The Phoenician range was introduced with version 5.0.0 of the Unicode Standard, and is located in Plane 1 (the Supplementary Multilingual Plane), which requires the enabling of surrogates in Windows 2000; these characters cannot easily be displayed in earlier versions of Windows.
The Phoenician script was used for the Phoenician language, in the region then known as Canaan, Phoenicia or Put. Phoenician is a Semitic language, related to Hebrew and Aramaic. The Phoenician alphabet is consonantal, with no symbols for vowel sounds. It was normally written horizontally from right to left, but a few texts were written with consecutive lines in alternate directions.
The characters that appear in the “Character” columns of the following table depend on the browser that you are using, the fonts installed on your computer, and the browser options you have chosen that determine the fonts used to display particular character sets, encodings or languages.
You can find some or all of the characters in this range in the Windows Unicode fonts Aegean, ALPHABETUM Unicode, Code2001 and MPH 2B Damase.
To see exactly which characters are included in a particular font, you can use a utility such as Andrew West’s BabelMap, or WunderMoosen’s FontChecker.
If you are not familiar with the characters, you can check the characters displayed here with the graphical display at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10900.pdf.
| Character (decimal) | Decimal | Character (hex) | Hex | Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 𐤀 | 67840 | 𐤀 | 10900 | PHOENICIAN LETTER ALF |
| 𐤁 | 67841 | 𐤁 | 10901 | PHOENICIAN LETTER BET |
| 𐤂 | 67842 | 𐤂 | 10902 | PHOENICIAN LETTER GAML |
| 𐤃 | 67843 | 𐤃 | 10903 | PHOENICIAN LETTER DELT |
| 𐤄 | 67844 | 𐤄 | 10904 | PHOENICIAN LETTER HE |
| 𐤅 | 67845 | 𐤅 | 10905 | PHOENICIAN LETTER WAU |
| 𐤆 | 67846 | 𐤆 | 10906 | PHOENICIAN LETTER ZAI |
| 𐤇 | 67847 | 𐤇 | 10907 | PHOENICIAN LETTER HET |
| 𐤈 | 67848 | 𐤈 | 10908 | PHOENICIAN LETTER TET |
| 𐤉 | 67849 | 𐤉 | 10909 | PHOENICIAN LETTER YOD |
| 𐤊 | 67850 | 𐤊 | 1090A | PHOENICIAN LETTER KAF |
| 𐤋 | 67851 | 𐤋 | 1090B | PHOENICIAN LETTER LAMD |
| 𐤌 | 67852 | 𐤌 | 1090C | PHOENICIAN LETTER MEM |
| 𐤍 | 67853 | 𐤍 | 1090D | PHOENICIAN LETTER NUN |
| 𐤎 | 67854 | 𐤎 | 1090E | PHOENICIAN LETTER SEMK |
| 𐤏 | 67855 | 𐤏 | 1090F | PHOENICIAN LETTER AIN |
| 𐤐 | 67856 | 𐤐 | 10910 | PHOENICIAN LETTER PE |
| 𐤑 | 67857 | 𐤑 | 10911 | PHOENICIAN LETTER SADE |
| 𐤒 | 67858 | 𐤒 | 10912 | PHOENICIAN LETTER QOF |
| 𐤓 | 67859 | 𐤓 | 10913 | PHOENICIAN LETTER ROSH |
| 𐤔 | 67860 | 𐤔 | 10914 | PHOENICIAN LETTER SHIN |
| 𐤕 | 67861 | 𐤕 | 10915 | PHOENICIAN LETTER TAU |
| 𐤖 | 67862 | 𐤖 | 10916 | PHOENICIAN NUMBER ONE |
| 𐤗 | 67863 | 𐤗 | 10917 | PHOENICIAN NUMBER TEN |
| 𐤘 | 67864 | 𐤘 | 10918 | PHOENICIAN NUMBER TWENTY |
| 𐤙 | 67865 | 𐤙 | 10919 | PHOENICIAN NUMBER ONE HUNDRED |
| 𐤟 | 67871 | 𐤟 | 1091F | PHOENICIAN WORD SEPARATOR |
Copyright © 2006–2008 Alan Wood
The hexadecimal numbers and the character names in the above table are taken from the Unicode 5.0.0 Character Database, Copyright © 1991–2006 Unicode, Inc., as contained in UnicodeData.txt on the Unicode Web site (http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) in July 2006.
Created 25th July 2006 Last updated 24th April 2008
Send comments or questions to Alan Wood