Origin and Development of the Paleohispanic scripts: The Orthography and Phonology of the Southwestern alphabet

The first attested indigenous writing system in the Iberian Peninsula is the so-called “Southwestern script”. I argue that this system is of Phoenician inspiration and simultaneously offer an explicative model for its development as an alphabet, later on also the source of the Iberian semi-syllabary. This account, made primarily from a linguistic standpoint, ultimately intends to disclose orthographic rules of the script and phonological features of its underlying language.