Alphabet

• 1. Introduction

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  An alphabet is a set of symbols, called letters, that more or less stand for the particular sounds of a spoken language. Those letters largely correspond to phonemes, the smallest sound segments that can tell one word apart from another. This sounds simple, almost obvious. It was not. For most of human writing, symbols stood for syllables, or for whole words and ideas, never for the bare sounds underneath. So where did the idea of a letter come from, and why does it matter that the Greeks added vowels nobody else had bothered with? Why does the Korean letter for P look like a widened mouth, and why, after more than three thousand years, do we still recite A, B, C, D in an order borrowed from a script for ancient traders? The answers run from a turquoise mine in the Sinai to a king in fifteenth-century Korea.

• 2. Egyptian Roots

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  The earliest letters were not their own writing system. They were an aid to Egyptian hieroglyphs, a set of some 24 signs that lexicographers call uniliterals, each providing a single sound. These glyphs guided the pronunciation of logograms, wrote grammatical inflections, and later transcribed loan words and foreign names. What made them new was the move itself. They added pronunciation hints to hieroglyphs that had previously carried no information about how a word sounded. The script saw a fair amount of use into the 4th century AD. After pagan temples were closed, it slipped out of memory in the 5th century, forgotten until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. It shared the era with cuneiform, the wedge writing used for languages including Sumerian, whose last known use came in 75 AD. From this Egyptian habit of marking sound, a fully alphabetic idea would soon emerge in the desert mines to the east.

• 3. The Sinai Miners

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  In the Egyptian turquoise mines of the Sinai Peninsula, around 1840 BC, an apparently alphabetic system appeared, apparently left by Canaanite workers. This is the Proto-Sinaitic script. Orly Goldwasser has tied the origin of the alphabet to the graffiti of these illiterate miners. In 1999, the American Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell found an even earlier version at the Wadi el-Hol valley. The Wadi el-Hol script dates to around 1800 BC, and it shows signs of having been adapted from particular Egyptian hieroglyphs that can be dated to about 2000 BC. That suggests the first alphabet had taken shape around then, built on the appearances and names of hieroglyphs. It had no characters for vowels, and it probably began as a syllabary, with unneeded symbols stripped away. The best-attested Bronze Age alphabet, Ugaritic, was a different experiment, an alphabetic cuneiform of 30 signs invented at Ugarit before the 15th century BC. Three of those signs marked the following vowel, and the script vanished when Ugarit was destroyed in 1178 BC.

• 4. The Phoenician Breakthrough

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  Before about 1050 BC, the Proto-Sinaitic script had developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called Proto-Canaanite. The oldest Phoenician text is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram, around 1000 BC. Phoenician is considered the first true alphabet and the parent script of all western alphabets. Its great advantage was simplicity. Where cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B used many signs, Phoenician held only about two dozen distinct letters, few enough for traders to learn. Because it recorded words phonemically, it could write different languages, and the Phoenicians spread it across the Mediterranean. By the 10th century BC two other forms had separated out, Canaanite and Aramaic, and the Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet. A sister script, the South Arabian alphabet, became the ancestor of the Geʽez script. Yet Phoenician left one thing unwritten. Like Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac, it was an abjad, a system that leaves most vowels out. Filling that gap fell to the Greeks.

• 5. The Vowel Revolution

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  The Greek alphabet was the first in which vowels had their own letterforms, separate from the consonants. To make them, the Greeks took letters for sounds that did not exist in Greek and turned them into vowels. This is why some scholars reserve the term true alphabet for Greek alone. Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets, which give letters to both consonants and vowels, from abjads, which mostly leave vowels out, and abugidas, which mark vowels with diacritics added to consonants. The Greeks did not write in a vacuum. Their Mycenaean ancestors had used the Linear B syllabary from the 16th century BC, a set of 87 symbols that already included five vowels. In its early years the Greek alphabet came in many regional variants, and from that spread many different alphabets evolved. One of those variants would travel west and become the most widely used script on earth.

• 6. Westward To Latin

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  Around 800 to 600 BC, Greek colonists carried the alphabet in its Euboean form to the Italian peninsula. There it gave rise to scripts for the Italic languages, including the Etruscan alphabet, whose final classical form held 20 letters, four of them vowels, and was used until the 1st century AD. One offshoot became the Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it survived in intellectual and religious works, then served the Romance languages and most tongues of western and central Europe. Adapters reshaped it freely. Danish and Icelandic use the ligature æ; Old English and Icelandic borrowed the thorn from the Futhark runes and modified a d into the eth. Other languages took only a subset, as Hawaiian and Italian do, using j, k, x, y, and w mainly for foreign words. Runic writing followed its own path. Elder Fuþark, in use from around 100 CE, descended ultimately from Phoenician, and its name comes from the first six runes listed in order. These scripts gave way to Latin yet still appear in limited contexts, including the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

• 7. Eastern Inventions

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  In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443. Hangul is a featural alphabet, where the shape of many letters reflects a sound's place of articulation. P resembles the widened mouth, and L resembles the tongue pulled in. Planned by the government of the day, Hangul places its letters into syllable clusters of equal dimensions, the way Chinese characters occupy space, so one syllable always fills one square block no matter how many letters are stacked inside. Taiwan kept a different kind of system. Bopomofo, also called zhuyin, is a semi-syllabary used mainly there to transcribe the sounds of Standard Chinese. It grew from a form of Chinese shorthand in the early 1900s and mixes alphabet and syllabary. Syllable initials get individual symbols like an alphabet, but each possible final has its own character, so luan is written as l, u, an. After the People's Republic of China was proclaimed in 1949 and adopted Hanyu Pinyin in 1956, bopomofo's use on the mainland became limited, though it still aids pronunciation and serves as a computer and phone input method. Across India and Eastern Asia, most alphabetic scripts descend instead from the Brahmi script, itself believed to descend from Aramaic.

• 8. Order, Names, And Spelling

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  A dozen Ugaritic tablets from the 14th century BC preserve the alphabet in two sequences, and both have stayed stable for at least 3000 years. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, continued with minor changes into Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin. The other, HMĦLQ, was used in southern Arabia and survives today in Geʽez. The Brahmic family chose a different logic entirely, arranging letters by how and where the sounds are produced in the mouth. Letter names carry their own history. In Phoenician each letter was tied to a word beginning with that sound, a practice called acrophony; the names alpha and beta came from aleph, the word for ox, and bet, the word for house. Latin abandoned acrophony, adding a vowel before or after the consonant instead, though Y and Z kept Greek-flavored names. Comparing the letters in English and French shows the Great Vowel Shift plainly. A, B, C, and D sound like /eɪ, biː, siː, diː/ in English but /a, be, se, de/ in French, while F, L, M, N, and S stayed the same in both because short vowels were largely untouched. Spelling itself rarely matches sound perfectly. Spanish and Finnish come close to a one-to-one fit, while English diverges sharply, partly because the Great Vowel Shift came after its orthography was set. To realign writing with speech, countries reform their scripts. Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based one, and Kazakhstan, after making a Latin version in 2021, is still moving its official script away from Cyrillic.