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jng | 3 years ago

It is variant of the northwestern Iberian alphabet, a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet as you mentioned, and Iberian writing has been decoded for a while now (not the language itself). Iberian used to be written in one of three ways, northwestern and southeastern variants of the Phoenician derivative, and Greek alphabet sometimes.

I'm a native Basque speaker and the first word is obvious and makes all sense (still used these days to wish "happy birthday"), parts of the others have some resemblance to modern words, but it's far from obvious. Not surprising in 2000 years of the evolution of a minority, mostly-non-written language, with a ton of external influence.

(The variation of the alphabet brings over letter T from greek, which does not exist in Iberian as seemingly they didn't use the sound, while Basque uses the T sound.)

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