Phoenician Alphabet Translator

This Phoenician alphabet translator writes English names and words in the 22-letter script of ancient Phoenicia, right to left as the Phoenicians wrote. Choose authentic consonant-only spelling or add vowel letters to make names easier to read.

How to use the Phoenician alphabet translator

Type a name or short phrase in English letters.
Choose how to handle vowels. Phoenician wrote only consonants. “Consonants only” gives an authentic spelling. The other option writes vowels with the letters that later became Greek vowels (ʾalf for a, he for e, yod for i, ʿain for o, wau for u), which makes names easier to recognise.
Press Convert. The result reads from right to left, just as Phoenician did.
To read Phoenician, switch the direction and paste the letters. You get the standard Semitic transliteration.

How the conversion works

The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, all consonants. Readers supplied the vowels from context, as readers of Hebrew and Arabic still often do. The tool turns your text into sounds, then matches each sound to the closest letter:

sh and ch → 𐤔 (shin), ts and tz → 𐤑 (ṣade), th → 𐤈 (ṭet, the ancestor of Greek theta).
f and ph → 𐤐 (pe), since Phoenician had no f. v and w → 𐤅 (wau). j → 𐤉 (yod).
c → 𐤊 (kaf) for a hard c and 𐤎 (semk) for a soft c. x → 𐤊𐤎.
In “Consonants only” mode, vowels inside a word are dropped and a word that starts with a vowel gets 𐤀 (ʾalf), which is how Phoenician spelled an initial vowel sound.

Hannibal → h n b l → 𐤄 𐤍 𐤁 𐤋 → 𐤄𐤍𐤁𐤋 (read right to left)

The real Punic name was Ḥanniba ʿal, “grace of Baal”, which begins with ḥet (𐤇), not he. English “h” cannot tell you which of the two Phoenician h-sounds a name had, so the tool uses he. That is a good reminder that a converter can only spell sounds; it cannot recover the original spelling of a historical name.

Phoenician alphabet chart

Letter	Name	Sound	Became
𐤀	ʾalf	ʾ (glottal stop)	Greek Α, Latin A
𐤁	bet	b	Greek Β, Latin B
𐤂	gaml	g	Greek Γ, Latin C and G
𐤃	delt	d	Greek Δ, Latin D
𐤄	he	h	Greek Ε, Latin E
𐤅	wau	w	Greek Ϝ and Υ; Latin F, U, V, W, Y
𐤆	zai	z	Greek Ζ, Latin Z
𐤇	ḥet	ḥ (a throaty h)	Greek Η, Latin H
𐤈	ṭet	ṭ (emphatic t)	Greek Θ
𐤉	yod	y	Greek Ι, Latin I and J
𐤊	kaf	k	Greek Κ, Latin K
𐤋	lamd	l	Greek Λ, Latin L
𐤌	mem	m	Greek Μ, Latin M
𐤍	nun	n	Greek Ν, Latin N
𐤎	semk	s	Greek Ξ
𐤏	ʿain	ʿ (a throat sound)	Greek Ο, Latin O
𐤐	pe	p	Greek Π, Latin P
𐤑	ṣade	ṣ (emphatic s)	Greek San (Ϻ)
𐤒	qof	q	Greek Ϙ, Latin Q
𐤓	rosh	r	Greek Ρ, Latin R
𐤔	shin	š (sh)	Greek Σ, Latin S
𐤕	tau	t	Greek Τ, Latin T

Letter names follow the Unicode standard’s spellings. Many are ordinary words: bet is “house”, kaf is “palm of the hand”, mem is “water”, rosh is “head”. Unicode also has a word divider, 𐤟, which the tool can place between words.

Examples

Cities of Phoenicia

Tyre becomes 𐤕𐤉𐤓𐤄 with vowels shown. Byblos becomes 𐤁𐤉𐤁𐤋𐤏𐤎. Carthage, the Phoenician colony in North Africa, becomes 𐤊𐤀𐤓𐤈𐤀𐤂𐤄. Its own name was Qart-ḥadasht, “new city”, spelled 𐤒𐤓𐤕𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕 in Phoenician script.

Reading a real word

Paste 𐤌𐤋𐤒𐤓𐤕 into the reverse direction and you get mlqrt: Melqart, the chief god of Tyre. Supplying the vowels is the reader’s job, just as it was for the Phoenicians.

Why the Phoenician alphabet matters

Almost every alphabet used in Europe today descends from this one. Around the 8th century BC, Greeks borrowed it and turned the letters they did not need for consonants into vowels: ʾalf became alpha, he became epsilon, yod became iota and ʿain became omicron. The Etruscans and then the Romans took the Greek letters, giving us A, B, C. Other branches led to Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic script. The earliest long Phoenician inscription is the sarcophagus of King Ahiram of Byblos, usually dated to around 1000 BC. Our guide on the From Phoenician to Latin: How the Alphabet Spread traces the whole family tree, and you can see what the Greeks did with these letters in our Greek Alphabet Converter.

Frequently asked questions

Did the Phoenician alphabet have vowels?

No. All 22 letters were consonants. Greeks later reused some of them, such as ʾalf and he, as the vowels alpha and epsilon.

Which direction is Phoenician written?

Right to left. The tool shows the result that way. When you copy it, most apps keep the right-to-left order.

Is Phoenician the same as Hebrew?

They were closely related languages, and early Hebrew used a script almost identical to Phoenician. Modern Hebrew letters come from the later Aramaic script, a descendant of Phoenician.

Why do some letters look like Latin letters?

Because the Latin alphabet descends from Phoenician through Greek and Etruscan. Look at 𐤀 turned on its side and you can see an A.