While the Phoenician alphabet was thus fertile in developing daughter alphabets in the West, the progress of writing was no less great in the East, first among the Semitic peoples, and through them among other peoples still more remote.
In the Phoenician alphabet a sibilant Zade (Tzaddi) stands between q and p. Hence Q is the nineteenth letter in the Phoenician alphabet, the eighteenth in the Greek numerical alphabet, which alone contains it, the sixteenth (owing to the omission of 8 and E) in the Latin, and (from the addition of J) the seventeenth in the English alphabet.
In the Phoenician alphabet it takes a form closely resembling the English W, and this when moved through an angle of 90 is the ordinary Greek sigma 2.
The resemblances between some Egyptian symbols and some symbols of the Phoenician alphabet are striking; in other cases the differences are no less remarkable.
Egyptologists are at variance on the question whether this alphabet was the original, or had any influence upon the development of the Phoenician alphabet.
