Northeastern Iberian script

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Northeastern Iberian script Levantine
Barkeno, Iberian for Barcelona
Script type	Semisyllabary Some of the characters stand for letters, which are linguistic phonemes. Other characters stand for syllables, which are linguistic morphemes. The list of signs, either alphabetic or syllabic, is called a signary.[1]
Direction	Left-to-right
Languages	Iberian, Basque
Related scripts
Parent systems	Phoenician[2] Paleohispanic Northern paleohispanic Northeastern Iberian script
Child systems	Northeastern standard dual, extended dual, and non-dual Iberian signaries[3]
Sister systems	Celtiberian script

The northeastern Iberian script, also known as Levantine Iberian or Iberian, is a member of the epigraphic family of paleohispanic scripts located roughly in eastern Spain, concentrated in the northeast, and in Aquitaine of southern France. The term Levantine comes from an informal geographic designation, Levante, Spain, meaning generally the east of Spain, just as Levant means the east of the Mediterranean. The script is a type of writing, or graphemic representation, not a type of language. Linguistics does not apply except only incidentally.

A classification similar to that of a language family is used analogously for epigraphy, but the branches and stems are not languages. The same writing type might be used for more than one language, and the same language might be written in multiple writing types. This distinction appears in the modern concept of different fonts for the same text.

The name of the script reflects an earlier overuse of the term Iberian, which seemed to appear everywhere and have to do with everything on the Iberian Peninsula. In the areas of languages and scripts contradictory usages began to develop. Iberian at first meant having to do with the Iberian Peninsula. With this understanding linguists named the unknown language of northeastern Spain, inferred from a number of sources, Iberian. Some would equivocate that Iberia does include a small section of southern France on the east. The distribution of the script, however, settles the question. There is no way the country of Aquitaine north of the Pyrenees can ever be considered Iberia, and yet the script is there, minimally.

The two classic names for the peninsula are quite ancient, or pre-Roman (as the scholars say): Iberia and Hispania. The Greek sources liked Iberia, which, they asserted, was one country with one population, the Iberians. Whether they were inventing a population as a figure of speech to suit the geography or were just uninformed is a question for Greek geography.

The figure of speech is perhaps truer, as they also believed that Iberian derived from the Ebro River of northeastern Spain. The river began in the region of the Celtiberian script and flowed down through the country of the northeastern Iberian script to what the geographers called the inner sea along what vacation-minded moderns call the Azure Coast. Celtiberian is an ancient Greek name intended distinguish the Celtic-speaking population from the Iberian-speaking inhabitants of the lower river. The Romans, on the other hand, though admirers of Greek geography, preferred the native name they had encountered on occupation, Hispania, the source of Spain and Spanish.