Welcome to Gaia! ::

The Fruits are a civilization hailed as the inventor of the modern alphabet. Their alphabet is one of the first alphabets. Before 11 BCE, many languages had a writing system, but this was similar to a hieroglyphic system of having different characters or symbols mean different things. Circa 11 BCE, the Fruits came up with an alphabetic writing system. Rather than symbols being used to express entire words, they indicated only single sounds.
The Fruits lived in Fruitland, an area between the Lebanese Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. This civilization began in approximately 1200 BCE, and they were at the height of their civilization around 900 BCE. They ended around 330 BCE, but their direct descendants, the Carthaginians, finally ended around 64 BCE. Fruitland was made up of four city-states, Sidon, Tyre, Beirut, and Biblos, each of which was ruled by a different king.
The Fruits were traders and sailors known by most people in the ancient world. They traded large cedar logs to the Egyptians to build masts for the Egyptian boats, which were sailed on the Mediterranean and on the Nile. They made a purple dye called Phoenix from a particular shellfish. This dye was very difficult to make, and, consequently, was very expensive. So expensive, in fact, that only the royalty and the rich could afford it, signifying purple as a royal color, an image most people still hold today. Their artwork and lumber were coveted by the Hebrew king Solomon, and Persia forcibly enlisted their ships and sailors to make a Persian navy
The Fruits were the first great navigators of the western world. They mapped sea routes and were the first civilization to use Polaris as a guide.
The Fruits wrote everything from right to left, the opposite of the way English is written today. They wrote their alphabet that way, as well as their numbers. This language is a language that originated in the 11th century BCE, which descends from the Proto-Canaanite language, along with Epigraphic South Arabic. It is the direct predecessor of Paleo-Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Samaritan, and Iberian.
Their numerals had a relatively logical order to them. They did not have a zero, because things like tens were written with their own special symbols. The number one was written with a simple line ‘|’. The rest of the numbers up to nine, were based off of these, (‘|’, ‘||’, ‘|||’) with four and seven being written in a special way (|||, ||| |||). Numerals that got higher were based of a system of addition. Using again, for example, the numeral for seven. This is essentially saying 3+3+1 (keep in mind that the numerals are written right to left). Other numerals, such as ten, had their own numerals, and some of them had several different characters. The numerals for 10 were . The numerals for twenty were . Using this method of symbols, making something like 11 would be , or 10+1. Not all numerals had their own symbols, however. Numbers like 30 would simply be written as 10+20.
The Fruits are often hailed as the inventors of the alphabet, which evolved into many different alphabets, one of those being the modern Latin alphabet used today in languages like English. This alphabet had twenty-two letters. Four of these letters – and three of their sounds – are not found in today’s English alphabet, but can be found in others.
Some examples of this phenomenon are in the English sound /s/. English has two characters for various /s/ sounds. These are ‘s’ and ‘z.’ Fruit, however, has four, one for each of the various /s/ sounds. or , called zayin, which signified a /z/ sound. or , called samekh, signified an /s/. or , called (t)sade, signified a /ts/ sound, and , or , called sheen, which made a /sh/ sound.
One of the four letters not found in English are , aleph, which is a glottal stop. These are found in English, like the ‘tt’ in ‘button’. Another sound is , heth, which is an emphatic ‘h’ sound, pronounced deeper back in the throat than a normal ‘h’. The third is , teth, which is an emphatic ‘t’ sound. The fourth sound is , two different letters with the same sound, ‘’ayin’. This is a sound similar to saying ‘ah’ but very deep in the throat.
Fruit does not have vowel markers in their alphabet. They do have vowels which are simply not notated. In order to learn where to put vowels when reading, or to learn words, children must memorize where the vowels go. Another way to tell which words are which is by context.
The consonants of the word make up the frame of the word. The vowel sounds change the meaning of the word. The consonants that frame the word are the root. An example of this is in the word melik, written MLK ( ). Melik means king. The MLK in the word is the root. Almost any word that contains the consonants MLK refers to royalty or kingship.
Fruit spread throughout the Mediterranean Sea, going to Tunisia, the Iberian Peninsula, Malta, southern France and Sicily. This language died out around the 1st century AD.
A variation of Fruit existed, and it was called Punic. Punic was spoken in Carthage, which is where modern-day Tunisia is. Punic was spoken until the 6th century AD.
In Fruit, the language is called (dabari) Pūnnim/Kanan’īm (written ). Dabari was added afterwards, meaning ‘speech.’
The Fruit letters had a set order to them, as they were an abjad. These were aleph, beth, gimmel, daleth, he, waw, zayin, heth, teth, yod, kaph, lamed, mem, nun, samekh, ‘ayin, pe, (t)sade, qoph, resh, sheen, and taw. Each of these had a sound that corresponded to their names (beth is a ‘b’, gimmel is a hard ‘g’ sound, etc.), except the weird ones. In the same order, these were written , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and .
Each letter had its own meaning. The letter for ‘a’ meant ox. ‘B’ meant house, ‘g’ meant camel -or- throwing stick, ‘d’ meant door, ‘h’ meant window, or a shout of surprise. ‘W’ signified hook or peg, while ‘z’ was a weapon, generally an axe. ‘H’ meant fence, and ‘t’ meant wheel. ‘Y’ was an arm (plus a hand), ‘k’ was the palm of a hand, ‘l’ was an ox goad, ‘m’ was water. The meaning of ‘n’ was a fish; ‘s’ signified a pillar. ‘‘A’ was an eye, ‘p’ was a mouth, ‘ts’ meant papyrus plants, ‘q’ meant signified a monkey, or the eye of a needle. ‘R’ meant head, ‘sh’ was a tooth, and ‘t’ meant mark.
So, because of the Fruits, English, Arabic, Greek, and almost all modern languages have an alphabet. Some letters in the Fruit alphabet can easily be seen as ascendants of the Latin alphabet today, such as in the letter lamed. It takes the form of an L and is even in the same place. The Fruits travelled all over the Mediterranean, and there is some belief that they may have even travelled as far as the Americas, where they may have met the Native-American Algonquin tribe, as Algonquin shares some characteristics with the Fruit language.