History of the alphabet


where letters generally correspond to individual sounds in a language, as opposed to having symbols for syllables or wordswas likely invented once in human history. Virtually all later alphabets used throughout the world either descend directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script, or were directly inspired by it.
It emerged during the 2nd millennium BC among a community of West Semitic laborers in the Sinai Peninsula. Exposed to the idea of writing through the complex system of Egyptian hieroglyphs used for the Egyptian language, their script instead wrote their native Canaanite language. It has been conjectured that the community selected a small number of the hieroglyphs commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own language. Mainly through the Phoenician alphabet that descended from this Proto-Sinaitic script, alphabetic writing spread throughout West and South Asia, North Africa, and Europe during the 1st millennium BC.
Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal alphabets, with the term abjad coined for them in 1996, and true alphabets with letters for both consonants and vowels. In this narrower sense, the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Many linguists are skeptical of the value of wholly separating the two categories. 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 4th millennium BC: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as pictograms denoting an object visually depicted by the hieroglyph, as phonograms denoting sounds, or as determinatives which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds. Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet, or abjad. This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been an 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 by stimulus diffusion, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd-century BC 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 was invented by a community of West Semitic laborers in the Sinai Peninsula in the 2nd millennium BC, and was used to write the community's native West Semitic languages. It has not been fully deciphered. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el-Hol and date to. The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.

Egyptian prototypeF1O1T14O31A28T3Z4O6F35D42D46
Phoenician
Acrophonyʾalp 'ox'bet 'house'gaml 'thrown hunting club'digg 'fish' or 'door'haw, hillul 'jubilation'waw 'hook'zen, ziqq 'handcuff'ḥet 'courtyard' or 'fence'ṭēt 'wheel'yad 'arm'kap 'hand'



Egyptian prototypeS39N35I10R11D4D21M22V24D1T9AZ9
Phoenician
Acrophonylamd 'goad'mem 'water'nun 'large fish' or 'snake'samek 'support' or 'pillar'ʿen 'eye'piʾt 'bend'ṣad 'plant'qup 'monkey' or 'cord of wool'raʾs 'head'šananuma 'bow'taw '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, the "acrophonic principle". For example, the hieroglyph per 'house' was used to write the sound in Semitic, because was the first sound in the Semitic word bayt 'house'. Little of this Proto-Canaanite script has survived, but existing evidence suggests it retained its pictographic nature for half a millennium until it was 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 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 8th century BC, to become the official script of the Assyrian Empire and Babylonian Empire and Achaemenid Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:

Greek alphabet

By the 8th century BC, 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 Cadmus. 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 were not 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; this is 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—which became omega—or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.
Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as the Cumae alphabet, 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, then to left-to-right writing.
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—which used both Greek and Roman letters—and perhaps Georgian.
Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, Georgian scripts derive from the Semitic family, but were also strongly influenced in their 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.