History of the alphabet

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The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing. The first pure alphabets emerged around 2000 BC in Egypt, as a representation developed by Semitic workers in Egypt of their own language (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), deriving the system from the partly alphabetic principles (besides syllabic and logographic values) of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one development, including the Phoenician alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and the Latin alphabet, or were directly or indirectly inspired by its design.

[edit] The beginnings in Egypt

By 2700 BC the ancient Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the individual consonants of their language, plus a 23^rd that seems to have represented word-initial or word-final vowels. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although alphabetic in nature, the system was not used for purely alphabetic writing. The first purely alphabetic script is thought to have been developed around 2000 BC for Semitic workers in central Egypt. Over the next five centuries it spread north, and all subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd century BC adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt.

[edit] The Semitic alphabet

The Middle Bronze Age scripts of Egypt have yet to be deciphered. However, they appear to be at least partially, and perhaps completely, alphabetic. The oldest examples are found as graffiti from central Egypt and date to around 1800 BC [1]/[2]. This Semitic script did not restrict itself to the existing Egyptian consonantal signs, but incorporated a number of other Egyptian hieroglyphs, for a total of perhaps thirty, and used Semitic names for them. So, for example, the hieroglyph per ("house" in Egyptian) became bayt ("house" in Semitic). It is unclear at this point whether these glyphs, when used to write the Semitic language, were purely alphabetic in nature, representing only the first consonant of their names according to the acrophonic principle, or whether they could also represent sequences of consonants or even words as their hieroglyphic ancestors had. For example, the "house" glyph may have stood only for b (b as in beyt "house"), or it may have stood for both the consonant b and the sequence byt, as it had stood for both p and the sequence pr in Egyptian. However, by the time the script was inherited by the Canaanites, it was purely alphabetic, and the hieroglyph originally representing "house" stood only for b.

[edit] Descendants of the Semitic abjad

Chart showing details of four alphabets' descent from Phoenician abjad, from left to right Latin, Greek, original Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic.

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 Phoenician, an early version of the Canaanite script.

The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC 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 3rd century AD 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 the Indian subcontinent, which spread to Tibet, Mongolia, Indochina, and the Malay archipelago 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 15th century. Tradition holds that it was an autonomous invention; however, Gari Ledyard suggests that portions of its consonantal system 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 consonants are derived from this core as a featural system.

Besides Aramaic, the Phoenician alphabet gave rise to the Greek and Berber 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.

[edit] 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 descendants of these scripts.

The letter names proved stable among many descendants 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 descendants.

nr.	Proto-Canaanite	IPA	value	Ugaritic	Phoenician	Hebrew	Arabic	other descendants
1	ʼalp "ox"	/ʔ/	1	𐎀 ʼalpa	ʼālep	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	ʻen "eye"	/ʕ/	70	𐎓 ʻain	ʻayin	ע‎	ع‎	Ο O О
17	pu "mouth" / piʼt "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	raʼs "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, which survives as a separate phoneme in Ge'ez 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).

[edit] Graphically independent alphabets

The only 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. The Osmanya alphabet devised for Somali in the 1920s was co-official in Somalia with the Latin alphabet until 1972, 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 derives 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. (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.)

In the ancient world, 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. However, while all of these systems may have been graphically independent of the other alphabets of the world, they were devised from their example.

[edit] 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.

[edit] External Links

• Animated examples of how the English alphabet evolved

[edit] See also

• Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic
• History of writing
• List of inventors of writing systems
• List of languages by first written accounts
• History of the Latin alphabet
• History of the Arabic alphabet

[edit] Further reading

• David Diringer, History of the Alphabet, 1977, ISBN 0-905418-12-3.
• Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (eds.), 1996. The World's Writing Systems, ISBN 0-19-507993-0.
• Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, 2004, ISBN 0-8147-3654-8.