History of the alphabet


The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Semitic language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Mainly through Phoenician, Hebrew and later Aramaic, three closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and South Asia.
Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called "abjads" since 1996, and "true alphabets" in the narrow sense, the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while the symbols in a pure abjad stand only for consonants. In this sense, then the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, but not all scholars and linguists think this is enough to strip away the original meaning of an alphabet to one with both vowels and consonants. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.

Predecessors

Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms that represent a word denoting an object pictorially depicted by the hieroglyph; more commonly as phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives. Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet. This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been a significant influence on the creation of the first alphabet. All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been inspired by one of its descendants, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd-century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt. The Rongorongo script of Easter Island may also be an independently invented alphabet, but too little is known of it to be certain.

Consonantal alphabets

Semitic alphabet

The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el Hol and date to perhaps 1850 BCE. The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.
Possible Egyptian prototypeF1O1T14O31A28T3Z4O6F35D42D46
Phoenician
Possible
acrophony		ʾalp oxbet housegaml thrown hunting clubdigg fish, doorhaw, hillul jubilationwaw hookzen, ziqq handcuffḥet courtyard/fenceṭēt wheelyad armkap hand

Possible Egyptian prototypeS39N35I10R11D4D21M22V24D1T9AZ9
Phoenician
Possible
acrophony		lamd goadmem waternun large fish/snakesamek support/pillarʿen eyepiʾt bendṣad plantqup monkey/cord of woolraʾs headšananuma bowtaw signature

This Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph. So, for example, the hieroglyph per was used to write the sound in Semitic, because was the first sound in the Semitic word for "house", bayt. The script was used only sporadically, and retained its pictographic nature, for half a millennium, until adopted for governmental use in Canaan. The first Canaanite states to make extensive use of the alphabet were the Phoenician city-states and so later stages of the Canaanite script are called Phoenician. The Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a vast trade network and soon the Phoenician alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean. Two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of writing: the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet.

Descendants of the Aramaic abjad

The graph to the left of this literature contains incorrect translations from Latin to the Arabic lettering. It is recommended to get additional translation material for comparison. for example the Latin E in Arabic would have the equivalent of different alphabet.
The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE, to become the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:

Greek alphabet

;Adoption
vessel. There is a digamma but no ksi or omega. The letter phi is missing a stroke and looks like the omicron Ο, but on the underside of the bowl it is a full Φ.
.
By at least the 8th century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more important role. The Greeks used for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which weren't used in Greek speech. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented, something called the acrophonic principle.
However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter, in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and `ayin became Greek alpha and o, and stood for the vowels and rather than the consonants and. As this fortunate development only provided for five or six of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraphs and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o, or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.
Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek or Chalcidian, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor. The Athenians adopted that latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon to left-to-right writing.
;Descendants
Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an, gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic, and perhaps Georgian.
Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia, was also influenced by Korean hangul, which was either independent or derived from the abugidas of South Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception by Greek. A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics, which is a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand developed by the missionary James Evans.

Latin alphabet

A tribe known as the Latins, who became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BCE in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the seventh century. In adopting writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter F, pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. To represent the G sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan, the Gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters G, J, U, W, Y, and Z, as well as some other differences.
C, K, and Q in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the and sounds; the Romans soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, where Z had been, to maintain the gematria. Over the few centuries after Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the third century BCE, the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again in order to write these words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed Y and Z, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words.
The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic wen, which was first used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the time looked like a v, the double u looked like two v's, W was placed in the alphabet by V. U developed when people began to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. J began as a variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century.
and uncial, which derive from Roman cursive and Greek uncial, and Visigothic, Merovingian and Beneventan. The Carolingian script was the basis for blackletter and humanist. What is commonly called "gothic writing" is technically called blackletter and is completely unrelated to Visigothic script.
The letter j is i with a :wikt:flourish|flourish; u and v were the same letter in early scripts and were used depending on their position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts; w is a ligature of vv; in insular the rune wynn is used as a w, ʻféʼ as an abbreviation for cattle/goods and maðr.
The letters y and z were very rarely used; þ was written identically to y, so y was dotted to avoid confusion; the dot was adopted for i only after late-Caroline ; in Benevetan script the macron abbreviation featured a dot above.
Lost variants such as r rotunda, ligatures and scribal abbreviation marks are omitted; long s is shown when no terminal s is present.
Humanist script was the basis for Venetian types which have changed little to this day, such as Times New Roman

Letter names and order

The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BCE in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order. There are two orders found, one of which is nearly identical to the order used for Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian.
It is not known how many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, an ABGDE order in Phoenician and an HMĦLQ order in the south; Ugaritic preserved both orders. Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of these scripts.
The letter names proved stable among the many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, they were largely abandoned in Tifinagh, Latin and Cyrillic. The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic, but was abandoned in Brahmi, Runic, and Arabic, although a traditional abjadi order remains or was re-introduced as an alternative in the latter.
The table is a schematic of the Phoenician alphabet and its descendants.
nr.ReconstructionIPAvalueUgariticPhoenicianHebrewArabicGreekLatinCyrillicRunic
1ʾalpu "ox"1? ʾālep ʾālef ʾalifΑ alphaAА azŭᚨ *ansuz
2baytu "house"2? bēt bēṯ bāʾΒ bētaBВ vĕdĕ, Б bukyᛒ *berkanan
3gamlu "throwstick"3? gīmel gīmel jīmΓ gammaC, GГ glagoliᚲ *kaunan
4daltu "door" / diggu "fish", 4? dālet dāleṯ dāl, ḏālΔ deltaDД dobro
5haw "window" / hallu "jubilation"5? hē hē hāʾΕ epsilonEЕ ye, Є estĭ
6wāwu "hook" or 6? wāw vāv wāwϜ digamma, Υ upsilonF, U, V, W, YѸ / Ꙋ ukŭ → Уᚢ *ûruz / *ûran
7zaynu "weapon" / ziqqu "manacle"7? zayin zayin zayn or zāyΖ zētaZꙀ / З zemlya
8ḥaytu "thread" / "fence"?, 8? ḥēt ḥēṯ ḥāʾ, ḫāʾΗ ētaHИ ižeᚺ *haglaz
9ṭaytu "wheel", 9? ṭēt ṭēṯ ṭāʾ, ẓāʾΘ thētaѲ fita
10yadu "arm"10? yōd yōḏ yāʾΙ iotaI, JІ ižeiᛁ *isaz
11kapu "hand"20? kap kāf kāfΚ kappaKК kako
12lamdu "goad"30? lāmed lāmeḏ lāmΛ lambdaLЛ lyudiyeᛚ *laguz / *laukaz
13mayim "waters"40? mēm mēm mīmΜ muMМ myslite
14naḥšu "snake" / nunu "fish"50? nun nun nūnΝ nuNН našĭ
15samku "support" / "fish" ?60? sāmek sāmeḵΞ ksi, Ѯ ksi,
16ʿaynu "eye", 70? ʿayin ʿayin ʿayn, ġaynΟ omikronOО onŭ
17pu "mouth" / piʾtu "corner"80? pē pē fāʾΠ piPП pokoi
18ṣadu "plant", 90? ṣādē ṣāḏi ṣād, ḍādϺ san, Ц tsi, Ч črvĭ
19qupu "Copper"? or 100? qōp qōf qāfϘ koppaQҀ koppa
20raʾsu "head" or 200? rēš rēš rāʾΡ rhoRР rĭtsiᚱ *raidô
21šinnu "tooth" / šimš "sun", 300? šin šin/śin sīn, šīnΣ sigma, ϛ stigmaSС slovo, Ш ša, Щ šta, Ꙃ / Ѕ dzĕloᛊ *sowilô
22tawu "mark", 400? tāw tāv tāʾ, ṯāʾΤ tauTТ tvrdoᛏ *tîwaz

These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, seven are missing: the interdental fricatives ḏ, ṯ, ṱ, the voiceless lateral fricatives ś, ṣ́, the voiced uvular fricative ġ, and the distinction between uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives ḫ, ḥ, in Canaanite merged in ḥet. The six variant letters added in the Arabic alphabet include these :
ḏ → ḏāl;
ṯ → ṯāʾ;
ṱ → ḍād;
ġ → ġayn;
ṣ́ → ẓāʾ;
ḫ → ḫāʾ

Graphically independent alphabets

One modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps other existing alphabets, it derives its letter forms from numerals. Another is the Korean Hangul, which was created independently in 1443. The Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, and the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations.
Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet and Japanese Kana both derive from Chinese characters. The Santali alphabet of eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as "danger" and "meeting place", as well as pictographs invented by its creator.
In early medieval Ireland, Ogham consisted of tally marks, and the monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem to have been created for the occasion.

Alphabets in other media

Changes to a new writing medium sometimes caused a break in graphical form, or make the relationship difficult to trace. It is not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet derives from a prototypical Semitic abjad, for example, although this appears to be the case. And while manual alphabets are a direct continuation of the local written alphabet, Braille, semaphore, maritime signal flags, and the Morse codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and semaphore letters, for example, are derived from the alphabetic order of the Latin alphabet, but not from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters.