It’s not much different in approach from an English children’s alphabet - A is for Apple, B is for Ball, C is for Cat…
With the addition that B is a picture of a ball and so on, and also why does the Apple come before the Ball?
Well, finally a clear idea about the rationale. Thanks, Kimstu!
[tangent]
This makes me wonder whether or not Punic was mutually intelligible with contemporaneous eastern-Mediterranean Hebrew? Or if there was noted divergence even then (Carthage did last a while, after all).
More tangent: is written Punic at all accessible to modern Hebrew readers (given any necessary transliteration)?
[/tangent]
I’d like to know these things too. Good question.
I don’t know about “modern Hebrew readers” - how comfortable are they with say Biblical Hebrew? - but the Wikipedia snippets of 5th-century Phoenician and 1st century BC “Late Punic” seem definitely still pretty close to Hebrew to me. It’s the later AD Punic that would raise intelligibility questions. I am not familiar with it therefore cannot comment.
And of course, mutual intelligibility is a squishy criterion to begin with.