Alphabetic writing – whereletters generally correspond to individual sounds in a language (phonemes), as opposed to having symbols for syllables or words – was likely invented once in human history. TheProto-Sinaitic script emerged during the 2nd millennium BC among a community of West Semitic laborers in theSinai Peninsula. Exposed to the idea of writing through the complex system ofEgyptian hieroglyphs, their script instead wrote their nativeWest Semitic languages. With the possible exception ofhangul in Korea, all later alphabets used throughout the world either descend directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script, or were directly inspired by it.[1][2] It has been conjectured that the community selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings todescribe the sounds, as opposed to thesemantic values of their own languages.[3][4] This script was partly influenced byhieratic, an older cursive script derived from hieroglyphs.[5][6][dubious –discuss] Mainly through thePhoenician alphabet that descended from Proto-Semitic, 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 termabjad coined for them in 1996, andtrue alphabets with letters for both consonants and vowels. In this narrower sense, the first true alphabet would be theGreek 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,[7] in turn derives from theEtruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.
Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the 4th millennium BC: Mesopotamiancuneiform andEgyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as pictograms denoting an object visually depicted by the hieroglyph (orlogograms representing extensions of the object), asphonograms denoting sounds, or as determinatives which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds.[8] Since vowels were mostly unwritten, thehieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet, orabjad. This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been an influence on the creation of the first alphabet.[9] All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been inspired by one of its descendants bystimulus diffusion, with the possible exception of theMeroitic alphabet, a 3rd-century BC adaptation of hieroglyphs inNubia to the south of Egypt. Therongorongo script ofEaster Island may also be an independently invented alphabet, but too little is known of it to be certain.[10]
TheProto-Sinaitic script was invented by a community of West Semitic laborers in theSinai Peninsula in the 2nd millennium BC, and was used to write the community's nativeWest Semitic languages. It has not been fully deciphered. The oldest examples are found asgraffiti in theWadi el-Hol and date toc. 1850 BC.[11] The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of thePhoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.
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".[12] For example, the hieroglyphper 'house' was used to write the sound[b] in Semitic, because[b] was the first sound in the Semitic wordbayt 'house'.[13] 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.[14] The first Canaanite states to make extensive use of the alphabet were thePhoenician 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: theAramaic alphabet and theGreek alphabet.[15]
Global distribution of the Arabic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called anabjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC, to become the official script of theAchaemenid Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
TheArabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via theNabataean alphabet of what is now southernJordan. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic script in the world (afterLatin) and the most used abjad system.[16]
Greek alphabet on ancientblack-figure pottery. There is adigamma but noksi oromega. The letterphi upright in the photograph is missing a stroke and looks like theomicron Ο, but on the other side of the bottom it is a full Φ.Etruscan writing, the beginning of the writing with theLatin alphabet
By the 8th century BC, the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language,[18] creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted byHerodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece byCadmus. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order.[18] However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, wherevowels played a much more important role.[19] 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 theacrophonic 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 (the acrophonic principle), 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 Greekalpha ando (later renamedomicron), and stood for the vowels/a/ and/o/ rather than the consonants/ʔ/ and/ʕ/. As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually createddigraphs and other modifications, such asei,ou, ando—which becameomega—or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in longa,i,u.[20]
Global distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the lettereta remained an/h/, gave rise to theOld Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the OldRoman 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 perhapsGeorgian.[21]
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 dozenDemotic hieroglyphs, was used to writeCoptic Egyptian. Then there isCree syllabics (anabugida), which is a fusion ofDevanagari andPitman shorthand developed by the missionaryJames Evans.[22]
Global distribution of the Latin alphabet. The dark green areas show the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
A tribe known as theLatins, who became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From theEtruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BC in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the 7th century. In adopting writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letterF, pronounced /w/, giving it the /f/ sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modernS. To represent theG sound in Greek and theK sound in Etruscan, thegamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the lettersG,J,U,W,Y, andZ, as well as some other differences.
C,K, andQ in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the/k/ and/ɡ/ sounds; the Romans soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, whereZ had been, to maintain thegematria (the numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries afterAlexander the Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the 3rd century BC, the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again to write these words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowedY andZ, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words.
TheAnglo-Saxons began writingOld English using the Latin alphabet following its introduction alongsideAugustine of Canterbury's mission to Christianise Britain in the 6th century. Because therunewen, which was first used to represent the /w/ sound 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 Vs,W was placed in the alphabet afterV.U developed when people began to use the roundedU when they meant the vowel U and the pointedV when the meant the consonantV.J began as a variation ofI, in which a long tail was added to the finalI when there were several in a row. People began to use theJ for the consonant and theI for the vowel by the 15th century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-17th century.
The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the 14th century BC in the town ofUgarit onSyria's northern coast.[23] 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 forHebrew,Greek andLatin, and a second order very similar to that used forGeʽez.[24]
It is not known how many letters theProto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, theUgaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, theSouth Arabian alphabets had 29, and thePhoenician alphabet 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, anABGDE order in Phoenician and anHMĦLQ 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 theSamaritan,Aramaic,Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets. However, they were largely abandoned inTifinagh, Latin andCyrillic. The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin,Armenian,Gothic, and Cyrillic, but was abandoned inBrahmi, runes, and Arabic, although a traditionalabjadi order remains or was re-introduced as an alternative in the latter.
The table shows Proto-Sinaitic and its descendants.
These 26 consonants account for the phonology ofNorthwest Semitic. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly reconstructed forProto-Semitic, the voiceless fricatives ś, ṣ́, and ṯ̣ are missing. The phonemesḏ, ṯ, ḫ, ġ disappeared in Canaanite, merging withz, š, ḥ, ʿ in Canaanite scripts, respectively. The six variant letters added in the Arabic alphabet include these (except forś, which survives as a separate phoneme inGeʽezሠ):
One modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is theMaldivian 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 thehangul alphabet used to writeKorean, which was created in 1443.
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 cuneiformUgaritic alphabet derives from a prototypical Semitic abjad, for example, although this appears to be the case. And whilemanual alphabets are a direct continuation of the local written alphabet (both theBritish two-handed and theFrench/American one-handed alphabets retain the forms of the Latin alphabet, as theIndian manual alphabet doesDevanagari, and theKorean does Hangul),Braille,semaphore,maritime signal flags, and theMorse codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and semaphore letters are not derived from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms ofshorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters.
^The Canaanites seem to have replaced the 𓄤 glyph with one resembling a spinning wheel (ṭayt) 𓊖.
^A| glyph for ś has been found in the Canaanite Lachish Comb inscription, though no such glyph has been found in Proto-Sinaitic, and its origin has not been discovered.
^Van De Mieroop, Marc (2022). "Vernaculars That Changed the World".Before and after Babel. Oxford University Press. pp. 149–C7.P48.ISBN978-0-19-763466-0.
^"Arabic Alphabet".Encyclopædia Britannica.Archived from the original on 26 April 2015. Retrieved2015-05-16.
^Daniels & Bright 1996, p. 27, "there are languages for which an alphabet isnot an ideal writing system. The Semitic abjads really do fit the structure of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic very well, [more] than an alphabet would ... since the spelling ensures that each root looks the same through its plethora of inflections and derivations.".
^Wilson-Wright, Aren Max (2016). "Sinai 357: A Northwest Semitic Votive Inscription to Teššob".Journal of the American Oriental Society.136 (2):247–263.doi:10.7817/jameroriesoci.136.2.247.ISSN0003-0279.
Drucker, Johanna (2022).Inventing the Alphabet. University of Chicago Press.ISBN978-0-226-81581-7.
Fischer, Steven Roger (2021) [2005].A history of writing (New ed.). London: Reaktion.ISBN978-1-78914-349-2.
Hoffman, Joel M. (2004).In the beginning: a short history of the Hebrew language. New York University Press.ISBN978-0-8147-3654-8.
Logan, Robert K. (2004) [1986].The alphabet effect: a media ecology understanding of the making of Western civilization. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.ISBN978-1-57273-522-4.
Naveh, Joseph (1997) [1982].Early history of the alphabet: an introduction to west Semitic epigraphy and palaeography (Reprint ed.). Jerusalem: Magnes.ISBN978-965-223-436-0.
Powell, Barry B. (1991).Homer and the origin of the Greek alphabet. Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-0-521-37157-5.
𐡀 'ālap̱
𐡁 bēṯ
gāmal
𐡃 dālaṯ
𐡄 hē
𐡅 waw
[28]
𐡆 zayn
𐡇 ḥēṯ
[a]
)
𐡈 ṭeṯ)
𐡉 yoḏ
𐡊 kāp̱
𐡋 lāmaḏ
𐡌 mim
𐡍 nun
𐡎 semkaṯ
𐡏 ʿayn
𐡐 pē
𐡑 ṣāḏē
𐡒 qop̱
𐡓 rēš
[30]
)
𐡔 šin
?[b][31]
𐡕 taw[citation needed]
