Although Iberian script and Latin alphabet phonetic equivalents are more or less known, studied by Gómez Moreno from bilingual coins, in the 21st century the Iberian language is still shrouded in mystery, refusing to be deciphered, and even today no one knows what its affiliation is. Some people link it to the Basque language, others prefer more remote origins and say that the Iberians came from the Caucasus. In fact, however, archeology has shown that there is a continuum of the population from the Bronze Age and that the Iberians are the indigenous inhabitants of the Catalan Countries.
The decipherment of the script, by Gómez Moreno on the 20's, is still considered valid for the Northeastern or Levantine Iberian writing, but presents serious doubts for the Meridional or Tartessian varieties.
There are still many uncertainties, not so much for knowing the approximate equivalence of each sign, as for how the sign really sounded. We have an approximate idea as far as the inventory of sounds, but we don't know what was the opposition between phonetic characters of the same group:
Let's see the script decoding according to Gómez Moreno and Javier Velaza:
Gómez Moreno |
Javier Velaza |
The current study methodology is based on the original texts transliteration into the Latin alphabet, which leads to multiple errors because they are not languages from the same root and there is no biunivocal correspondence.
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