Alphabet
An alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols, called letters, to more or less represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicographers. This system was used until the 5th century AD, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian hieroglyphs, which was later modified to create the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic.
Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets—which use letters to represent both consonants and vowels—from both abugidas and abjads, which only need letters for consonants. Abugidas represent them with diacritics added to letters, while abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether. In this narrower sense, the Greek alphabet was the first true alphabet; it was originally derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which was an abjad.
Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a useful tool in collation, as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly known as alphabetical order. This also means that letters may be used as a method of "numbering" ordered items. Some systems demonstrate acrophony, a phenomenon where letters have been given names distinct from their pronunciations. Systems with acrophony include Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac; systems without include the Latin alphabet.
Etymology
The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος ; it was made from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. The names for the Greek letters, in turn, came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet: aleph, the word for ox, and bet, the word for house.History
Alphabets related to Phoenician
Ancient Near Eastern alphabets
The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, which are glyphs that provide one sound. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. The script was used a fair amount in the 4th century AD. However, after pagan temples were closed down, it was forgotten in the 5th century until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. There was also cuneiform, primarily used to write several ancient languages, including Sumerian. The last known use of cuneiform was in 75 AD, after which the script fell out of use.In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently alphabetic system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula, apparently left by Canaanite workers. Orly Goldwasser has connected the illiterate turquoise miner graffiti theory to the origin of the alphabet. In 1999, American Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley. The script dated to and shows evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had developed about that time. The script was based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it probably was a syllabary—a script where syllables are represented with characters—with symbols that were not needed being removed. The best-attested Bronze Age alphabet is Ugaritic, invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This was an alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs, including three that indicate the following vowel. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit in 1178 BC.
The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called Proto-Canaanite, before. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the 10th century BC, two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet.
The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Geʽez script was descended. Abugidas are writing systems with characters comprising consonant–vowel sequences. Alphabets without obligatory vowels are called abjads, with examples being Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution due to the need of preserving sacred texts. "Weak" consonants are used to indicate vowels. These letters have a dual function since they can also be used as pure consonants.
The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited number of signs instead of using many different signs for words, in contrast to cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script, and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically.
The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. The Greek alphabet was the first in which vowels had independent letterforms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. The Linear B syllabary, used by Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC, had 87 symbols, including five vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, causing many different alphabets to evolve from it.
European alphabets
The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages, like the Etruscan alphabet. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It came to be used for the Romance languages that descended from Latin and most of the other languages of western and central Europe. Today, it is the most widely used script in the world.The Etruscan alphabet remained nearly unchanged for several hundred years. Only evolving once the Etruscan language changed itself. The letters used for non-existent phonemes were dropped. Afterwards, however, the alphabet went through many different changes. The final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters. Four of them are vowels——six fewer letters than the earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century AD. The Etruscan language itself was not used during the Roman Empire, but the script was used for religious texts.
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures, a combination of two letters make one, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and in Algonquian; borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and modified existing letters, such as the eth of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y, and w only in foreign words.
Another notable script is Elder Futhark, believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to other alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 AD to the late Middle Ages, being engraved on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions found on bone and wood occasionally appear. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet. The exception was for decorative use, where the runes remained in use until the 20th century.
The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular.
The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was created by a circle of their disciples in the Preslav Literary School including Naum of Preslav, Constantine of Preslav, Chernorizets Hrabar among others. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by Greek and Hebrew.