Phoenician basic words

Question

Do you know webiste with phoenician/punic how look in that dead leanguage basic words like "hi/hello/good morning/goodbye" ? Ofcourse i am very welcome if this will be only hipothetic or a little fiction but with historic possibility ( "create" that word comparing with hebrew and old arabic )

Answer 1

Having worked on a Punic-derived conlang I've done a fair bit of digging myself. All the websites I could find offering Phoenician wordlists were either very incomplete or inaccurate.

The standard reference (although some of the entries do require a little pinch of salt, notably his entry for pny "Phoenician" relies on his own idiosyncratic reading of a verse from Psalms which is in Hebrew and universally understood in a completely different sense) here is the Phoenician-Punic Dictionary by Charles R. Krahmalkov, 2000, published by Peeters & the Department of Oriental Studies Leuven, which is sadly out of print. Krahmalkov has also published a Phoenician-Punic Grammar in 2001 with Brill which is likewise a standard reference work.

For lexicons, a Comparative Semitic Lexicon of the Phoenician and Punic Languages by Richard S Tomback, 1978 published by the Society of Biblical Literature is also fairly good.

These books are all for sale online (albeit possibly only second hand), although they are not cheap. It is likely also possible to acquire digital copies through less legitimate means.

It's worth noting that neither book vocalises its lemmas. This is because Phoenician and Punic (when written in their native script) were rarely written with matres lectionis, leaving the vowels almost entirely unmarked. Some patterns can be reconstructed based on comparison with Hebrew (a very close relative of Phoenician) and careful reading of Greek & Latin transcriptions and loanwords (as well as late Punic inscriptions, which start using matres lectionis very freely, before Neo-Punic starts being written entirely in Latin characters). As such, whilst reasonable guesses can be made for most words, they are not generally directly attested in vocalised form.

Lastly, regarding more phrasebook-like works (which seems to be what you're mostly interested in) I don't believe any exists. To your specific question as to greetings, I can find the following in the mentioned lexicons:

• Hauo "may you live" is also used as a greeting in a Punic passage in the Latin play Poenulus by Plautus (note that this is a 2nd person masculine singular jussive, the precise form would be different if used to greet multiple people, or a feminine person or group). This appears to have been the usual greeting in Punic and is probably the source of the Latin greeting ave.

• The same verb written ḥwʾ appears in funerary inscriptions, often corresponding to "farewell" in bilingual ones, although it is here likely a past tense form "he lived".

• Šlm is also attested as an epistolary greeting in Punic, and is widely used as a greeting across the Semitic languages.