reading,” itself calqued from Arabic or Hebrew) reduced somewhat the ambiguity of the originally purely consonantal Phoenician way of spelling. This practice entailed the use of the consonantal signs for h, w, and y in a second function, using them to spell the long vowels a, u, o, i, and e (normally marked with a bar in scientific transcription: ā, etc.), at first only at the end of a word, but to an increasing degree also within a word. This was presumably an invention of the Arameans, as this