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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 alphabet emerged around 2000 BC to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age Alphabets ), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian Hieroglyph s. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek and Latin alphabets, or were inspired by its design. Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", ''Archaeology'' 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21. PRE-ALPHABETIC SCRIPTS Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the and Egyptian Hieroglyphs . Both were well known in the part of the Middle East that produced the first widely used alphabet, the Phoenician . There are signs that cuneiform was developing alphabetic properties in some of the languages it was adapted for, as was seen again later in the Old Persian Cuneiform Script , but it now appears these developments were a sideline and not ancestral to the alphabet. The Beginnings in Egypt By 2700 BC the Ancient 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. That is, while capable of being used as an alphabet, it was in fact always used with a strong logographic component, presumably due to strong cultural attachment to the complex Egyptian script. 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 - though even here many scholars suspect the influence of that first alphabet. 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 {Link without Title} / {Link without Title} . Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", ''Archaeology'' 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21. These inscriptions, according to Gordon J. Hamilton, help to show that the most likely place for the alphabet’s invention was in Egypt proper. Hamilton, Gordon J. "W. F. Albright and Early Alphabetic Writing", ''Near Eastern Archaeology'' 65, No. 1 (Mar., 2002): 35-42. page 39-49. 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.Hooker, J. T., C. B. F. Walker, W. V. Davies, John Chadwick, John F. Healey, B. F. Cook, and Larissa Bonfante, (1990). ''Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet''. Berkeley: University of California Press. pages 211-213. So, for example, the hieroglyph '', 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 Canaan ites, it was purely alphabetic, and the hieroglyph originally representing "house" stood only for ''b''.Hooker, J. T., C. B. F. Walker, W. V. Davies, John Chadwick, John F. Healey, B. F. Cook, and Larissa Bonfante, (1990). ''Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet'', Berkeley: University of California Press. page 212. The first Canaanite state to make extensive use of the alphabet was and the Greek Alphabet . {Link without Title} Descendants of the Aramaic abjad , Greek , original Phoenician, Hebrew , Arabic .]] See Also: Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic 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 as the official script of the Persian Empire , appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
TRANSMISSION OF THE ALPHABET TO GREECE See Also: History of the Greek alphabet By at least the 8th century BC the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language.McCarter, P. Kyle. "The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet", ''The Biblical Archaeologist'' 37, No. 3 (Sep., 1974): 54-68. page 62. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. McCarter, P. Kyle. "The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet", ''The Biblical Archaeologist'' 37, No. 3 (Sep., 1974): 54-68. page 62. However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where Vowel s played a much more important role. The Greeks adapted those Phoenician letters for consonants they couldn't pronounce to write vowels. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented, something called the Acrophonic Principle . However, several Phoenician consonants were rather soft and unpronounceable by the Greeks, 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, in Greek these letters now stood for 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 and rather than the consonants and . As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) 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''. Robinson, Andrew, (1995). ''The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms'', New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd. page 170. Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek Or Chalcidian , was west of Athens and in southern Italy . The other variation, known as Eastern Greek , was used in present-day Turkey , and the Athenians, and eventually the rest of the world that spoke Greek, adopted this variation. 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. {Link without Title} DESCENDANTS OF THE GREEK ALPHABET 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 .Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1995. BBC. "The Development of the Western Alphabet." 8 April 2004; cited 1 May 2007 . Available from http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890. 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. Development of the Roman Alphabet A tribe known as the Latins , who became known as 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 fifth century. In adopted 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. {Link without Title} C , K , and Q in the Romans’ alphabet could all be used to write the k sound, and C could also be used to write the sound 'g.' The Romans invented the letter G and inserted it into the alphabet between F and H for an unknown reason. Over the few centuries after Alexander The Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the Third Century BC , the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again in order 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. {Link without Title} The Anglo-Saxon Language began to be written using Roman letters after Britain was invaded by the Normans in the Eleventh Century . Because the Runic ''wen'', which was first used to represent the sound 'w' and 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 v's, W was placed in the alphabet by 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 fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century. {Link without Title} LETTER NAMES AND SEQUENCE OF SOME ALPHABETS The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BC, in a place called , Greek , and Latin , and a second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian . Millard, A.R. "The Infancy of the Alphabet", ''World Archaeology'' 17, No. 3, Early Writing Systems (Feb., 1986): 390-398. page 395. 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 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. 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 are not 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. REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
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