Katakana and Cypriot

From Louis Godart’s The Phaistos Disc: The Enigma of an Aegean Script (1994, tr. Alexandra Doumas):

Whoever studies the history of writing, ancient or modern, should be mindful of one basic methodological principle: a comparison between the signs encountered in different scripts should always be treated with skepticism and subjected to severe criticism. There are plenty of examples of signs that are graphically the same, and indeed have the same phonetic value, in scripts that have absolutely nothing in common. A case in point are the nine signs in the classical Cypriot syllabic script, in use on Cyprus until the fourth century BC, and modern Japanese. The signs YE [sic], VE [sic], RO, SE, TO, KO, RU, ME, and PE are written in exactly the same way in both, without anyone ever even imagining an affinity between the script of ancient Cyprus and the kana script of Japan.

These days both katakana and the Cypriot syllabary are encoded in Unicode, so it’s convenient to present the following table of glyphs that (according to their Unicode character names) represent the “same” phonetic values:

Cypriot Kana Value
𐠀 A
𐠊 KA
𐠔 MA
𐠙 NA
𐠞 PA
𐠣 RA
𐠨 SA
𐠭 TA
𐠲 WA
𐠼 ZA
𐠁 E
𐠋 KE
𐠕 ME
𐠚 NE
𐠟 PE (cf. katakana ヘ, “HE”)
𐠤 RE
𐠩 SE
𐠮 TE
𐠳 WE (cf. katakana エ, “E”)
𐠂 I
𐠌 KI
𐠖 MI
𐠛 NI
𐠠 PI
𐠥 RI
𐠪 SI
𐠯 TI
𐠴 WI
𐠃 O
𐠍 KO
𐠗 MO
𐠜 NO
𐠡 PO
𐠦 RO
𐠫 SO
𐠰 TO
𐠵 WO
𐠿 ZO
𐠄 U
𐠎 KU
𐠘 MU
𐠝 NU
𐠢 PU
𐠧 RU
𐠬 SU
𐠱 TU

See also a nice diagram of a few of these on page 11 of Francesco Soldani’s doctoral thesis “Interconnessione grafica tra i vari sillabari egei e loro leggibilità” (University of Milan, 2013).

Posted 2026-06-12