Nun — 𐤍

Before N, there was Nun.

Nun is the fourteenth of the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet. In this consonantal writing system, it represents the sound /n/.

Its early history raises an interesting distinction: the traditional name of the letter and the proposed graphic prototype do not necessarily refer to the same thing.

The name Nun is traditionally associated with the fish. Yet one influential reconstruction of the Proto-Sinaitic signs connects the graphic ancestor of the letter with Egyptian hieroglyphs representing snakes.

Nun therefore reminds us that the name of a letter should not automatically be treated as a description of the image from which its sign developed.

Its later history is much clearer. Nun — 𐤍 became the Greek Nu — Ν, and eventually contributed directly to the Latin N.

Between snake and fish

The earliest alphabets used signs whose shapes often derived from objects in the visible world.

With Nun, however, identifying that original image requires some caution.

In her study of the Proto-Sinaitic corpus, Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser connects the sign representing /n/ with Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting snakes, forms that were common in inscriptions from Sinai. These signs had different values in Egyptian, but may have been reinterpreted by Semitic-speaking users to represent the sound /n/.

At the same time, the traditional name of the letter is Nun, commonly associated with the fish.

The two should not be confused.

It would therefore be too categorical to describe Nun simply as the stylisation of a fish.

The name Nun is associated with the fish, while an influential reconstruction of its pictographic ancestor points instead to the snake.

What is much better established is its alphabetic function: Nun — 𐤍 occupies the fourteenth position of the Phoenician alphabet and represents the consonant /n/.

By this stage, the sign had become an alphabetic character, and its phonetic function is far more secure than the precise history of the image behind it.