History of the alphabet

The history of the alphabet begins with the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BC. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately originate in this Semitic script. Its origins can be traced to the Proto-Sinaitic script that represented the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in ancient Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, it has been conjectured that they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and South Asia, mainly through Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet) and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early 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.
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 (or logograms representing extensions of the object), 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.
The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el-Hol and date to c. 1850 BC. The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician 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". For example, the hieroglyph per 'house' was used to write the sound [b] in Semitic, because [b] 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.
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 7th century BC, to become the official script of the Achaemenid Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
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 (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 Greek alpha and o (later renamed omicron), 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 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 (c. 400 BC) 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 /h/, 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 (an abugida), which is a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand developed by the missionary James Evans.
A tribe known as the Latins, who became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscans, 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 letter F, pronounced /w/, giving it the /f/ sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. To represent the G sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan, the gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters G, J, U, W, Y, and Z, as well as some other differences.
C, K, and Q 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, where Z had been, to maintain the gematria (the numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries after Alexander 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 borrowed Y and Z, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words.
The Anglo-Saxons began writing Old English using the Latin alphabet following its introduction alongside Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Christianise Britain in the 6th century. Because the rune wen, 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 after V. U developed when people began to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel U and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. J began as a variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I 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 of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. 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 for Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a second order very similar to that used for Geʽez.
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 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 the many descendants of Phoenician, including the Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets. However, they were largely abandoned in Tifinagh, Latin and Cyrillic. The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic, but was abandoned in Brahmi, runes, and Arabic, although a traditional abjadi 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 of Northwest Semitic. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, the voiceless fricatives ś, ṣ́, and ṯ̣ are missing. The phonemes ḏ, ṯ, ḫ, ġ disappeared in Canaanite, merging with z, š, ḥ, ʿ in Canaanite scripts, respectively. The six variant letters added in the Arabic alphabet include these (except for ś, which survives as a separate phoneme in Geʽez ሠ):
One 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. Another is the Korean Hangul, which was created independently in 1443. The Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, 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 bopomofo phonetic alphabet is graphically derived 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 early medieval Ireland, 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.
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 are not derived from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters.