the Phoenician letters as logograms or ideograms. To take the same example, the letter Bet lost the sememe of a house. It only meant /b/.

The specimens of Proto-Sinaitic and other linear scripts from Canaan are very scarce. A handful of isolated inscriptions have been dated at intervals of several centuries. Their relationships and relevance to the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally dated after 1050 BC (Lehmann 2020), as well as the Semitic nature of the language they allegedly record, is questionable (see sections The Proto-Sinaitic script, The Tel Lachish script, and Proto-Canaanite scripts). Instead, there is massive evidence for the continuous practice of other languages and non-linear scripts in the Sinai and Canaan regions for the entire second millennium BC. I am referring, of course, to the Egyptian hieroglyphics in Sinai and Egypt and the Akkadian cuneiform of the Amarna letters in the Levant. At the same time, hieroglyphic and linear writing systems developed in Crete with dense diachronic continuity and evidence for a gradual abstraction of glyph forms.

Figure 1. A green jasper Minoan seal with Cretan hieroglyphs dated 1800 BC is currently in the archaeological museum of Iraklion, Greece. Artwork by ngo Pini; marked as public domain.

The so-called Archanes script (Yule 1980) from the homonymous town of Crete appears first on seals and sealings dated as early as 2200-1800 BC (Decorte 2018b). The corpus, known by the acronym CHIC (Corpus Hieroglyphicarum Inscriptionum Cretae), was rapidly enlarged with inscriptions on other clay and metal artifacts from various locations (Evans 1909; Godart and Olivier 1996). There are more than 350 documents with over 3000 tokens from fewer than 4 centuries by1800 or 1700 BC (Morpurgo-Davies and Olivier 2012; Olivier, n.d.).

The earliest inscriptions, sometimes called the Archanes formulas, typically consist of 2-3 signs with an iconographic appearance and perhaps only decorative function (Yule 1980). Fig. 1 gives an idea. As collected in Fig. 2, the motifs are artistically elaborated in relief to give the impression of three-dimensional objects of which the nature and primary semantic value are more-or-less apparent (Decorte 2018a; Nosch and Ulanowska 2021). Identical formulas have been found on specimens not only from the same deposit (Archanes, Phourni necropolis, building 6) but also in other archeological sites in Crete (Knossos, Gouves) and as far North as Samothrace; although Godart and Olivier (1996, page18, note 59) state that these may not represent the same script or language. Some scholars do not consider such symbols as part of a writing system but more as a decorative style (Sbonias 1995; Karnava 1999). However, the diachronic use of some signs and their gradual abstraction to Linear A characters (Fig. 3) seems to have convinced most authors that this is indeed a hieroglyphic script comparable to but largely independent from the Egyptian hieroglyphics (Decorte 2018b; 2018a; Ferrara 2015; 2018; Phillips and SCIEM 2000 (Program) 2008). Ferrara proposed the pointed birth of a fully developed hieroglyphic writing system in Crete during the Middle Minoan II period, i.e., approximately from 1850 BC, after a long and gradual development (Ferrara 2018).

Figure 2. Archanes Script signary, as proposed by Decorte (2018a).

 

Figure 3. Comparison of the Archanes Script (AS) signs with Cretan hieroglyphs (CH), Linear A and Linear B (LA/LB), and Phaistos Disc (PD) signs by Decorte (2018a).

Figure 4. Examples of gradual abstraction of Cretan hieroglyphics, numbered with #, towards Linear signs (numbered otherwise). 1. CHIC 070; a cross joining four points. 2. CHIC 031; fruits or vegetables (Psi = P for mouth + si for food; see section Europe and Asia). 3. CHIC 056; a bottle; sign #113.b2 has also been found in the Proto-Sinaitic inscription (Serabit el-Khadim; see section Proto-Sinaitic script, Fig. 1). 4. CHIC 047; a basket, decorated button, or ring; confounded with the CHIC 044 (Fig. 5) and the needle or nail sign CHIC 062, has given various Linear A signs and variants, eventually Linear B *70 (ko). 5. CHIC 062; the needle or nail sign, confounded with button or ring signs, has given Linear B *70 (ko). 6. CHIC 057; a dispenser funnel sign giving some versions of K. 7. CHIC 063, depicting a needle passing through a hole, and CHIC 064, a thread through a hole; similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics Gardiner-F33 (tail; /sd/; 𓄢), T2 (mace; /skr/; 𓌈), T3 (mace; /hd/; 𓌉), and V24 (command staff; /wd/; 𓎗). 8. CHIC 024 or CHIC 155; branches with leaves or trimmings. 9. CHIC 006; crossed hands. 10. CHIC 156; branch support with three poles leading to Linear AB *131, ‘wine’ (Salgarella 2020). 11. CHIC 034; two breasts leading to Linear AB signs *58 (su) and *59 (ta); comparable to Egyptian hieroglyphs Gardiner D27 (small breast; /dʒ/; 𓂑) and D27A (large breast; /dʒɑ(ː)/; 𓂒). 12. CHIC 028; jaws with teeth. 13. CHIC 010; leg or knee leading to Linear A sign A352 and zigzag signs with leg, knee, or N-like forms (AB12, so; AB53, ri; AB75, we).

Some examples of gradual abstraction from hieroglyphic to linear signs are shown in Fig. 4. The fully pictographic versions of a sign suggest the kind of object they describe, providing, thus, information that is lost after abstraction. Fig. 5 shows the evolution of the hieroglyphic sign CHIC 044, which was particularly popular in the Archanes set. This sign represents a button, a shank button. At first glance, I interpreted its outline as a rocker stamp, but there is no reason for seal stamps to have holes or rings. Shank buttons are spheroid objects with a more-or-less flat, visible side and a ring-protrusion on the opposite side. This hidden hole serves to sew a thread and attach the button to the fabric. Shank buttons are not a recent invention (Fig. 6). They can be made from various materials, but the older ones were metallic and had a wide variety of surface designs. The decorative pattern is uninterrupted by the sewing holes and thread one would get with a sew-through button. The Archanes seals may have been used to stamp the visible surface of casted metallic shank buttons. The sign of a button on a seal may function as an identifier, telling the purpose of the seal. If so, the sign bears meaning, not necessarily a phoneme or syllable.

Figure 5. Evolution of the Cretan hieroglyphic sign CHIC 044 (Godart and Olivier 1996) from its Archanes seal versions (top; Decorte, 2018b) through realist pictographs and more casual variants (middle) to fully abstracted hieroglyphics (lower left) and Linear A signs with similar forms (lower right). Note that most realist icons feature one to three holes.

Figure 6. Ancient and modern shank buttons. A: From the 12th century AD (kostym.cz). B: From Medieval Europe (Dagfari). C: From Kievan Rus’, 9 - 13th century (Michal Chromý). D: Brass buttons from the uniform of a Danish World War I artillery lieutenant (Europeana 1914-1918 project; Creative Commons license). E: Spanish button about 12 mm from ca. 1650-1675 (Peach State Button Club; Creative Commons license).

It is noteworthy, however, that the phonetic value given to the Linear A and B sign AB70 (Fig. 5) for deciphering Linear B was ko (Ventris and Chadwick 1973), as in κομβόω (komboō), to bind up, fasten, κόμβωμα (kombōma), robe, κόμβος (kombos), roll, band, girth, belt, Modern Greek knot, or κομβίον (kombion; glossed περόνη), buckle, brooch, an ornament fastened to clothing with a hinged pin and catch, rivet, bolt, pin for twisting ropes round, Modern Greek button. Compare English combine, knot and knob (with metathesis of the nasal), Hungarian gomb, Bulgarian ко́пче (kópče), Slovak gombík, Slovene gumb, Modern Greek κουμπί (koumpí; /kumbi/), Japanese kō or ku, Mandarin kòuzi, Sanskrit kudma, Armenian կոճակ (kočak), Ukrainian gúdzyk, all meaning button, as well as Mandarin kòu (/ko/), button, to engrave, decorate, Old Turkic root qori- (/kori/), to close, block, guard, protector, Late Egyptian <kwt> (/ku:t/ or /kot/), knot, and <Skw> (/ʃku:/), earrings, bracelets or <kwSn>, girth. However, I could not find any similar word in Middle Egyptian, i.e., before 1350 BC.

Perhaps, the B-shape of a knob with two roundish parts, one smaller than the other, gave the English button, where U stands for the hollow shank or buttonhole, O for the visible spheroid, and TT for the function of a button in aligning and joining two parts together (N for movement, action; see section N). Besides, B is omnipresent in the above European cognates of knob. The nasals M and N, as well as the S-shapes on the Archanes seals of Fig. 5 (top), could be zigzag glyphs representing the thread and the up-down, or in-out, sememe of sewing. I cannot help but note the phonetic coincidence between Mandarin kòuzi (釦子; /kozi/; button), French cousu (/ku.zy/; sewn, stitched), and the Linear B syllabograms 𐀒𐁙𐀸 (ko-zu-we, AB *70-*79-*75) which would be descendants of the signs in the left-topmost Archanes seal of Fig. 5.

Some Archanes formulas are indeed very repetitive. Sign CHIC 044 (󲀝, 𐂴) is the most frequent hieroglyphic, although its usage drops dramatically in Linear A, probably having been replaced by other inventions or misinterpreted variants as in Fig. 5 (󰙢, 󰙣, 󰘩, 󰀚, 󰗓, 󰗒). It is most frequently combined with signs CHIC 049 (󲄳) in about 70 specimens and CHIC 005 (󲃧) in about 30 (Ferrara 2015), neither of which has any obvious match in Linear A or B. Linear A and B sign *75 (󲃔; S-hook; Z-hook; double hook; double-U; W; syllable we, usually transliterated with Y or U) is poorly represented in CHIC under class 309, and not in SigLA, although it is pretty frequent in the Archanes seals. The sign CHIC 005 is an eye (Fig. 7). An eye is, primarily, a slit of the skin that opens and closes with extreme ease, an excellent logo for buttonhole technology.

Moreover, the icon of an eye with eyelashes is the closest symbolic representation I can think of – in the context of the late third millennium BC – for a shank button passing through its buttonhole. Sign CHIC 049 looks like another type of garment attachment, a scarf-pin (Fig. 8). The S-shaped object, occasionally bearing decorative spikes, is more difficult to identify due to low graphic complexity. It wouldn’t be surprising, however, if, in the context of garment attachment devices, this too was one, e.g., an S-hook or hook-and-eye clasp (Fig. 9). Note that the S-objects are frequently depicted in couples (Fig. 4, top).

Figure 7. Left: Variants of Cretan hieroglyphic sign CHIC 005. Right: An eye-shaped buttonhole with ‘eyelashes’ (Dicraft).

Figure 8. Cretan hieroglyphic sign CHIC 049 versions (left) compared to modern scarf pins (right).

Figure 9. Various S-hook and hook-and-eye clasps.

If the above theory is correct, buttons and buttonholes were not a Late Medieval European invention as it is currently believed (“Buttonhole” n.d.). They were known to Minoans and advertised together with other cloth attachment solutions since the early second millennium BC. In modern western thought, still seeing gods and kings as humanity's most outstanding achievements, scholars classify the Archanes formulas into ‘palace’ and ‘temple’ classes, or ‘royal’ versus ‘bureaucratic’ (Ferrara 2015). But here, we are witnessing aspects of the ancient clothing industry and fashion. The Archanes seals have nothing to do with administration or worship; probably nothing in the ancient world is of this sort. The deposit could somehow represent a factory of cloth accessories, a tailor’s workshop, or the office of a graphic designer in charge of promoting such objects. Perhaps, the person buried with personal belongings at building 6 of the Phourni cemetery, Archanes, was a tailor, a fashion designer, or a seller.

Figure 10. Cretan hieroglyphics and similar Linear A signs compared to old belt buckles.

Many more Cretan hieroglyphics and later abstracted Linear A signs look like closures from the clothing industry (Fig. 10). Sign CHIC #046.b, for example, looks like a couple of male and female objects entangled to hold their respective fixtures, e.g., the two sides of a belt, together. The variants of CHIC sign 38 (𐩷, 𐩹, 𐌇, 𐌎, 󰖰, 󲉐, etc.) look like buckles. They are generally rectangular, with one vertical stroke often slightly longer than the other, probably representing an axel of fixation and rotation for the rectangle. Any extra horizontal or vertical strokes inside the rectangle may represent buckle pins. The standard abstraction, e.g., CHIC #044.a or #57.c, may be and has been interpreted as a door (Clodd 1900). Indeed, abstract signs may be interpreted as anything they might look like, according to the context. The variants CHIC #293.a, #200, and #058.d also look like parts of bed or chair design (Fig. 11). The hieroglyphics CHIC #053.c, representing circles with two or three dots inside, are practically identical to Linear A and B sign *78 (SigLA AB78) and its local variants featuring 2-5 or, exceptionally, more dots (Fig. 12). These signs may well represent a new fashion of sew-through buttons with variable hole numbers. Sign CHIC #236.a and its family (CHIC 070) may be part of the instructions for sewing 4-hole buttons. The dotted circles may also represent any other circular object with 2 or more feature points but CHIC #089.b (Fig. 13) is definitely a dress!

Figure 11. Some Cretan hieroglyphics may represent furniture design. Left: Davis metal bed frame (Dreams.co.uk). Right: Vincent Willem van Gogh’s painting representing a chair (marked as public domain).

Figure 12: Signs CHIC #53.c (families CHIC 074 and 075), #236, and SigLA AB78 variants (left) compared to modern sew-through buttons (right). Artwork by Treasurie (top) and Beau Paper Co. (bottom).

Figure 13. The sign CHIC #089.b.

I am not suggesting that Archanes and later Cretan hieroglyphs or linear signs are always related to clothing and fashion. I am not even sure that I got their meaning right. My hypothesis, subject to independent validation, is based on the observation that signs combined into Archanes formulas could be coherently interpreted as clothing attachment devices. I am suggesting that the first linear drawings were ideograms with no supernatural, noble significance, or phonetic value, only with meaning. They meant what they looked like. What could be the phonetic value of a leg of a chair anyway? Would it be that of a leg or that of a chair? In probability terms, the personal belongings of priests and kings would be infinitely hard to find because those people were very few if they existed. We expect to find representations of objects used by the general population, particularly when we dig in places where such items were massively manufactured or distributed. The enrichment of Cretan hieroglyphics in clothing-related semantics may be interpreted as most of them were found in a clothing context. If we dig somewhere else, we should find a different set of signs. Alternatively, the clothing industry was where those first signs were invented and most used. Even today, our clothing industry uses its own script (“Guide to Apparel and Textile Care Symbols” 2022).

We may already ask where does the syllable KO come from? How did it make it to languages as diverse as Linear B (and Linear A), Chinese (and Japanese), and Late Egyptian? Why can we not find it in Middle Egyptian or Semitic roots with similar meanings? Or can we? Not least, were the Archanes symbols pronounced? What was created first, the phoneme /k^w/, giving the syllables ku, ko, gu, go, etc., or the graphemes |<O (KO) depicting a circular object that passes through a slit?

The English sew matches the Mandarin zi (from kòuzi), French su (cousu), Sanskrit siv (sivyati; to sew, stitch), and Linear B zuw (ko-zu-we); but also, the zi of zigzag. There are several inseparably associated notions and sememes in a button, i.e., the button itself, its shank or its little holes, the tight buttonhole (depicted as an eye with sewn eyelashes), sewing, the narrow hole (‘eye’) of the needle, and the zigzag pattern of the thread. In the Archanes script, the button itself was depicted with the sign CHIC 044 (Fig. 5). This sign gave Linear A and B *70 (𐂴, 𐀒, respectively) and Proto-Canaanite (𐂴). The current theory would explain this impressive distribution of the syllable ko (button, nail), assuming a PIE origin of the phonemes /k^w/ and /z^y/, which first combined to give the Ukrainian (kurgan steppe) gúdzyk, and other IE words for button, then borrowed in Chinese as kòuzi, kòu, Japanese kō or ku, Turkic qori-, etc. Indeed, the word forming particles com-, con-, and co- are products of the PIE root *kom-, meaning beside, near, by, or with. An Egyptian origin can be excluded since k^w-like words with related meanings appear only in Late Egyptian (after 1350 BC); unless I missed them. They were probably introduced from the north.

According to the above phonocentric PIE-origin hypothesis, sewed buttons existed and were called something like /k^wz^y/ long before any attempt at writing. This hypothesis leaves many questions unanswered. People landing in Crete called a sewed button ko-zu-we; we do not and cannot know why since attributing sounds to objects is arbitrary. One day, they decided to write the word down using the image of a button (󲀝, 𐂴, or 󰗒) for ko-, a buttonhole (󲃧, 𐁙) for -zu-, and a double-hook 𐀸 (UU) for -we. They certainly had many other words starting with ko-. Why did they use an image of a button to write ‘button’ (/k^wz^y/) and not another signified of the syllable ko, e.g., combine or co-worker? Would they give ko another image if they were to write something else? Next, if the image of a button fully conveyed the notion of a button, what was the use of the other two syllables? Perhaps to specify a sewed button since the /zy/ phonemes are associated with IE words for sewing. In other words, ko-zu-we would not stand for a simple (shank) button but, perhaps, for a sew-through button.

We observe a bifurcation of IE languages using k^w and z^y syllables in their verbs for sewing. Romance languages use both syllables, whereas Slavic and Germanic languages, as well as Latin, use only the z^y syllable (Table 1). There is also frequent use of R in verbs using both k^w and z^y. That R is equivalent to the Linear B syllable ri (sign AB *53), which looked like a double hook (Z, J, S, 𐀸) in Linear A. The hieroglyphic double hook could, thus, be confused with Linear AB *53 and pronounced ri instead of we (Linear AB *75; 𐀸). In the modern English mindset, W has no semantic but phonetic value. It is, nevertheless, a double-U (UU) and represents a double hook, like an S-hook, commonly used for attachment and hanging. Unless Salgarella and Castellan (2021) confused some variants of AB *75 (we) with AB *53 (ri) in their database, we have two hypotheses to confront: the phonocentric, that we and ri were phonetically and semantically equivalent and interchangeable by some phonetic rule, therefore, rendered with similar glyphs (same sign) in writing; and the graphocentric, that readers and teachers interpreted cursive variants of a single S-hook sign with various phonetics. The semantics of an S-hook pictogram would not change if people pronounced it differently.

Table 1: The use of k^w and z^y syllables in Romance, Slavic, Germanic, and other cognates of sew.

The kw - zy pattern	The zy pattern
Aromanian: cos	English: sew
Catalan: cosir	Gothic: siujan
Dalmatian: coser	Hindi: sīnā, silnā
Extremaduran: cosel	Japanese: suru
French: coudre	Kashubian: szëc
Friulian: cusî	Latgalian: šyut
Galician: coser	Latin: suō
Italian: cucire	Latvian: šūt
Ladino: kuzir	Lithuanian: siūti
Lombard: cusì, cüsì	Macedonian: šíe
Norman: couôtre	Bokmål: sy
Occitan: cordurar, cóser	Nynorsk: sy
Portuguese: costurar, coser	Ossetian: xwijyn
Romanian: coase	Polish: szyć
Romansch: cuser, cusir	Quechua: siray, sirai, hirai
Sardinian: cosie, cosire, cusiri, cusire	Russian: šitʹ
Sicilian: cùsiri	Sanskrit: sī́vyati
Spanish: coser	Serbo-Croatian: šivati, šiti
Ancient Greek: κασσύω (kassyō)	Slovak: šiť
Japanese: hōsei	Slovene: šivati
	Lower Sorbian: šyś
	Upper Sorbian: šić
	Sudovian: shūt
	Swedish: sy
	Ukrainian: šýty
Other patterns
Mandarin: féng, féngzhì, féngrèn	German: nähen
Irish: fuaigh	Greek: ράβω (ravō)
Scottish Gaelic: fuaigheil	Ancient Greek: ῥάπτω (rhaptō)
Turkish: dikmek	Georgian: ḳerva
Welsh: gwnïo

In this example, we do not simply have phonetic changes following the famous rules of PIE theory; we have a differential selection of syllables for constructing a verb. The currently reconstructed PIE root of sew is *syū- (compare Archanes hieroglyphics and Linear B zu-we), or *sū: (Linear B zu), to bind, sew. This reconstruction (Pokorny 2007) considered Old English seowian, siowan (to sew), from Germanic *siwjan (to stitch, sew, mend, patch, knit together), suture, accouter, couture, from Latin suere, past participle sūtus (to sew), suffixed form *sū-dhlā‑, Greek souvlaki (subulate), from Latin sūbula, (awl; a sewing tool), suffixed form *sū-tro‑, sutra, Kamasutra, from Sanskrit sūtram (thread, string), suffixed shortened form *syu-men‑ (hymen), from Greek humēn (thin skin, membrane). It did not consider cognates starting with co- or cu-. These cognates are thought to derive from a hypothetical Vulgar Larin *cosere, from Classical Latin cōnsuere, a derivative of suere, to sew (Ortolang 2012); it would mean something like to sew together, a pleonasm. The Archanes formula of about 2000 BC could not have been borrowed from Latin.

Table 2: The use of k^w, z^y, and w^e/rⁱ syllables in cognates of Linear A/B ko-zu-we (button, sewing).

The kw - zy pattern	The kno pattern
Albanian: kopsë	Czech: knoflík
Armenian: kočak	Danish: knap
Assamese: gunothi, gudam	Dutch: knoop
Belarusian: húzik	Estonian: nööp
Bulgarian: kópče	Faroese: knappur
Mandarin: kòuzi	Finnish: nappi
Greek: κουμπί (koumpí, /kumbi/)	German: Knopf
Ancient Greek: κομβίον (kombion)	Alemannic German: Chnopf
Hebrew: kaftor	Hunsrik: Knopp
Hungarian: gomb	Icelandic: hnappur
Indonesian: kancing	Irish: cnaipe, cnaipí
Laki: gijik	Swedish: knapp
Macedonian: kopče	Yiddish: knop
Polish: guzik	Luxembourgish: Knapp
Samogitian: guziks	Bokmål: knapp
Slovak: gombík	Nynorsk: knapp
Slovene: gumb
Telugu: guṇḍī	The zu-ri pattern
Ukrainian: gúdzyk	Arabic zirr
Vietnamese: cúc	Egyptian Arabic: zurrār
Northern Kurdish: bişkoj	Gulf Arabic: zrār

The k^w clusters (ko or ku and phonetic or spelling variants) appear to start all the cognates of the English knob as in Table 2, though K and O are separated by metathesis in the Germanic group. The cou of French coudre (past participle cousu; to sew) is probably not the common prefix com-, con-, or co-, meaning beside, together, with, but a cognate of the stereotypical sewing object, the button (English knob). Note that the Arabic analogs of button are cognates of sew (compare Tables 1 and 2). It is evident from this example that phonetics may change from language to language, but the syllabic structure of words is not random. The syllables carry meaning because they were once realist pictograms.

Figure 14. British sign language letter Q. Artwork by Coloringbuddymike. Creative commons license.

Therefore, the alternative graphocentric scenario is that sememes were first written down as icons with no phonetics. The pictograms were next abstracted into linear signs. Only then were linear signs attributed phonemes by inverse echomimetic onomatopoeia, using sounds that the upper respiratory tract naturally makes. For example, a narrow hole (Fig. 14) is compared to the larynx. The larynx can naturally cough. A linear sign symbolizing a narrow hole is, hence, given a laryngeal phonetic value imitating a cough or throat clearing, /q/, /k/, /ɡ/, /ɣ/, /x/, etc., to indicate the larynx. Thus, language – the one we learn at school – is regarded as a deliberate intellectual construct, an invented, designed, and advancing technology like a computer programing language and its applications (words); it is not a necessary physical property of mankind as is, for example, body language. Languages are to natural phonic communication like modern dance is to body language, or opera singing to baby cry.

I do not know if the Celtic vocabulary is generally closer to Chinese than it is to IE languages – Celtic languages are usually classified as IE – but Tables 1 and 2 suggest that it is more prudent to trace the origins and relations of individual linguistic units (letters, clusters, syllables, or words) than correlate languages with genetic nations. The Irish and Scottish Gaelic words for sew are like Mandarin equivalents (Table 1). Arabic words for button are like IE words for sew (Tables 1 and 2). The Cretan script specimens ranging from fully pictographic to fully phonetic, with traceable paths between these extremes, provide unique material for the study of linguistic development.

The term Linear A was coined by Sir Arthur John Evans, who discovered the script along with Cretan hieroglyphics and Linear B during his first visit to Crete in 1893 and his first excavations from 1894 on (Clodd 1900; Arthur Evans 1909). According to Clodd, Evans treated the linear signs separately from the hieroglyphs for convenience but regarded the scrips as fundamentally connected since their usage seemed to overlap in space and time. Evans uncovered about 3000 inscriptions from his excavations at Knossos. Since this discovery, the corpus of Linear A, conventionally dated from 1800 to 1450 BC, has grown to nearly 1500 documents with more than 7300 signs (Neumann 2006; Morpurgo-Davies and Olivier 2012). Most Linear A documents are found in Crete. Professor Emeritus John Younger from the University of Kansas lists the inscriptions found mainly in Hagia Triada, near Phaistos, and 38 other archeological sites in Crete as of August 2022 (Younger 2022a; 2022b). But Linear A documents have also been found outside Crete, in various Aegean islands (Kea, Kythera, Melos, Samothrace, Thera), the Anatolian coast (Miletus), the Greek mainland (Tiryns, Mycenae, Argos, Laconia) – perhaps as far as modern-day Bulgaria (Fol and Schmitt 2000) – and the Levant, at Lachish (Finkelberg et al. 1996) and Haror (Oren et al. 1996; Day et al. 1999; Karnava 2004).

The conventional dating of Cretan hieroglyphics, from 2200 to 1700 BC, and Linear A, 1800-1450 BC, means that Linear A coexisted with Cretan hieroglyphs in time for at least 100 years. Anastasiadou suggests that the two systems were separated geographically, with Linear A developing more in Southern regions and hieroglyphics being used more in Eastern and North-central parts of Crete (Anastasiadou 2016). But, again, the author based her hypothesis on the assumption that the Minoan palaces were ritual centers. Whether religious, administrative, commercial, or industrial zones, the so-called Minoan ‘palaces’ were potentially open to corporate groups from various regions on the island.

In every continually evolving system, the discretization of stages depends on arbitrary definitions and is prone to classification artifacts.  As the above figures illustrate, many Linear A signs are indistinguishable from abstracted hieroglyphs. Also, similarities of sign variants between families are frequently more substantial than similarities within families. This is the case, for example, of some AB53 variants (e.g., KN Zb 5 from Knossos) being morphologically closer to AB75 (𐀸) than their siblings. The transition from alleged ancestral Egyptian hieroglyphs to Proto-Sinaitic or Cretan derivatives is usually abrupt (Fig. 15). In contrast, Linear A, as well as the Proto-Sinaitic script, can be seen as smooth continuations from the hieroglyphic systems with some signs gaining popularity, some loosing out, and many new signs being introduced as writing became ampler with time. Similar phenomena are observed today, with words appearing and disappearing in every language. The sign and script evolution process continued throughout the second millennium to produce Linear B.

Figure 15. Left: Provenance of two Phoenician letters from Egyptian hieroglyphs through Proto-Sinaitic intermediate forms according to mainstream hypotheses. Right: Alternative proposition for a Cretan hieroglyphic origin of Linear A and Proto-Sinaitic signs depicting a hand palm.

By sign evolution, I mean the insensible change in the shape of a given sign due to an increase in the speed of writing, the use of different tools, and such scribe-dependent variation. Individual signs evolve from realist ideograms to abstract cursive glyphs with fewer strokes. When comparing glyphs (e.g., Fig. 15), we must decide if they represent the same or different signs. The decision is often complicated and arbitrary. Is a triangle pointing left different from a triangle pointing right or up? What about right, acute, and oblique angles? When the complexity of glyphs increases, the decision is more straightforward. Two triangles, each with three fringe strokes on one side, most probably represent the same sign, whatever their orientation. Yet, does the number of fringe strokes matter? Minor variation and abstraction may accumulate, so the resulting variants are interpreted as different signs. Figures 16 and 17 show continuous variation in attested Linear A glyphs that may account for the creation of new discrete signs. Each glyph is practically indistinguishable from its immediate neighbors, but the glyphs at the extremes of a line are clearly different signs.

Figure 16. Evolution of hand-palm signs.

In Fig. 16, the variants 1-3 of Linear sign AB28 (Linear A and B Bennett and Wingspread Convention sign *28; attributed the vowel i) are complex pictograms representing the palm of the right hand, as we look at it, with four fingers stretching upwards, the thumb extending rightwards, and a lot of palm muscle detail. Variant 4 shows that a lot of this detail can be replaced by a dot, which functions as an ellipsis sign. Variants 5-9 feature a prominent bent thumb. In variants 1, 4, and 11, the extra thickness of the thumb is suggested with a minor detached diacritic stroke. Signs 5, 6, and 8-12 have a more-or-less accurately drawn palm muscle. Up to variant 10, most signs feature four upright fingers, but variants 4, 6, and 9 show that three fingers can do the job. From 11 on, all variants feature 3 vertical fingers only. Signs 12 and 13 seem to be casual three-finger versions of the more stylized four-finger Linear B signs 25 and 24, respectively. In 13 to 16, the muscle is also dropped, but the thumb is still suggested by a horizontal stroke extending rightwards. Sign 14 retains the thumb thickness-diacritic and passes it over to sign 23. If we cursively join the rightmost finger, the thumb, and the arm strokes of sign 15, we get Gardiner’s Proto-Sinaitic glyph 345 (Gardiner 1916); only that 345 is rotated to fit the right-to-left reading. In Linear A, the leftmost finger stroke is joined with the thumb stroke to make a single quasi-right-angle stroke, as simplification continues in signs 17-19. Signs 18-21 have lost the thumb detail with the horizontal thumb stroke aligned to the vertical finger strokes. This landmark group is best represented by two symmetrical angular glyphs, the square version 30 and the triangular 31, featuring three fingers, an extended vertical stroke for the arm, and a horizontal palm-thumb line. Sign 31 was extensively used in Linear B times and is today the Unicode standard for Linear B *28 (Pandey, 2019).

The curvier variant 16 loses its thumb stroke to produce variant 22, which also continues in Linear B as 32 and 33. Similarly, 23 inherits its thumb stroke from variant 14 but only as a decorative feature. Instead, in variants 34 through 36 or 37, the thumb is suggested by lowering the right stroke (thumb line) below the left stroke (other fingers). But such graphical nuance cannot last long in handwriting, and this evolutionary line eventually splits up to produce signs with the left and right strokes joined. In one of the branches, i.e., signs 37-40, the central stroke shortens to disappear; the emphasis is placed on the finger strokes. Sign 40 is also found in Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, e.g., the graffito of Ahiram's tomb (see section Proto-Canaanite scripts, Fig. 6), as well as in several Anatolian (Lycian and Carian) and Greek alphabets with varying reconstructed phonetic values. The other two branches keep the middle stroke longer but differ in the configuration of the left and right finger strokes. In signs 41 to 44, the fingers are cursively joined into a single curve to give the Linear B sign 43 (sign *27) and the Classical Greek Psi (sign 44). In the branch of signs 45-51, which probably also derive from 36 or 37, the two shorter finger strokes are always kept straight to form an angle, but the longer stem varies from curved to straight, from oblique to upright, and from right to middle. The last sign in this series, 51, is the Phoenician K. The series of signs 51-57 probably derives from signs like 26 or 26 by abstracting the palm feature to a dot and its eventual omission. Sign 58 occupies the place of K in the abecedary of the Proto-Canaanite inscription on ʿIzbet Ṣarṭah ostracon (see section Proto-Canaanite scripts, Fig. 5c).

The above story explains why the Semitic K is called kāp, meaning hand palm, simply because K derives by gradual abstraction from a Linear A pictogram, ultimately from an utterly figurative hieroglyph representing the palm of the hand. Two Egyptian hieroglyphs depict a hand palm, one open (Gardiner D46), the other bent, half closed (D47). Gardiner believed that the Proto-Semitic and, later, Phoenician sign kāp (he calls it kāf; /xaf/, like the English half) derived from the half-closed palm D47 while D46 gave yōd (Gardiner 1916). There is, however, no evidence for a gradual abstraction of D47 towards K. Egyptian hieroglyphs remained rigidly standardized throughout the second millennium BC. If the Semitic K (/xaf/) still meant half, a reduced amount, it was probably conceived independently as a glyph with two strokes, one vertical straight line, and an arrow-like angular stroke pointing the middle of the vertical one, |<. This is another elegant way to graphically express the notion of a reduced amount. Whether originating in Egypt or Crete, K must have conveyed the meaning of a hand palm alone for a long time, without the aid of -āp. I have extensively documented that A stands for filling (with valuable stuff, food, water, etc.), and P stands for a mouth. If so, the name kāp would stand for the sememes palm-of-the-hand + filling + mouth; in other words, feeding, doing something useful for life. Now, was the palm of the hand called kāp in Minoan times? Did it have the phonetic value of /k/, or a phonetic value at all?

Because ideograms intuitively convey the sememe they represent, they need no phonetic value, and they never have any, as far as I can remember. For example, modern prohibition labels containing the grapheme Ó do not convey the phoneme /x/, but the sememe of prohibition, danger, 'no', 'do not.' Nowhere does the notion of palm-of-the-hand contain the phoneme /k/ in English, but work (doing something with your hand to feed yourself and your family) does contain the notion of a palm-of-a-hand (K). The root kāp appears in English capable, capture, capacity, and cognates, as well as in Sanskrit kapati, meaning two handfuls, Latin capax, able to hold, capere, to grasp, lay hold. The notion of the palm of the hand and its use is evident in all these words. It is said that these words derive from the PIE root *kap meaning to grasp. So, is the Semitic name of the letter kāp, meaning palm of the hand, genuinely Semitic or PIE? Are words like capable, capture, or capere (to grasp) truly IE or of Semitic origin? Or was kap from some proto-language that gave rise to the Indo-European and Semitic families?

Hypotheses of common ancestry prevail in evolutionary theory. The above evidence suggests that the notion of the palm of the hand is not in kap but in K alone and existed as a pictogram before the phoneme /k/ was associated with early K-forms. In fact, the phoneme /k/ is obviously not essential to express the notion of handling or grasping. It is associated with many other things, and a hand is associated with many other phonemes. A pictogram of a palm of a hand conveys this meaning no matter how it is pronounced, if at all. It is argued herein, however, that K no longer represents, visually, the palm of the hand but the capability of the hand to rotate. Rotation is associated with a narrowing like that of a neck or knee. The strokes of K indicate this narrowing (e.g., the wrist and other joints), which was perhaps once perceived as the most essential feature of a hand.

Something important is happening among signs 26-29 of Fig. 16. Instead of a palm muscle and a thumb, sign 26 has a semicircular stroke at the wrist. This stroke suggests a counterclockwise rotation that would bring the back of the hand upwards to our sight. Signs 27 and 28 have similar rotation strokes, but the fingers' configuration remains that of the right-hand palm. The sememe of rotation of the palm of the hand is equivalent to the sememe of a rotated hand showing its back. The inventor of sign 29 represented the back of the hand with the configuration of the fingers of the left hand. The story continues in Fig. 17.

Figure 17. The family of E, F, Zeta, G, Z, J, and I. The insert shows Cypro-Minoan glyphs (16 to 11th century BC) with upright or rotated stances.

Fig. 17 shows some more Linear A graphemes used in classical and modern alphabets. Like in Fig. 16, the graphemes are arranged so that juxtaposed characters present only handwriting differences, but the endpoints are recognizable discrete classical and modern letters. The glyphs 29 and 58-60 show hesitation in depicting the thumb (rightward) cross-strokes. These strokes eventually disappear in version 61. In some archaic Greek alphabets, the remaining cursive stem with the two leftward cross-strokes is stylized as the letter Sampi, sign 62. Alternatively, the rightward cross-strokes are cursively joined, reduced to an ellipsis dot or a single stroke, or wholly omitted down the line of signs 63-66. They produce the Phoenician ḣē (𐤄; sign 66), a Cypriot equivalent (ke, ge, k^he; sign 65), and many other Archaic variants of E. The insert of Fig. 17 shows similar Cypro-Minoan forms, including E and Ψ, found among several other recognizable Linear A signs of Late Bronze III (13 – 11th century BC) or Cypro-Minoan period II (17 – 15th century BC) inscriptions from Enkomi, Cyprus (Palaima 1989).

The cross-strokes are reduced in size and number from sign 67 to give the Classical Phoenician jōd (sign 71), its Greek equivalents Digamma (rotated 71), Zeta (76, 89), and Iota (83) – which is also the Phoenician zajin – the Latin equivalents Z (73, 76) and G (90), and the modern J. Note that these letters cluster close together at the left side of K (palm of the right hand) in the final Greek alphabet. The dots of Latin lowercase I, i, and J, j, as well as those of signs 80-81 and 83-85, respectively, represent the ellipsis of the cross-strokes of their ancestral sign 68. The modern J derives by rotation (87) of Linear A sign 86. Similarly, the Greek lowercase Zeta (89) derives by rotation (88) of sign 83 and provides the essential elements of handwritten G and g (90). The two cross-strokes of sign 72 are cursively retained in handwritten Latin Z (73).

Today, it is generally agreed that the name of the letter and numeral Sampi (ϡ, or Ͳ) derives from the san and pi, san meaning like, in Modern Greek, and pi, the letter Pi. San-Pi phonetically turns into Sampi and could mean 'like a Pi'[1]. The word san did not exist in Ancient Greek with this meaning (like). San was only the name of another archaic letter, 𐌑, pronounced as sibilant, like Σ or S[2] (Jeffery 1961). If Sampi is indeed a contraction of San (/s/) and Pi (/p/), it may have been pronounced as /sp/, which is the inverse of /ps/ (Psi; Ψ). According to Fig. 16, the latter is a Linear A sign deriving from a hand palm ideogram and giving rise to the Phoenician K through forms like 𐊜 or 𐊵. Thus, Sampi would be the inverse of the palm of the hand, i.e., the back of the hand or the thing that the palm holds and manipulates. There is literary evidence that Sampi was used in the Ionian (the most ancient) dialect in words where other (later) dialects used SS, TT, St, or Ts. It likely represented some T-multiplicity or intensity that could be spelled out as TT (compare Cypro-Minoan 𐠙 or Linear B 𐤳; AB *05, to). Several other lines of evidence suggest that Sampi is related to the hand but represents antonyms of the palm. First is its form. If the palm (𐊜, 𐊵, ᛎ) is concave, the back of the hand (ϡ, Ͳ, Ͳ, 𐊁, ᛏ) is convex. Plastic materials like clay or dough are convex when squeezed with the palm.

The stem sam is used in sama (σᾶμα), a Doric form for sēma (σῆμα; compare semantics), meaning sign, mark, token, mound, a rounded mass projecting above a surface. The cognate verb, samainō (σαμαίνω; Doric for σημαίνω, sēmainō) means to indicate, show by a sign, point out, give signs, signify, declare, mean, conjecture, provide a sign or mark, seal, mark out. With the morpheme -ainō being a generic verb ending, the specific meanings of samainō repose on sam. The back of the hand shows its outer side when indicating. It is culturally insulting to a Greek if the number 5 is indicated using an open-palm gesture[3]. The back of the hand should be shown instead.

Table 3. The semantics of some frequent Ancient Greek words with πι (pi-). Lemmas are hyperlinked to online dictionaries and frequencies to predicted occurrences at the Perseus Digital Library (Crane 2006).

Lemma	Frequency	Short Definition
πίνω	9452	to drink
πίμπλημι	7211	fill, fill full, satisfy, glut, have enough of
πιστός	4109	liquid
πιστός-2	4109	conform, faithful, loyal, trusty, true
πίπτω	3577	to fall down, intentionally cast down, intersect, meet
πικρός	1959	pointed, sharp, keen, piercing,
πιέζω	1922	to press tight, squeeze, compress, weigh down, hold fast to, insist upon, determine precisely, outweigh, (settle, set firmly)

The original meaning of the stem pi can also be readily deduced from words starting with pi. The most common of them is the verb πίνω or (pinō; future πίομαι, piomai; aorist πιεῖν, piein; root πι-, pi-), to drink, i.e., saturate the body with a liquid. The mass of water in hand, or of any drink in a cup, is a convex object that perfectly fits the concave container. The next most common is πίμπλημι (pimplēmi), to fill, fill full, fill up, satisfy, glut, have enough of. The ancient noun πιστός (pistos) originally meant liquid. Still, it was later used metaphorically as conform, faithful, loyal, trusty, or true, regarding the fidelity with which a liquid mass follows the shape of its container. A liquid-like copy would mean an exact copy. The verb πιστοποιέω (pistopoieō; *piͲ-o-poieō) means to accredit, confirm, certify, authenticate, or attest. It is made of πίστις (pistis; *piͲ-is), meaning trust, faith, persuasion, confidence, assurance, credit, guarantee, and ποιέω (poieō), to make, produce, create, bring into existence, compose, do, as pist-o-poieō, with -o- as a ligature. Then, πίπτω (piptō) means to fall, intentionally cast down, intersect, or meet. The adjective πικρός (pikros; compare Eglish pick) means pointed, sharp, keen, piercing, or shrill. Last but not least, πιέζω (piezō) contains the independent verb ἕζω (‘ezō), to settle, set firmly, and means to press tight, squeeze, compress, press or weigh down, press hard, hold fast to, lay stress on, insist upon, determine precisely, repress, stifle, outweigh. From pi, we also have πίναξ (pinax) meaning board, plank, drawing- or writing-tablet (first made of soft pine wood and engraved with a pin), board for painting on, public noticeboard or register, generally, plate with anything drawn or engraved on it.

Think also of English pin, pincers, pinch, pine (of which the softwood was used for writing in antiquity), or pinpoint in the sense of extreme accuracy and precision or specificity, especially regarding location. Other iconic English Ͳ-words containing the sememes of Ͳ (stamping-like gesture, liquid, fluid, fidelity, stamp, print, and pressure) are piston, pestle, and the inverse, stipulate, stipend, tip, and chip (*Ͳip; printed). If Ph is the intensive, repetitive, or otherwise plural version of P, as it is repeatedly argued herein, Phin would be more precise and repetitive pressure with a small sharp object (I), and Phoin, with a cylinder (Oi). The Phoenicians (Phoinikes) would then be the printers (see section The Phoenicians). Compare Latin pinna or penna (feather, pen) and English fin, fine, finery, finger, finial, finicky, finish, finance, with a probable original sense of coin cutting or the characteristic behavior of seed-eating finch birds.

A note should be made of the opposition between πίμπλημι (pimplēmi), to fill, and πίμπρημι (pimprēmi), to burn, burn up, burn with fever, burn with fire, to fire. These quite long verbs are identical for the most part except for the opposition L/R. In the context of pottery, L stands for a liquid-saturated, malleable clay, whereas R is for the dry, fired product. Besides, πλῆξις (plēxis) is a stroke, whereas πρῆξις (prēxis) is an accomplishment, result, or completion. English completion (/kəmˈpliːʃən/) allegedly derives from com (with, together) + PIE root *pele- (1), to fill. It may also be considered, however, as a cognate or derivative of com + plēssō (πλήσσω) or Attic plēttō (πλήττω), meaning to strike or stamp as one does a coin. Here, again, we would have a conversion of a graphical SS to phonetic Sh (/ʃ/).  

Evidently, Sampi is the agglutination of the sememes of sam (to indicate, show by a sign, mark, seal) with those of pi (liquid, fill full, faithful, cast down, press). This semantic agglutination results in sign-mark-liquid-fill-accurate-pressure, i.e., printing, stamping, casting, or accurately filling up space by applying pressure. According to the theory of acrophony, Sampi must have once been spelled *Ͳampi and pronounced /s^tampi/ or /t^sampi/ since no Greek word starts with SS, TT, or any other double consonant. With Ͳ dropping out from the Greek alphabet in favor of S, Ͳampi became Sampi in Greek, but the phonemes /s^tamp/ survived in English as in stamp. In French, Ͳ became T, and Ͳampi, tampon (tampon, stopper, plug, absorbent material, buffer, stamp). In other words, stamp and tampon are immediate cognates of Sampi, and the letter’s name means to stamp or seal. Indeed, Ͳ looks like a flat stamp with a handle. Its isoform ϡ is a curved, rocker stamp, still in use when I was a child. The purpose of a rocker stamp was to improve the uniformity of printing on larger surfaces.

The core stem of Sampi, ἀμπί (ampi), is said to be Aeolic for ἀμφί (amphi) but was probably coined to explain forms such as ἀμπέχω (ampexō), which are due to dissimilation. The verb ampexō means to surround, cover, enclose, put around, especially put clothes and the like on, dress, put on, wear, cover with, while amphi means on both sides of, over, around, all about, throughout, on all sides. The graphocentric view is that ampi and amphi are not just dialectal phonetic variants of the same signifier but graphically express two significantly different concepts. The pi of ampi depicts the entire perimeter of an object as a single roundish entity, while the phi of amphi signifies the two or more parts of that perimeter. This is one more example of phonetic aspiration resulting from the duplication of a grapheme or the addition of H (for length, intensity, multiplicity) to express a multiplicity (Φ < Ph < PP;  *amppi > amphi; see section On the origin of words). Finally, ἄμ (am) is the preposition ἀνά (ana) before β, π, φ, or μ, and means on, upon, without any notion of motion, throughout, and ἅμα (contracted to ἅμ; ama, am) means at once, at the same time.

Figure 18. A. Wall painting representing a fuller’s press for drying the wet clothes found on a pillar at the Fullonica (fullery; laundry workshop) of Veranius Hypsaeus, Pompey, Italy (Pompeii VI.8.20), dated AD 79 (Dunn and Dunn 2022); now in Naples Archaeological Museum, inventory number 9974. B. A diagram of the same device from 1899 is now exhibited at the New York Public Library (Wallach and Wallach 1899). C. Variants of the Linear A sign AB39 for various locations in Crete (HT=Hagia Triada; ZA=Zakros; KH=Chania; PH=Phaistos; ARKH=Archanes; KN=Knossos; TY=Tylissos; MA=Malia). Images from SigLA (Salgarella and Castellan 2021) are available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. D. The Unicode (Pandey 2019) standard Linear B sign *39 (pi).

While am means on, upon, the inverse, ma (μά), is an antonym meaning by. While pi seems to be the result of a printing or the material submitted to pressure, as above, the inverse stem, ip, is an antonym referring to the weight or force required for printing. We perceive this meaning in ἴπνη (ipnē), woodpecker, ἰπόω (ipoō), to press, squeeze, weigh down, ἴπωσις (ipōsis), pressing hard, squeezing, ἰπωτήριον (ipōtērion), olive- or winepress, and ἶπος (ipos), any weight, fuller’s press (Wallach and Wallach 1899; Dunn and Dunn 2022). The circumflex (bending around something else; curved) tonic accent and the spiritus lenis (smooth) diacritic over the I (ἶ) add descriptive detail to the meaning of I and its role in the word. Fig. 18 compares a Roman fuller’s press with Linear A and B variant glyphs of the Linear B syllabogram pi (*39). A fuller’s press was a P(P)-shaped device with one or more vertical bolds, which are turned to squeeze anything placed under them, i.e., typically wet cloths. The Linear AB39 signs look like a device functioning on the same principle, probably used for applying uniform pressure on the enclosed material.

Thus, the name Sampi conveys the notion of a device that puts pressure (or liquid) covering both sides of an object at the same time. Other historically attested names for Sampi are συγκοπή (sygkopē), cutting up into small pieces, cutting of metal into pieces for coinage, and χαρακτήρ (charactēr), engraver, one who mints coins, graving tool, die, stamp, branding-iron, coin type, standard, a distinctive mark, or token impressed, impress, image (“Sampi” n.d.). I do not know if Sampi was a device for printing and cutting coins, buttons, or other things. Still, the term did not mean ‘like pi’ and is not of Medieval origin, as the Wikipedia article simplistically assumes.

The above graphocentric view – that the graphemes and their names are iconic – would almost agree with the present phonocentric view. According to OED[4], a stamp is a cognate of Old English stempan, to pound in a mortar, from Proto-Germanic *stamp- (source also of Old Norse stappa, Danish stampe, Middle Dutch stampen, Old High German stampfon, German stampfen, to stamp with the foot, beat, pound, and German Stampfe, pestle, stamp), from nasalized form of PIE root *stebh-, to support, place firmly on; source also of Greek stembō (στέμβω), to trample, misuse (also to shake about, agitate, handle roughly) [5]. According to OED, the vowel is altered in Middle English, perhaps by the influence of Scandinavian forms. The Wiktionary identifies the PIE root *stemb-, meaning to trample down[6]. On the one hand, a stamp and a pestle have roughly similar forms and functions. On the other hand, a term about the precision of stamping cannot be cognate of a term for the chaotic actions of pounding or trampling. There must be some confusion. If pronounced incorrectly, /stamp/ may be heard as /stemb/, then written as stemb. A phonetic analysis is prone to error. The graphemes stamp, however, cannot be read and copied as stemb; although p may intentionally be inverted (turned over) to b and a replaced with e to specify an analogous but different action. The letter A, like a half-filled container, would stand for filling (absorption), whereas E, graphically deriving from the fingers of the hand (Fig. 17), would represent width, intervals, open space/time between occurrences; hence, the pounding and trampling sememes. Compare tremble/trample, temple (pattern, rhythm), tempo, or French temps (time).

Cylinder stamp seals with Cypro-Minoan inscriptions have been found in Enkomi, Cyprus (Palaima 1989). This type of object existed in the Near East before 3000 BC. The first specimens were printed images and cuneiform texts suggesting the existence of an industry of decorative arts (Ross 2014). Stamping with a cylinder raises the question of matching the cylinder’s perimeter to the length of the surface to be printed. How long will the print be if the cylinder makes a complete turn? Or, how big should the cylinder be to print the whole surface with the whole image? We need to know the diameter of the cylinder of which the perimetry will match a given length. Therefore, we need to know the relation between the diameter and the perimeter of cylinders or circles. In linguistic terms, we know the sam- (all sides) of our Sampi (stamp), i.e., the ensemble of signs to be conveyed, and we need to calculate its pi, what will faithfully be printed, the length of the print. It turned out that pi is always 3.14… times the diameter of our cylindrical Sampi. The Babylonians and the Egyptians had rough numerical approximations of the value of pi. Later mathematicians in ancient Greece, particularly Archimedes, improved on those approximations (Bogart 1999).

Various Linear A signs were probably used as special characters, diacritics, ligatures, punctuation signs, or numerals at different times and places. The name of the Greek letter Stigma, meaning a mark, dot, puncture, or generally a sign, was a generic term for all these characters, in my opinion. Thus, depending on Archaic locality and time, Stigma referred to various signs. For example, 𐊥, elsewhere called Digamma; ᚿ, identical to Linear A sign AB01 but thought to derive from the Phoenician hēt (𐊧 and variants, themselves identical to Cretan AB55, AB56, and AB57) and to have given the Greek aspirate diacritic; ς or ⲋ, marking the end of a word and still used as the final Sigma; ϙ, elsewhere called Koppa; Ϻ, the letter San and Doric Sigma); Ͳ or ϡ for Sampi; Ͷ, another variant of San; etc. (“Stigma (Letter)” n.d.; “Heta” n.d.). Stigma (στίγμα) means mark, στιγμός (stigmos), pricking, puncture, point, στιγμή (stigmē), spot, mathematical point, anything tiny, jot (compare Phoenician yōd, 𐤥; Semitic Yōd; Greek Iota), title, moment; in grammar, full stop, period, colon.  All these words are derivatives or close cognates of the verb στίζω (stizō), of which the root is στιγ- (stig-), meaning to mark, put a punctuation mark. Another derivative of this verb is στίξις (stixis), which means marking, e.g., of musical notes, or punctuation, still used in Modern Greek. Other cognates are στίχος (stichos; ch for a multitude of stixis; sticsis), row, line of poetry, verse, line of prose, and στικτέον (stikteon), one must put a punctuation mark. Therefore, all these signs under the generic name of Stigma were punctuation marks. Judging from how punctuation works today, it did not have phonetic values but served to organize writing and speech in a legible and comprehensible way.

The case of ϙ supports the above punctuation hypothesis. This character was initially named ϙoppa, then, Qoppa, and later, phonetically transliterated in Greek as Koppa by reborrowing. The stems ὄππα (oppa) or ὅππᾳ (hoppa_i) are glossed as ὅπη, or Doric ὅπᾳ (hopē or hopa), all being dialectal variants semantically associated with questions like where? by which or what way? In which or what direction or part? How? With such question words, ϙ would have played the role of a question mark (ϙ-oppa = ?-oppa = oppa?). Nowadays, a question mark is not pronounced but does modulate a phrase's musical intonation in an interrogative clause. In cursive writing, the Q-like shape may often break up at the side like a Latin G, Cyrillic Koppa, Ҁ, ҁ, ʕ, ʔ, Greek Stigma, ϛ, Linear A sign A349 (󰚋), or an inverted h, ɥ,  (“Koppa (Letter)” n.d.). In Classical Greek, since it was not pronounced, ϙ was probably reduced to a spirit diacritic placed above the initial o of oppa. A similar question mark that takes the form of an open circle diacritic is found in Armenian (Fig. 19). However, that diacritic is placed on the last vowel of the interrogative word (“Question Mark” n.d.). Whether the Greek sign was a true spiritus asper (rough-breathing diacritic) or just modulating intonation, it would be transliterated as H and interpreted as voiceless glottal fricative (aspirate; /h/) in languages using the Latin alphabet. Meanwhile, ϙ-oppa gave the digraph Qu (/k^w/), the qu-words in Latin and Romance languages, and the wh-words in English. Because ϙ-oppa was pronounced /qoppa/ in Latin, and Greek had no such letter as Q in its alphabet, but K, the name of the character Qoppa became Koppa.

Figure 19. A right-to-left question mark (left) and an Armenian question diacritic (right).

The principle of antonymy by inversion (see section On the origin of words) was applied to produce generic answers to opa or ϙ-opa (ʕ-opa, opa-ʔ, ɥ-opa, opa ?) questions, i. e., where? by which or what way? In which or what direction? Inversion of opa gives ἀπό (apo), which means from. Inversion of ʕ-opa-ʔ, h-opa? or ɥ-opa-ʔ (ϙ-opa-ϙ) gives ϙ-apo-ϙ, then, kapoɥ, kapou (κάπου), meaning somewhere, about, around, kapoios (κάποιος), someone, somebody, some, kapote (κάποτε), sometime, sometimes, at some point, formerly, once. So, the Ancient Greek h-op- (ϙ-op) words gave the po-questions ποῦ (poy = po-ɥ = po-ϙ), where? ποῖος (poios), of what kind? What? Which? Who?  πότε (pote), when? What time? πόσος (posos), of what quantity? How much? How many? And, in general, the hypothetical root πός* (*po-ϛ) is traced in all such interrogative words. It also gave the Latin qu-words and the English wh-words. The ϙ-opa questions produced the ϙ-apo answers. Interestingly, in Ionic, the P of the po-words was converted to K, equivalent to Latin Q. The Phoenician Qōp (Semitic Qoph) looked like 𐌘 but was pronounced /k^w/, like in Latin. Note that the lowercase p is an invested q. Perhaps, p and q were once the opposite orientations of the same sign used in left-to-right and right-to-left writing.

I repeatedly argue that aspirates represent letter duplication for intensity or multiplicity. A typical example is presented here: the Ph of the Semitic Qoph is equivalent to the Greek PP of Qoppa, while the Phoenician Qōp corresponds to the Greek Q-opa.

One of the main arguments for the Phoenician (Semitic) provenance of the Greek alphabet is that the names of the letters mean something in Semitic languages but nothing in Greek (Peters 1901). The name qoph is usually suggested to mean sewing needle, specifically the eye of a needle (Hebrew קוף; /kuf/) or monkey (Hebrew קוף; /kof/; Aramaic קופא; /qopɑʔ/). In Arabic, they say qāf means nape, the back of a head and neck, or knot, but its meaning is doubtful (“Qoph” n.d.). The back of the human head and neck indeed looks like a Ϙ. In standard Arabic, the back of a head and neck is actually called qafan (قَفًا; root q-f-w). As a verb, it means going behind, following the track, persecuting, or attaching to the trail. In South Levantine Arabic, which is probably closer to the ancient Canaanite languages, qafan also means back, bottom, buttocks, ass, the back side, reverse side, or the wrong side of something. The Ottoman Turkish cognate kafa means head, mind, mentality, or intelligence, while its derivative kafali means headed, understanding. The Ancient Greek cognate κεφαλή (kefalē or kephalē) and its Modern Greek derivative, κεφάλι (kefali; kephali), mean head, bust. Greek is older than Hebrew, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish; if there were a common ancestor root, it might have been Qoppa, or Koppa, and the homonymous letter.

Monkeys are not native to the region of Canaan. It is unlikely that the Phoenicians ever saw a monkey and had a name for it to give to their letter. The Aramaic and Hebrew words for monkey may be borrowings from Sanskrit kapi (कपि; /kɐ.pi/), notably meaning ape, monkey, elephant, and other things. It is more likely that the various Semitic, Turkic, and Greek quasi-homophones of Qoppa are stems, rather than roots, of the name of the letter ϙ or 𐌘. Disparate objects were named after the letter because they had a ϙ or 𐌘 shape. A monkey's characteristic buttocks and tail, for example, look like 𐌘 while a needle is like ϙ.

Figure 20. The Egyptian hieroglyphs Gardiner-E32 (left), E33 (middle) and E36 (right).

Based on the Aramaic and Hebrew monkey connection, some say that the ultimate origin of the Phoenician Qōp glyph (𐌘), hence that of Greek Koppa (Ϙ) and Latin Q, is an Egyptian hieroglyphic depicting a monkey. Indeed, Gardiner-E32, E33, and E36 depicting monkeys or baboons have phonetic values ky, kȝ, and gf, respectively, all meaning monkey (Gardiner 1957). The former <ky>, is close to the English /ˈkjuː/, the latter, <gf>, close to the Semitic root q-f-w giving the Arabic qāf and, allegedly, the various names of Ϙ. However, there is no archeological evidence for an abstraction of any of those hieroglyphs (Fig. 20) towards the signs Ϙ or 𐌘 whatsoever, and it is difficult to mentally trace such evolutionary paths apart from identifying the Ϙ or 𐌘 forms monkeys’ buttocks and tail.

Others say that signs ϙ, 𐌘, and Q derive from the Egyptian hieroglyph Gardiner-V24 (𓎗) representing a cord wound on a stick with phonetic value wḏ (/wj/; compare English wedge), later wd (Gardiner 1957). Compare also the English wedge, in the sense of grafting, a golf club, a wedge-shaped heel, to force into a narrow space, or to tighten, secure, fasten using a wedge, and to wed, especially in the senses of obstinately attached, or to join or couple intimately, combine. This might explain why the Arabic qāf means a knot, among its other sememes, but the phonetic value of V24 has nothing to do with that of Koppa or Qoph letters (/k^w/). The intermediate form between V24 and the Phoenician Qōp (later Semitic Qoph) is thought to be the Proto-Sinaitic sign Qup, which looks like 8, with unknown phonetics (“Q” n.d.). But Qup is identical to Cretan CHIC 047 and Linear AB70 (ko; Fig. 4.4 and 5). The phonetic value of the syllabogram AB70 is precisely that of the clusters KO and QO in Koppa and Qoph, respectively. This suggests that all, Qup, Koppa, Qoph, and Linear B *70 stemmed from the Linear A sign SigLA AB70 and, ultimately, from the Cretan hieroglyphic CHIC 047.

Note that the Qup-like Cretan graphemes gradually evolved from figurative hieroglyphics depicting two tightly joined (circular or spheroid) objects, like shank buttons (Fig. 5) or jewelry rings (Fig. 4.4), to the nail or wedge-shaped Linear B syllabogram *70. It is possible that this graphical evolution was accompanied by a gradual semantic shift and that Linear B *70 (𐀒) depicted a sewing needle, pin, or nail (CHIC 062) for permanently joining (𐌘 > Ϙ) or a wedge for splitting objects (Ϙ > 𐌘 > ȹ > qp (qōp) > pp (Ϙoppa) >> Ph (Qoph) or B), before it was further abstracted to Koppa and Qoph graphemes. If such was the course of the semantic shift, then Cretan hieroglyphs of the CHIC 042, 051, 062, 063, or 064 families with unknown phonetic values, or the Egyptian analogs Gardiner-T1, T2, and T3 depicting maces, T7 and T7A depicting axes, or T8 and T8A depicting daggers, may be considered as candidate roots of Ϙ and 𐌘, although the comparison of the corresponding Egyptian phonetic values ḥḏ (/tʃ/; mace), ȝkḥw (axe), or b(ȝ)gsw (dagger) with the phonetic values of Ϙ and 𐌘 (k^w, ko, p^h, qu, etc.) is far from obvious.

However, mace, axe, and dagger are all tools for splitting objects into pieces. There are nearly 100 Greek cognates of kop, which could qualify as the progeny of Koppa inheriting the splitting sememe. Among the most frequent in the literature, the verb κόπτω (koptō) means to smite, slaughter an animal with an axe or mallet, cut off, chop off, cut down or fell trees, hammer, forge, later, stamp metal – i.e., coin money – pound, bray in a mortar, knock, dash about, munch, masticate, sharpen, tire out, weary; passive, to be worn out; of ships, to be shattered, disabled by the enemy. A simple noun derivative of koptō, κόπος (kopos) means striking, beating, toil and trouble, suffering, fatigue, work, or exertion. Also, κοπίς (kopis) is a chopper, cleaver, broad curved knife, κόπαιον (kopaion), a piece, κοπάς (kopas), pruned, lopped, κοπεύς (kopeys), one who brays or pounds, carpenter, one who cuts, κόπωσις (kopōsis), weariness, κοπία (kopia), rest from toil, κοπή (kopē), cutting in pieces, slaughter, breaking up, pounding in a mortar, dressing of stone, striking, minting, divorce (separation), and so on. The latter stem forms the term συγκοπή (sygkopē), cutting up into small pieces, cutting the metal into pieces for coinage, cutting a word short by striking out one or more letters, extreme conciseness, which has been proposed as an alternative name for the letter Sampi as mentioned above.

The meanings of smiting, impact, cutting, and partitioning remain in French coup, a rapid, successful action, stroke, hit, knock, bang, thrust, cut, blow, shock, small quantity, or beaucoup, large part or quantity, and couper, to cut, cut off, turn off, chop, break, intersect, disconnect, using a sharp tool. One may also consider the Albanian copë (piece, chunk) and the Germanic cognates: German, Low German, and Dutch kappen (to cut, cut off, chop, hew), Danish kappe (to cut, lop off, poll), Swedish kapa (to cut), Saterland Frisian kappe (to chop, lop off), German dialectal chapfen, kchapfen (to chop into small pieces), Scots chap, Middle English choppen or chappen, and the Modern English equivalent, chop, which are said to be of uncertain origin, possibly an onomatopoeia related to chip. Yet, the Greek kipp or kēp, from κιππαρός (kipparos) or κηπουρός (kēparos), keeper of a garden, gardener, are also related to cutting and trimming, but in a softer and more delicate mode with smaller volumes of the cut objects and cuttings. Compare the English verbs to cheap (chaffer, reduce the price) and to keep (maintain). In those syllables, in bold, the shape and length of the nuclear vowel (O, A, H, I, OU, EE, etc.) imply the form and volume or length of the cut object and its parts – i.e., O for spheroid, A, wide, H, EE, long, I, thin, narrow, U, hollow (kiki/bouba effect; see sections Towards a theory of iconic language and Pipe) – whereas the length of the coda (P, PP, PF, FF) relates the intensity or repetition of the action (see sections On the origin of words and Duplication).

The English equivalent of Ϙ is Q, pronounced /ˈkjuː/ and mostly named cue, but also kew, kue, or que. The spelling variation indicates that the word was introduced in English phonetically and that the letters used in writing do not matter if the sound is rendered correctly. This is an example of phonocentrism. A cue is a long, straight, tapering rod for striking the ball in cuesports like pools, billiards, snooker, etc. In terms of form, a billiard cue resembles a tail or a wedge, all being long tapering rods. In function, a cue is more like a wedge serving to strike and break up objects (the balls). Note that Ϙ describes a straight, rigid tapering object for striking, whereas Q is like an animal’s tail, a soft, flexible tapering object. A cue is also a signal, a sign, an action, or an event that is a signal for somebody to do something, the last words of a play actor's speech serving as an intimation for the next actor to speak; any word or words which serve to remind an actor to speak or to do something; a catchword. In the latter sense, a cue functions as a punctuation mark: it signals the end of a part of speech and the beginning of another. In a third sense, a cue is a series of virtually connected objects, typically people but also letters and other things, arranged one behind another, a line, a column, a row, or a string.

In any case, a cue relates to a long, thin, tapering form – rigid (straight) or flexible (curved) – that separates or splits a large object into smaller pieces for the organization of those pieces into a coherent functional whole. In other words, a Ϙoppa splits the material into discrete units to assemble into a composite object. For example, as a wedge, a cue splits massive stones to build a column or a wall. To measure quantities, we split materials into tones, kilograms, grams, etc. The text is separated into paragraphs, lines, columns, sentences, clauses, words, and letters (Greek grammata). Quality relates to how well materials are split and organized into a purchasable good. Signs of punctuation, like ‘;’ (Modern Greek question mark, identical to English semicolon), or ‘,’, ‘!’, ‘?’, /, \, -, _, ‘(‘, ‘)’, etc., are long, thin, frequently tapering, strait, or curved separators acting as signals for the organization of text (and speech) into strings, lines, columns, etc. Therefore, the punctuation meaning of Ϙoppa, as documented with Greek op-, ko-, Germanic wh-, and Latin qu-words above, is not different from the wedge’s form and function. They both convey the sememe of splitting for organizing.

Figure 21. Spinning cops compared with Linear B sign *70 and an Archaic Greek Koppa. Artwork by Pschemp. Creative Commons license.

There are several English words without cue but directly related to Ϙoppa. For example, coppice is an area of undergrowth and small trees, grown for periodic cutting, to trim or cut back young trees periodically to stimulate the growth of shoots; a cop (in spinning) is a conical ball of thread wound on a spindle (compare the shape of Linear B *70; Fig. 21); copper may have been named so because it is malleable (forgeable) or was mainly used for cutting coins; copulation is a grammatical or logical connection; and couple, a pair, from Latin copulo, to join, unite, connect. The word copy is thought to originate from Latin cōpia, meaning plenty, abundance, from *coopia, from co-, together + ops, wealth, riches. The obsolete copp- spellings coppy, or coppie, suggest that the co + ops (*coopia) hypothesis may be inaccurate and that copy may ultimately be related to Koppa. The Latin cōpia is no other than a direct transliteration of the Greek κοπία (kopia) because plenty and abundance imply rest from toil. When there is plenty and abundance, it is also time to cut, split, and separate into pieces for storing or distributing. More likely, cōpia meant pieces, from Greek kopaia, plural of kopaion (κόπαιον), a piece. Abundance meant that there were plenty of pieces (cōpia) to distribute. For the distribution of man-made goods and for the publication of texts, cōpia (the pieces) was reposed on reproduction. This is probably how copy (English singular backformation from plural cōpia) came to mean a single specimen (piece) of a publication.

The stem paion from kopaion (piece) is the independent word παῖον (paion), a derivative of the verb παίω (paiō), to strike, smite, drive, hit hard. The noun paion is glossed as  ἀσφαλές (asphales) or βέβαιον (bebaion), both meaning not liable to fall, immoveable, steadfast, firm, unfailing, trusty, assured from danger, safe, secure, fast, firm, steady, sure, constant. The sememes of trust, security, and assurance are also in the English piece as part of a whole in such a form that it can be separated from other parts, particularly in the sense of a coin. The sememes of firmness, fastness, steadiness, etc., are in the verb to piece as to assemble, make, enlarge, or repair by adding a piece or pieces, to patch. Therefore, kopaion combines the sememes of a wedge (ko) and a steadfast assembly by hitting hard.

One wedge or Koppa-like object for secure fastening and assembly of pieces is the nail. But objects may also be fastened with a rope or string. The English verb and noun wedge (/wɛdʒ/) appeared in the early 15th century with very few Germanic cognates and uncertain origin. The Middle Egyptian roots Gardiner-wḏ (/wdʒ/ or /uːdʒ/; Dickson-wD and wd) and wd (/wd/ or /uːd/; Dickson-wd) appear in three groups of words: (i) meaning written decree, precept, dispatch, stela (stele), inscription, inform, control, administer, hand over, pass on, assign, convey (to someone), command, control, govern, give orders; (ii) words meaning hard, hard stone, sandstone, firm, strong, enduring, permanent, effective, persistent, successful, to succeed, safe and sound, amulet, prosperous, prosper, strengthen, maintain, restore (buildings), make secure, provide, set right (a wrong), fulfill, keep safe, wind (rope around); or (iii) words meaning cut (cords), cut off (head), be parted (of lips of a wound), cut out (sandals), remove, discern, distinguish, separate, divorce, judge, divorce by judgment, wean, remain over of balance in calculations (Dickson 2006). We see that wḏ was used for writing on stone, like a chisel, for fixing, stabilizing, securing, or repairing things including health, like nails, needles, or strings, and for cutting or separating pieces, like knives, scissors, cutters, or, metaphorically, judgment. The English wedge seems, therefore, to be a direct loanword from Ancient Egyptian, whereas Koppa is a semantically related but graphically and phonetically independent construct.

The meanings of the Arabic qāf, nape, back of a head and neck, or a knot, are also related to splitting and organizing. The nape is the place where we split and organize our hair. Typically, we attach it using all sorts of attachment devices to form tresses or a ponytail (French queue de cheval, horsetail).

It is, therefore, not true that Koppa, or Qoph, means nothing in Greek but has meaning only in Semitic languages. The Greek meaning is subtle and abstract enough to be applicable in many disparate situations but perhaps too old to be remembered. It dates from Linear B *70 (ko) with a recognizable wedge shape. The idea of a wedge that splits is complementary to that of attachment of pieces – or pieces for attachment (button) – as conveyed by ancestral signs such as the Proto-Sinaitic Qup or Linear AB*70. The meanings of the Semitic Qoph – as presented by Modern scholars (eye of the needle, monkey, nape) – and of the European Q (cue) are mere vestiges, hardly making any coherent sense today and difficult to assemble into a convincing etymological story. They represent only a tiny subset of all possible Koppa applications initially meant. Phonocentrism and consequent phonetic spelling contribute to confusing and obliterating meanings, thus, accelerating detrimental semantic shifts. It is difficult to imagine that a word now written with a C (e.g., cue) was once written with a Ϙ, a wedge (Linear B ko) representing all modern labialized velar stops [ɡʷ, kʷ, kʷʰ], or joining signs such as Linear AB70 (ko) or CHIC 047 (button). It is just as challenging to assume that an F was once a double-P (PP > Ph > F). It is easier to call Grimm’s phonetic law that /f/ frequently derives form /p/ – though not all /p/ turns to /f/ – without really explaining how and why apart from refuging to random social habits and fashion (“Grimm’s Law” n.d.; Collitz 1926; Ray 2021).

Fig. 4.6 suggests that K may also have derived from a Cretan hieroglyphic representing a dispensing funnel (CHIC 057). A funnel is filled (A for filling) from a large orifice (P; mouth) and allows small quantities of the filling to escape from a narrow neck in a controlled manner (KAP = dispenser; K + filling; A + mouth; P). A chimney is an iconic object with a similar shape and function, allowing smock to escape. The Greek word for smock is καπνός (kapnos). Also, καπύω (kapyō) means to breathe forth, κάπτω (kaptō), to gulp down, κάπη (kapē), manger, a food dispenser, and κᾶπος (kapos) is the Doric version of κῆπος (kēpos) for garden, orchard, or plantation. This filling-mouth notion encoded in A and P, respectively, in the cluster AP is best evidenced in the word ἄππας (appas), glossed by Hesychius as τροφεύς (tropheys), one who brings up, foster-father, one who feeds, rearer, breeder, personal attendant, slave, nurse, one who gives free meals to the people; basically, the feeder, the regular feeder or the multiple-mouth (PP) feeder (compare English appetite). The Homeric verb ἀππέμψει (appempsei; later, ἀποπέμπω; apopempō) means to send off or away, dispatch, dismiss, get rid of, emit, discharge. The noun ἄππιρ (appir) is explained by Hesychius as ὕσπληξ (ysplēx), generally referring to automatic trap mechanisms, especially one using a loop of wire or string, a piece of wood made to rise or fall by this or similar means, a race-starting machine, any contrivance (compare apparatus). It would be the stopper in the context of a K-type liquid or grain dispenser with a stopper-controlled feeding orifice.

It, thus, turns out that the Greek name of the letter K, Kappa – for which no explanation exists in any dictionary – means K-appa, i.e., a regular feeder of K-form, like the object depicted by the Cretan hieroglyphs of the CHIC 057 family, a dropper funnel or tap funnel having a tap to allow the controlled release of liquid or grain material. The filling material is dispensed to the other side when the neck opens but concentrates in the upper, wide part (stock container) when the neck is closed. This reversal is expressed by inverting the stem kap into pak. Hence comes the verb πακτόω (paktoō), to fasten, close, stop up, caulk, and the noun πάκτωσις (paktōsis), fastening, putting together. In Romanian, apă means water. If apă is related to Greek stem appa, the original tap funnel (K-appa) would have been designed for water dispensing.

The English equivalent of kap, cap, appears as an independent word for a device to seal a bottle or protect the point of a pen, the lens of a camera, etc., a close-fitting hat, the top or uppermost part of something (hence, head, top of the mountain, etc.), the uppermost of any assemblage of parts, or an artificial upper limit. These sememes, and the notions of capacity, capital (stock), capsule, and captain, are likely related to the upper part of a K-appa funnel. By inversion, like kap gives pak in Greek, the English cap gives pac as in pack, to fasten things together, pack up (especially of a machine), stop functioning, break down, retire from an activity, contest, dismiss (a person) summarily, packet, pact, agreement, treaty, coming to terms, closing a contract, or capacity. Note that capacity has the two stems juxtaposed and relates closer to a tap funnel.

Figure 22. A K-appa funnel with two caps, one controlling alimentation, filling, input, and the other, distribution, emptying, or output. Both control the stock relative to the capacity of the funnel.

This kind of morphological and semantic symmetry denotes the on/off function of a cap. It is observed in many IE, and other words related to material accumulation and distribution through a K-appa funnel or metaphoric input/output – e.g., of light through a lens – controlled by caps (Fig. 22). Of course, phonetic and spelling distortions make the relation between those words difficult to recognize. Occasionally, one A is converted to U. U depicting a hollow cavity may be used to signify emptiness or emptying, in opposition to A which denotes filling. Most iconically, a cap is called kapak (from *kap-pak) in Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian and Bulgarian (капак), capac in Rumanian, and kapaki (καπάκι) in Greek. The Hungarian kupak, Italian cappuccino, and French capuchon convert one A to U. Phonetic theory would have difficulty explaining in those cases why one A is converted to U but not the other.

Less obvious but likely cognates formed on the same principle of symmetry are the Japanese kyappu, Russian колпачо́к (kolpačók, from *kolpaccok < *kolpaqok), Galician chapa (from *ccapa < *capac), and Arabic qubbaʿa or Hijazi Arabic gubbaʿa, qubbaʿa (from qappaʿa, with ʿ denoting void), kāb (from *qāb < *qaapp < *qappaʿ) or kāp (from *qāp < *qaap). By some interesting K/P (q|p) graphical inversion we get the English pack up (from *paqqup, inverted *qappuq as in cappuccino). Danish uses a different ichnographic symmetry, dop (d|p), to describe the function of a cap (*qap; q|p). These graphic representations of various cap-control devices are even harder to explain as purely phonetic phenomena.

Note also that K calls for the distribution or emptying of goods from the tap funnel at the beginning of a stem (e.g., kap, cap) but functions as a closed stopper for accumulation or concentration of goods when it is at the end (pak, pack). The stokes of K, | (stop) and < (start arrow), indicate the position and fate of the dispensable material in a dropper funnel with relation to the stopper: PA|< = mouth (P) + fill (A) + stop (K); |<AP = start (K) + fill (A) + mouth, orifice (P). The English digraph Ck nicely depicts a flow stopper as <|<. In PAK, the filling material lies before the stopper (not available for consumption), whereas in KAP, the valuable material is after the stopper, therefore, available to consumers.

From *paqqup (pack up) we have two separable stems. The first, paq, uses A to denote filling, content, and produces the English pack. The second, qup, uses U (Greek Y) to denote emptiness (empty), hollowness (hollow), cavity (cave), and produces cup. A cup is small vessel used to contain liquids, drinking vessel. According to OED, the Modern English term as well as its cognates: Old English cuppe, Old Northumbrian copp, Latin cupa (tub, cask, tun, barrel), Late Latin cuppa, Italian coppa, Spanish copa, Old French coupe, Sanskrit kupah (hollow, pit, cave) Greek κύπη (kypē; gap, hut, hole, a kind of ship), Old Church Slavonic kupu, Lithuanian kaupas (heap), Old Norse hufr (ship's hull), Old English hyf (beehive), are thought to derive from a non-IE loanword *kup- which was borrowed by and from many languages. Otherwise, the root was graphically engineered, perhaps independently, to describe an empty dropper funnel (K-YPPA; feeding device) as opposed to a full one (K-APPA). When spelled with one P, this refers to the single orifice of a cup. A double-P would refer to the repeated uses of the object. The final H of Greek κύπη (kypē) is the Attic equivalent of Doric A and denotes the closed pipe-like shape of the object (see section H). An archaic spelling using Ϙ (Ϙoppa; Koppa) would also be graphically pertinent, perhaps more so.

The third Cretan script is conventionally dated after 1450 BC but is probably the same script as Linear A, only grown in numbers and expanded to mainland Greece. Its corpus consists of about 70000 tokens from 6000 documents (Morpurgo-Davies and Olivier 2012). Today, it is universally established that Linear B records Greek in a syllabary fashion as deciphered by Ventris in 1953 (Ventris and Chadwick 1973). About 80 of the core deciphered signs of Linear B are identical to Linear A signs. But when their syllabic values are transposed to Linear A tablets, no text makes sense in any assayed languages, including Greek, Semitic, and Anatolian (Ventris 1952; Finkelberg 2000; Claus 2022).

Once we have drawn a button sign and have been using and abstracting it for a while, we may expand its semantics beyond clothing. We may use a button sign to suggest, for example, any attachment of parts or any object that passes through a tight hole. A typical tight hole that everybody on earth is aware of is the throat. Anything that has difficulty passing through the throat causes a cough (/käf/. Qoph (Phoenician Qōp; 𐤒) or Kaph is a laryngeal consonant of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew Qof‎ and Arabic Qāf. It is related phonetically, graphically, and historically to Archaic Greek Qoppa (Q) and Classical Kappa (K; /k/).

Crete appears, thus, to be an active linguistic workshop where various peoples borrowed hieroglyphic and Linear signs for their writing systems throughout the second millennium BC. The Cypriots, the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, and the Canaanites were probably the first to be served. But the effort to standardize linear writing started in Crete. About thirty signs used in Crete from the hieroglyphic period around 2000 BC were carried over to Linear A and were standardized as syllabograms in Linear B inscriptions (J.-P. Olivier 1986; Godart and Olivier 1996; Castleden 2002). Their number is typical of an alphabet.

Evans had already noticed and tabulated a core set of 13 Cretan hieroglyphic characters with identical or similar Linear A counterparts (Clodd 1900, p. 172). He had also noticed similarities between Cretan and Egyptian signs (Clodd 1900, p. 174) and some Phoenician characters, which he considered pictographic. Therefore, he deemed the Minoan signs intermediaries between the original Egyptian pictographs and the Phoenician letters. However, Evans did not propose phonetic or semantic values for any of those related signs. These comparisons led Evans to express a historically plausible alternative view that the Phoenician script did derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs (logograms), but through Crete, via a simplified linear script, i.e., Linear A (Evans 1900). Linear A inscriptions have been found in Egypt and Canaan (Oren et al. 1996; Finkelberg et al. 1996; Rendsburg 1998; Karnava 2004).

Flinders-Petrie proposed the broader view that non-hieroglyphic signs like the Phoenician glyphs existed in parallel with hieroglyphics all around the Mediterranean, including Egypt and the Aegean, long before the appearance of the standard Phoenician set (Clodd 1900; Petrie and Griffith 1901). Petri’s theory was not significantly different from Evans’ view of Cretan origin since the largest numbers of non-hieroglyphic signs were found in Crete. Glyphs identical to many Mediterranean script characters were found in the Neolithic Vinča-culture settlement of Turdaș (Romania) and elsewhere in the Balkans, dated from 5300-4300 BC (Lazarovici and Merlini 2005; Facorellis et al 2014). These are considered symbols of no linguistic relevance, i.e., graphic marks that stand for something else, not as conventional signs of a writing system (Fischer 2003). Older petroglyphs from the 7th millennium BC Armenia (Vahanyan and Vahanyan 2009) are also ignored when tracing the roots of linear scripts. Thus, Petri’s and Evans’ theories lost favor in the 20th century. Although there is an ongoing debate about what may be linguistic and what is not, there is no valid reason to discriminate Sinaitic or early Mesopotamian against Balkan, Chinese, or Armenian inscriptions of similar lengths (see section Old European scripts).

Based on archeological evidence, Phillips showed that there was indeed crosstalk between the Minoan and Egyptian cultures, but the influence went in the opposite direction (Phillips and SCIEM 2000 (Program) 2008). Minoan signs would be borrowed by the Egyptians rather than the other way around. A more thorough recent comparison of Cretan hieroglyphics, Linear A and Linear B signs is reported in the CHIC by Godard and Olivier (1996) and completed in Fig. 23. It counts 29 core signs used throughout the Minoan writing history. But there is still no published comparison considering earlier Armenian and Balkan signs.

Figure 23. Sings that were commonly used in three Cretan scripts: the hieroglyphic (H), Linear A (A), and Linear B (B). Adapted from Godart and Olivier, 1996. The circled signs were missing from Godart and Olivier’s table but are reported in the SigLA database as AB48 and A319 (Salgarella and Castellan 2021).

Looking only at single signs shared between contemporary scripts, it is difficult to establish in which direction they had traveled. Today, statistical methods measure the overall similarity between writing systems based on the number of signs they share, those they do not, and the degree of similarity between signs. Basically, the higher the proportion of characters shared between two scripts, the tighter the relation of the scripts and the closer their ‘phylogenetic’ distance. For the following analyses, I used a script comparison matrix (see section Script cross-tabulation, Table 2), where the signs are given two types of values for each script. Firstly, a sign takes the value 1 for a script if it exists in that script or zero if it does not. This coding (indicated by the prefix ‘Exists.’) tests questions about what signs the various scripts used, paying no attention to how those signs were precisely drawn. For example, N and И are considered the same; one derives from the other by a simple rotation. Secondly, in a coding prefixed ‘Similar.’, the signs are still given the value zero if they do not exist in a script, but the value 1 if some similar glyph is used, or 2 if an identical form exists in a script. Thus, N takes the value 1 for a script using И, but 2, for a script using the very same N.

I first compared the existence of signs in Linear A and B, Cretan hieroglyphics, Proto-Sinaitic, and the linear subset of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Ward hierarchical clustering. As expected, Linear A and B clustered closely due to their many shared signs. The other three scripts formed a separate cluster, with the Proto-Sinaitic script mapping much closer to the Egyptian than to Cretan hieroglyphics (Fig. 24). Since, we know, Linear A cannot have derived from Linear B. Still, the opposite is true, I omitted Linear B from further analyses.

Next, I tested the hypotheses that (i) Linear A or (ii) Proto-Sinaitic, derived from one or more of the older scripts, linear Egyptian, Cretan hieroglyphics, Armenian petroglyphs, or the Balkan script, allowing for influence from the other contemporary script. I used stepwise multiple regression of the similarity values (‘Similar.’) to select the scripts that contributed significantly to each test script, Linear A or Proto-Sinaitic. Linear A resulted as a mixture of Egyptian linear (variance proportion 7.8%; p-value = 1e-9), Armenian (1.7%; 3e-4), and Sinaitic signs (1%; 3e-2), entered in the model in this order of importance. The Proto-Sinaitic script was influenced, instead, by Balkan (8.5%; 2e-10), Linear A (2.4%; 5e-4), Armenian (1.6%; 5e-3), and Egyptian (0.8%; 4e-2).

Figure 24. Hierarchical clustering of linear Egyptian, Proto-Sinaitic, and Cretan scripts.

Therefore, some 10-15% of the signs of Linear A or Proto-Sinaitic derive from other scripts, the rest being local inventions. These numbers should only be taken as gross approximations since not all the available signs were considered here, and perhaps, more signs remain unearthed. The main message from this analysis is that scripts are mainly developed independently. However, we expect multiple influences and borrowing from foreign writing systems in a commercial and cultural exchange world.

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[1] Sampi in English Wikipedia; accessed 11 July 2021.

[2] San in Middle Liddell.

[3] Mountza in English Wikipedia; accessed 13 July 2021.

[4] stamp in OED; accessed 13 July 2021.

[5] στέμβω in LSJ.

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