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You're right, they do show the leg glyph in the sidebar, but then in the text they write: "The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨ Leg glyph ⟩, but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨ Bet ⟩ probably adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ Per ⟩ meaning "house"." It doesn't seem from this that they are claiming that B comes from the leg glyph. so it's very strange they put it in the side-bar, if it's etymologically unrelated. Also, if you look at the Aleph article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph, they have a sub-section with some Hieroglyphs that are pronounced as aleph, without mentioning any historical connection, which seems very strange. The rest of the article talks about letters that are historically related, so why bring up the vulture glyph? In the article for a they don't show the vulture though, only the ox. I think part of the reason people say things like this is that they are so strongly inclined to see writing systems as alphabets, so they just have to find "the letter b in Egyptian", even though that makes no sense at all. Egyptian didn't have a letter b, they had a number of glyphs that represented 1, 2 or 3 consonants. Btw I'm sure the professor knows his Egyptology, so the preceding wasn't referring to him, but maybe he didn't study the origin of the Semitic writing systems. That's not really Egyptology. |