Vertical and horizontal tribars in Eastern Numidian inscriptions

Abstract

In the ancient inscriptions written in the eastern form of Libyco-Berber (hence: Eastern Numidian), one letter has given rise to much discussion. This letter is written by means of three parallel lines, and is, as a consequence, known as the tribar. In this article, first the main proposals as to its phonetic interpretation will be presented. In the second part, a recent cautious suggestion by Irma Mora Aguiar is studied, according to which horizontally arranged tribars have a different phonetic interpretation than vertically arranged tribars, at least in part of the corpus. On the basis of an analysis of the lexicon and the distribution over sub-corpora, it is shown that this is hard to maintain. Some interesting tendencies as to the lexical distribution of the two arrangements are found, pointing to similarities in otherwise arbitrary orthographic practices all over the corpus.