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The history of the alphabet starts in Ancient Egypt . By 2700 BCE the Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 Hieroglyphs to represent the individual Consonant s of their language, plus a 23rd that seems to have represented word-initial or word-final Vowel s. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for Logogram s, 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 BCE 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 BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt. The Semitic alphabet The , 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 Canaanite s, it was purely alphabetic, and the hieroglyph originally representing "house" stood only for ''b''. 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 7th Century BCE as the official script of the Persian Empire , appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
The Hangul alphabet was invented in Korea in the 15th 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 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 Vowel s. 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 Digraph s 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 , 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. 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 Alphabet s 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. These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic . Of the reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonants, seven are missing: the interdental fricatives , the voiceless lateral fricatives , the voiced uvular fricative , and the distinction between uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives , in Canaanite merged in . The six variant letters added in the Arabic Alphabet account for these (except for , which survives as a separate phoneme in Ge'ez ): > ; > ; > ; > ; > ; > (but note that this reconstruction of 29 Proto-Semitic consonants is heavily informed by Arabic; see Proto-Semitic for details). 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 aren't used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet derives from Chinese Character s. 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. 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 Alphabet s 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 Code s 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. See also
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