字母歷史

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字母歷史
青銅中期文化時期 前19-15世紀 迦南-腓尼基字母 前14世紀 古希伯來字母 前10世紀 亞蘭字母 前9世紀 波羅米文字 前6世紀 藏文字母 7世紀 高棉語文字/爪哇語文字 9世紀 希伯來字母 前3世紀 古敘利亞字母 前2世紀 Nabate字母 前2世紀 阿拉伯字母 4世紀 阿維斯塔字母 4至6世紀 希臘字母 前9世紀 埃特魯斯坎字母 前8世紀 拉丁字母 前7世紀 盧恩字母 2世紀 歐甘文字 4世紀 哥特字母 4世紀 亞美尼亞字母 405年 格拉哥里字母 862年 西里爾字母 10世紀 撒馬利亞字母 前6世紀 伊比利亞文字 前6世紀 南阿拉伯字母 前9世紀 吉茲字母 前5至6世紀
麥羅埃文 前3世紀
諺文 1444年
注音符號 1913年
原始迦南文系譜

字母歷史起源於古埃及。公元前27世紀，古埃及人就發展出一套含22個單音節的象形文字來表達他們語言的子音，而第23個則估計是用來表示字首和字尾的母音。這些字元是作用是作為意音文字的發音指標、標示文法的變調，及後來用作寫外來字和名字。儘管是以字母為基本，但這個系統並不是單單用來書寫的。第一種單純用作書寫的文字約於公元前20世紀，由埃及中部的閃米特人發明。經過五個世紀，這套字母向北傳開，而後來差不多每一種的字母都是從此承襲或啟發的。唯一可能的例外是梅羅字母，這是種公元前3世紀努比亞至埃及南部一帶的象形文字變形。

目录 1 閃米特字母 2 Descendants of the Semitic abjad 2.1 Letter names and sequence 3 文字線條獨立的字母 4 Alphabets in other media 5 參見 6 Further reading

[编辑] 閃米特字母

埃及的青銅中期文化到現在仍未被破譯，但最少一部分，甚至是全部的這些字元都是字母，可以追朔至公元前18世紀埃及中部的壁畫 [1]/[2]。這些閃米特字母並不限制於當時已經存在的埃及子音字母，而是吸收一定數量的其他埃及象形文字(有可能用了30個)，而且及予它們閃米特名字。例如象形文字per(埃及語"屋子")演變為bayt(閃米特語"屋子")。很難確定這些字元用來書寫閃米特語時是否字母，即字元只是用來表達子音而字的名稱是依截頭表音法，或者字元是否可以同時表示子音的次序或甚至好像這些字的始祖象形文字一樣表達單字。例如，字元"屋子"可以解作b(在beyt"屋子"中的b)，或者可以解作子音b和byt這個次序，因為在埃及語中這個字元可同時解作p和pr這個次序。然而，隨著時間這些字體被純字母的迦南語所繼承，而原本表示"屋子"象形文字則只是表示b。

[编辑] Descendants of the Semitic abjad

see also: Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic.

This Proto-Canaanite alphabet, like its Egyptian prototype, only represented consonants, a system called an abjad. From it can be traced nearly all the alphabets ever used, most of which descend from the younger Phoenician version of the script.

The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7^th century BCE as the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:

• The modern Hebrew alphabet started out as a local variant of Aramaic. (The original Hebrew alphabet has been retained by the Samaritans.)
• The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabatean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan.
• The Syriac alphabet used after the 3^rd century CE evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian, into the alphabets of northern Asia, such as Orkhon (probably), Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu.
• The Georgian alphabet is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family.
• The Aramaic alphabet is also the most likely ancestor of the Brahmic alphabets of India, which spread to Tibet, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia along with the Hindu and Buddhist religions. (China and Japan, while absorbing Buddhism, were already literate and retained their logographic and syllabic scripts.)

The Hangul alphabet was invented in Korea in the 15^th century CE. Tradition holds that it was an autonomous invention; however, recent research suggests that it may be based on half a dozen letters derived from Tibetan via the imperial Phagspa alphabet of the Yuan dynasty of China. Uniquely among the world's alphabets, the rest of the letters are derived from this core as a featural system.

Besides Aramaic, the Phoenician alphabet gave rise to the Berber and Greek alphabets. Whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Berber, or Semitic, their absence was problematic for Greek, which had a very different morphological structure. However, there was a simple solution. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented. However, several of them were rather soft and unpronounceable by the Greeks, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. By the acrophonic principle that was the basis of the system, the letters now stood for those vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or h, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and he became Greek alpha and e (later renamed e psilon), and stood for the vowels a and e rather than the consonants ʔ and h. As this fortunate development only provided for 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.

Greek is in turn the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an h, gave rise to the Old Italic and Roman alphabets. 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, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia, was also influenced by Korean hangul, which was either independent (the traditional view) or derived from the abugidas of South Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception by Greek. The Greek alphabet, itself ultimately a derivative of hieroglyphs through that first Semitic alphabet, later adopted an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs when it was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree Syllabics (an abugida), which appears to be a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand; the latter may be an independent invention, but likely has its ultimate origins in cursive Latin script.

[编辑] Letter names and sequence

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 was reduced to 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 descendents of these scripts.

The letter names proved stable among many descendents of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, they were abandoned in Arabic and Latin. 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 descendents.

nr.	Proto-Canaanite	IPA	value	Ugaritic	Phoenician	Hebrew	Arabic	other descendants
1	ʾalp "ox"	[ʔ]	1	𐎀 ʾalpa	ʾālep	א	ﺍ‎	Α A А ᚨ
2	bet "house"	[b]	2	𐎁 beta	bēt	ב	ﺏ‎	Β B В-Б ᛒ
3	gaml "throwstick"	[g]	3	𐎂 gamla	gīmel	ג	ﺝ‎	Γ C-G Г ᚲ
4	dalet "door" / digg "fish"	[d]	4	𐎄 delta	dālet	ד	ﺩ‎	Δ D Д
5	haw "window" / hll "jubilation"	[h]	5	𐎅 ho	hē	ה	هـ‎	Ε E Е-Є
6	wāw "hook"	[β]	6	𐎆 wo	wāw	ו	و‎	Ϝ-Υ F-V-Y У ᚢ
7	zen "weapon" / ziqq "manacle"	[z]	7	𐎇 zeta	zayin	ז	ز‎	Ζ Z З
8	ḥet "thread" / "fence"?	[ħ] / [x]	8	𐎈 ḥota	ḥēt	ח	ح‎	Η H И ᚺ
9	ṭēt "wheel"	[tˁ]	9	𐎉 ṭet	ṭēt	ט	ط‎	Θ Ѳ
10	yad "arm"	[j]	10	𐎊 yod	yōd	י	ي‎	Ι I ᛁ
11	kap "hand"	[k]	20	𐎋 kap	kap	כ	ك‎	Κ K К
12	lamd "goad"	[l]	30	𐎍 lamda	lāmed	ל	ل‎	Λ L Л ᛚ
13	mem "water"	[m]	40	𐎎 mem	mēm	מ	م‎	Μ M М
14	naḥš "snake" / nun "fish"	[n]	50	𐎐 nun	nun	נ	ن‎	Ν N Н
15	samek "support" / "fish" ?	[s]	60	𐎒 samka	sāmek	ס	-	Ξ
16	ʿen "eye"	[ʕ]	70	𐎓 ʿain	ʿayin	ע	ع‎	Ο O О
17	pu "mouth" / piʾt "corner"	[p]	80	𐎔 pu	pē	פ	ف‎	Π P П
18	ṣad "plant"	[sˁ]	90	𐎕 ṣade	ṣādē	צ	ص‎	Ϡ
19	qup "cord"?	[kˁ]	100	𐎖 qopa	qōph	ק	ق‎	Ϙ Q Ҁ
20	raʾs "head"	[r] / [ɾ]	200	𐎗 raša	rēš	ר	ر‎	Ρ R Р ᚱ
21	šin "tooth" / šimš "sun"	[ʃ]	300	𐎌 šin	šin	ש	س‎	Σ S Ш ᛊ
22	taw "mark"	[t]	400	𐎚 to	tāw	ת	ت‎	Τ T Т ᛏ

These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic. Of the reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonants, 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 account for these (except for ś，它在吉茲字母中保存下來成為ሰ): ḏ > ḏāl; ṯ > ṯāʼ; ṱ > ḍād; ġ > ġayn; ṣ́ > ẓāʼ; ḫ > ḫāʼ (but note that this reconstruction of 29 Proto-Semitic consonants is heavily informed by Arabic; see Proto-Semitic for details).

[编辑] 文字線條獨立的字母

僧伽羅語的文字線條是現代民族字母中唯一不能追朔回迦南字母的，但很明顯地它是以阿拉伯語(有可能和其他語言)為藍本；它的獨特之處在於它是從阿拉伯的數字中衍生出來的。1920年代為索馬里語而發明Osmanya字母和拉丁字母一度並列為索馬里的官方，直至1972年，而Osmanya字母的子音系統使之成為一個完全的突破。

在一些現今不為國家民族所用的字母中，有小部分的字母線條是十分獨立的。中華民國時期的注音符號是從漢字中演變出來，儘管發明者強調注音符號「只是符號，並不是字母」。日文假名亦是由漢字演變而來。印度東部的桑塔利字母從表面看來是基於傳統符號(例如"危險"和"集合處"中演化)與及一些造字者發明的。 (The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le "swelling" represents e, while en "thresh grain" represents n.)

在遠古時期歐甘文字包括記數符號，與及古波斯帝國的碑文銘刻本質上均是以楔形文字字母書寫，而這些文字看來都是隨意創作出來的。雖然這些系統都是文字線條獨立於世界上其他字母，它們卻是從這些字母演化出來的。

[编辑] 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 (both the British two-handed and the French/American one-handed alphabets retain the forms of the Latin alphabet, as the Indian manual alphabet does Devanagari, and the Korean does Hangul), 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. Modern shorthand also appears to be graphically unrelated. If it derives from the Latin alphabet, the connection has been lost to history.

[编辑] 參見

• Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic
• History of writing文字歷史
• List of inventors of writing systems文字系統發明者名單

[编辑] Further reading

• David Diringer, History of the Alphabet, 1977, ISBN 0905418123.
• Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (eds.), 1996. The World's Writing Systems, ISBN 0195079930.
• Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, 2004, ISBN 0814736548.