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Alphabet: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Alphabet
The first letters were not invented by scholars in a grand library, but by illiterate turquoise miners in the Sinai Peninsula. In the Middle Bronze Age, these workers left graffiti in the Egyptian turquoise mines that would eventually evolve into the Proto-Sinaitic script. This system, which appeared around the 19th century BC, represents the earliest known attempt to use a limited set of symbols to represent the sounds of a spoken language rather than entire words or syllables. The miners adapted specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had previously served only as pronunciation guides for logograms, to create a new way of writing. This script had no characters representing vowels and was originally a syllabary before symbols that were not needed were removed. The discovery of this script at Wadi el-Hol valley in 1999 by Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell pushed the timeline back even further, showing evidence of adaptation from Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to the 18th century BC. This suggests that the first alphabet had developed about that time, fundamentally differing from earlier systems by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information.
The Phoenician Invention
The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called Proto-Canaanite, before the 10th century BC. The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram, marking a pivotal moment in human communication. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets and was probably the first true phonemic script. It contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of the Phoenician alphabet was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically. The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians, who were master traders. By the 10th century BC, two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet, while the Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic.
The Greek Innovation
The Greek alphabet was the first in which vowels had independent letterforms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels, transforming the Phoenician abjad into a true alphabet. This innovation was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula in the 8th century BC, giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages, like the Etruscan alphabet. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic. The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages, like the Etruscan alphabet. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, causing many different alphabets to evolve from it. The Linear B syllabary, used by Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC, had 87 symbols, including five vowels, but the Greek alphabet simplified this by separating vowels from consonants. This change allowed for a more flexible and efficient writing system that could be adapted to various languages.
Common questions
Who invented the first letters of the alphabet?
The first letters were invented by illiterate turquoise miners in the Sinai Peninsula during the Middle Bronze Age. These workers created graffiti in Egyptian turquoise mines that evolved into the Proto-Sinaitic script around the 19th century BC.
When did the Proto-Sinaitic script appear and where was it discovered?
The Proto-Sinaitic script appeared around the 19th century BC and was discovered at Wadi el-Hol valley in 1999 by Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell. Evidence of adaptation from Egyptian hieroglyphs in this script dates to the 18th century BC.
Which script is the parent of all western alphabets and when did it develop?
The Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called Proto-Canaanite, is the parent script of all western alphabets and developed before the 10th century BC. The oldest text in this script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram.
When was the Hangul alphabet created and who planned its creation?
Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443, and the creation was planned by the government of the day. This unique featural alphabet places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions.
What year did Kazakhstan transition from an Arabic script to a Latin alphabet?
Kazakhstan made a transition to the Latin alphabet in 2021 after changing from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence. This change aligns the writing system with the contemporary spoken language.
The Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic, became the most widely used script in the world. The Etruscan alphabet remained nearly unchanged for several hundred years, only evolving once the Etruscan language changed itself. The letters used for non-existent phonemes were dropped, and the final classical form of Etruscan contained 20 letters, four of which are vowels, six fewer letters than the earlier forms. The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century AD. The Etruscan language itself was not used during the Roman Empire, but the script was used for religious texts. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It came to be used for the Romance languages that descended from Latin and most of the other languages of western and central Europe. Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures, a combination of two letters make one, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and œ in Algonquian. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y, and w only in foreign words.
The Asian Variations
Many phonetic scripts exist in Asia, with the Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East being developments of the Aramaic alphabet. Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script, believed to be a descendant of Aramaic. In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443, a unique alphabet that is a featural alphabet where the design of many of the letters comes from a sound's place of articulation. The creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day, and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters. This change allows for mixed-script writing, where one syllable always takes up one type space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block. The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians, in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular. The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script.
The Order of Letters
Alphabets often come to be associated with a standard ordering of their letters, which is for collation, namely, for listing words and other items in alphabetical order. It is unknown whether the earliest alphabets had a defined sequence. Some alphabets today, such as the Hanuno'o script, are learned one letter at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for collation where a definite order is required. However, a dozen Ugaritic tablets from the 14th century BC preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One, the ABCDE order later used in Phoenician, has continued with minor changes in Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin; the other, HMHLQ, was used in southern Arabia and is preserved today in Ge'ez. Both orders have therefore been stable for at least 3000 years. Runic used an unrelated Futhark sequence, which got simplified later on. Arabic usually uses its sequence, although Arabic retains the traditional abjadi order, which is used for numbers. The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India uses a unique order based on phonology: The letters are arranged according to how and where the sounds get produced in the mouth. This organization is present in Southeast Asia, Tibet, Korean Hangul, and even Japanese kana, which is not an alphabet.
The Names of Letters
In Phoenician, each letter got associated with a word that begins with that sound, a phenomenon called acrophony. This is continuously used to varying degrees in Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. Acrophony was abandoned in Latin, which referred to the letters by adding a vowel, usually a, sometimes e or i, before or after the consonant. Two exceptions were Y and Z, which were borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan. They were known as Y Graeca Greek Y and zeta from Greek. This discrepancy was inherited by many European languages, as in the term zed for Z in all forms of English, other than American English. Over time names sometimes shifted or were added, as in double U for W, or double V in French, the English name for Y, and the American zee for Z. Comparing them in English and French gives a clear reflection of the Great Vowel Shift. The French names from which the English names got derived preserve the qualities of the English vowels before the Great Vowel Shift. By contrast, the names of F, L, M, N, and S remain the same in both languages because short vowels were largely unaffected by the Shift. In Cyrillic, originally, acrophony was present using Slavic words, with the first three words going, azu, buky, vede, with the Cyrillic collation order being, A, B, V. However, this was later abandoned in favor of a system similar to Latin.
The Rules of Writing
When an alphabet is adopted or developed to represent a given language, an orthography generally comes into being, providing rules for spelling words, following the principle on which alphabets get based. These rules will map letters of the alphabet to the phonemes of the spoken language. In a perfectly phonemic orthography, there would be a consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the phonemes so that a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker would always know the pronunciation of a word given its spelling, and vice versa. However, this ideal is usually never achieved in practice. Languages can come close to it, such as Spanish and Finnish. Others, such as English, deviate from it to a much larger degree. The pronunciation of a language often evolves independently of its writing system. Writing systems have been borrowed for languages the orthography was not initially made to use. The degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies. Sometimes, countries have the written language undergo a spelling reform to realign the writing with the contemporary spoken language. These can range from simple spelling changes and word forms to switching the entire writing system. For example, Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet, and Kazakh changed from an Arabic script to a Cyrillic script due to the Soviet Union's influence. In 2021, it made a transition to the Latin alphabet, similar to Turkish.