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2023-03-01 19:50 dustin  
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after all the fascinating and partly quite exstensive letter histories, ^ also likes the simplicity of the next letter "t" for a change: two lines crossing each other - that's what it is and that's what it has always been!  
  
history of the letter "t":  
  
| the semitic workers in old egypt probably invented this letter on their own for their proto-sinaitic script. it was just a cross which could either look like a "+" or like an "x" - both forms were equivalent. see the two ΠΠΠ shapes below the start. So it seems that „t“ is probably not based on a hieroglyph! the semitic spoke the letter [t] (as in "titanium wall") and the sound never changed in the following alphabets.  
  
| the phoenicians adopted the letter without any changes, it could still be written both ways. their letter was called "taw" (phoenician for "mark", which was probably the meaning of the cross), and it was the 22nd (and last!) letter of their alphabet.  
  
| the ancient greeks adopted the "+"-shape version of the letter and called it "tau". very soon, the horizontal line moved upwards, so that "tau" already looked like our familiar "t".  
  
| no changes by the etruscians and romans.  
  
for puzzle fans (a biiiig puzzle!)  
as mentioned above, "taw" was the final letter of the phoenician alphabet. So here's the complete phoenician alphabet (22 letters) with corresponding latin letters a-t as revealed so far in this series:  
  
1. aleph - a  
2. bet - b  
3. gimel - c,g  
4. daleth - d  
5. he - e  
6. waw - f  
7. (name of this letter not revealed yet in the series)  
8. heth - h  
9. thet  
10. yodh - i,j  
11. kaph - k  
12. lamedh - l  
13. mem - m  
14. nun - n  
15. samekh  
16. 'ayn - o  
17. pe - p  
18. san  
19. qoph - q  
20. resh - r  
21. shin - s  
22. taw - t  
  
but of course, we do have six more latin letters to go! So don't these six remaining letters have a phoenician origin? yes, they do! They're just no longer in the phoenician order because they were added at the end of either the ancient greek or the latin alphabet. so here's the puzzle question:  
  
for each of the six remaining letters u, v, w, x, y and z, what phoenician letter does it correspond to?  
  
actually, i already gave a lot of hints spread over all the previous caves of the series! for some letters, i already wrote the answer more or less directly, for others, you can at least make strong guesses based on the informations.   
  
Of course, as for earlier puzzles, you could just find the answers somewhere on the internet, but the idea of this puzzle is to use only the informations given in this series so far!  
  
Solutions, of course, will come one by one in the following caves! Or maybe, one of the following caves will give more than one answer at a time... (that was definitely the last hint for the puzzle!) :d  
  
cave difficulty: 4/10

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2023-03-01 20:42 dustin  
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small correction:  
18th phoenician letter was called "sade", not "san".  
and btw, i might not have written every phoenician letter entirely consistenly within this series (i don't even know if one officially correct name transcription exists). these small differences in writing have absolutely nothing to do with the puzzle! :)

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2023-03-02 22:19 dustin  
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i'll wait at least until monday with the next cave, not to spoiler puzzlers. if anyone wants more time, please write it! :)

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2023-03-20 22:37 dustin  
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soooo... here comes the solution "for puzzle fans"!  
  
as we've seen in the following caves, phoenician "waw" is the root of u, v, w and y, phoenician "samekh" has (perhaps) become latin x and phoenician "zayin" is the origin of z. so here's the complete list of the phoenician-latin connections:  
  
1. aleph - a  
2. bet - b  
3. gimel - c,g  
4. daleth - d  
5. he - e  
6. waw - f, u, v, w, y  
7. zayin - z  
8. heth - h  
9. thet  
10. yodh - i,j  
11. kaph - k  
12. lamedh - l  
13. mem - m  
14. nun - n  
15. samekh - x (?)  
16. 'ayn - o  
17. pe - p  
18. sade  
19. qoph - q  
20. resh - r  
21. shin - s  
22. taw - t  
  
and here's how i thought it was possible to solve the puzzle only based on the information you had until this cave here:  
  
| in the cave "f for hook/club", it became clear that "f" was created out of the greek "ypsilon", so it was obvious to assume that "y" and "f" have the same phoenician root, namely "waw".  
  
| in the same cave, i gave strong hints that there might be even more latin letters related to "f" and "y". as in the greek alphabet, the "t" is directly followed by the "y", a strong guess could be made that greek "y" is related to latin u, v and w because they also come after the t. so u, v and w also have the phoenician root "waw".  
  
| in the cave "g is c's sister", i wrote that latin g replaced z in seventh position in the alphabet, which made it logical to assume that the root of z is also the seventh phoenician letter.  
  
| finally, in caves "o for eye" and "s for tooth", i mentioned that phoenician "samekh" became greek "xi", so the logical guess would be that this one went on to become latin x (although, as we've seen in "x for unknown", that connection is not certain.)  
  
that was of course not an easy puzzle, and congrat if anyone solved the whole puzzle before the "u/v/w" cave came out! :d