Alphabet
Ancient Egyptian scribes carved twenty-four uniliteral signs into stone to serve as pronunciation guides for hieroglyphs. These glyphs appeared in the 4th century AD before fading from use when pagan temples closed down in the 5th century. Workers in the Sinai Peninsula left graffiti in turquoise mines that became the Proto-Sinaitic script around 1800 BC. John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this alphabet at Wadi el-Hol valley in 1999. The script dated to approximately 1850 BC and showed evidence adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This early system had no characters representing vowels and probably began as a syllabary before symbols were removed. Ugaritic, invented before the 15th century BC, was the best-attested Bronze Age alphabet with thirty signs including three indicating following vowels. It fell out of use after the destruction of Ugarit in 1178 BC. The Phoenician alphabet emerged later and contained only about two dozen distinct letters simple enough for traders to learn.
Greek colonists carried the Euboean form of the Greek alphabet to the Italian peninsula giving rise to many alphabets for Italic languages like Etruscan. One of these evolved into the Latin alphabet which spread across Europe as the Roman Republic expanded. Today it is the most widely used script in the world covering modern Europe Africa the Americas and Oceania. The Cyrillic script developed alongside the Glagolitic alphabet created by Saints Cyril and Methodius. Their disciples at the Preslav Literary School including Naum of Preslav and Chernorizets Hrabar designed Cyrillic using letters borrowed from Greek and Hebrew. Hangul appeared in Korea when Sejong the Great created it in 1443. This unique featural alphabet designs letter shapes based on the place of articulation such as P looking like a widened mouth. Bopomofo serves as a semi-syllabary primarily used in Taiwan to transcribe Standard Chinese sounds since the early 1900s. Arabic remains widely used sometimes as an abjad with Urdu and Persian or as a complete alphabet with Kurdish and Uyghur.
Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets that use letters to represent both consonants and vowels from abugidas and abjads. Abugidas indicate vowels with diacritics added to letters while abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether. The earliest known alphabet using this sense is the Wadi el-Hol script believed to be an abjad. Phoenician served as the ancestor for modern alphabets including Arabic Greek Latin Cyrillic and Hebrew. Examples of present-day abjads include the Arabic and Hebrew scripts while true alphabets encompass Latin Cyrillic and Korean hangul. Abugidas are used to write Tigrinya Amharic Hindi and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics function as an abugida because each glyph stands for a consonant modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. Ugaritic was essentially an abjad but had syllabic letters for specific instances where vowels were indicated. Coptic has a letter for initial vowels though Devanagari typically uses अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels.
The ordering of the Latin alphabet derives from the Northwest Semitic Abgad order which is already well established. In French accented letters like é à and ô are not considered additional letters for collation purposes. Icelandic treats accented letters such as á í and ö as distinct letters representing different vowel sounds. Spanish considers ń a separate letter but accented vowels like á and é are not treated as distinct in sorting. The twelfth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed the collating order so that ll came between lk and lm in dictionaries. German words starting with sch- insert between words with initial sca- and sci- instead of appearing after sz. Turkish adopted graphemes ö and ü where a word like tüfek would come after tuz in the dictionary. Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with æ ø å whereas Swedish conventionally puts å at the end. A dozen Ugaritic tablets from the 14th century BC preserve the alphabet in two sequences including ABCDE and HMHLQ. Both orders have remained stable for at least three thousand years.
In Phoenician each letter got associated with a word beginning with that sound known as acrophony. This phenomenon continues to varying degrees in Samaritan Aramaic Syriac Hebrew Greek and Arabic. Acrophony was abandoned in Latin which referred to letters by adding a vowel before or after the consonant. Two exceptions were Y and Z borrowed from the Greek alphabet rather than Etruscan. They were known as Y Graeca and zeta from Greek. Over time names shifted such as double U for W or double V in French. The English name for Y is y while American English uses zee for Z. Comparing English and French reveals the Great Vowel Shift since A B C and D are pronounced differently today versus contemporary French. The French names preserve qualities of English vowels before the shift occurred. Names of F L M N and S remain the same in both languages because short vowels were largely unaffected. Cyrillic originally used acrophony using Slavic words like azu buky vědě before abandoning it for a system similar to Latin.
When an alphabet is adopted to represent a given language an orthography generally comes into being providing rules for spelling words. In a perfectly phonemic orthography there would be a consistent one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. Languages can come close to this ideal such as Spanish and Finnish but others deviate significantly like English. German uses tetragraphs like tsch for specific phonemes and dsch in borrowed words. Kabardian also uses a tetragraph for one of its phonemes namely кхъу. Modern Greek may write the phoneme /i/ in six different ways including ι ει οι υ η and ει. Thai retains a letter for the final consonant /r/ present in the English word beer but silences it during pronunciation. English pronunciations mostly have to be memorized as they do not correspond to the spelling consistently. This occurs because the Great Vowel Shift happened after the orthography got established and English acquired many loanwords retaining original spellings. Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet to a Latin-based Turkish alphabet while Kazakh changed from Cyrillic due to Soviet influence. In 2021 Kazakhstan made a transition back to the Latin alphabet similar to Turkey.
Common questions
When was the Proto-Sinaitic script created by workers in the Sinai Peninsula?
Workers in the Sinai Peninsula left graffiti in turquoise mines that became the Proto-Sinaitic script around 1800 BC. John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this alphabet at Wadi el-Hol valley in 1999. The script dated to approximately 1850 BC and showed evidence adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Who invented the Ugaritic alphabet before the 15th century BC?
Ugaritic, invented before the 15th century BC, was the best-attested Bronze Age alphabet with thirty signs including three indicating following vowels. It fell out of use after the destruction of Ugarit in 1178 BC. This early system had no characters representing vowels and probably began as a syllabary before symbols were removed.
What is the origin of the Latin alphabet used across Europe today?
Greek colonists carried the Euboean form of the Greek alphabet to the Italian peninsula giving rise to many alphabets for Italic languages like Etruscan. One of these evolved into the Latin alphabet which spread across Europe as the Roman Republic expanded. Today it is the most widely used script in the world covering modern Europe Africa the Americas and Oceania.
When did Sejong the Great create Hangul in Korea?
Hangul appeared in Korea when Sejong the Great created it in 1443. This unique featural alphabet designs letter shapes based on the place of articulation such as P looking like a widened mouth. Bopomofo serves as a semi-syllabary primarily used in Taiwan to transcribe Standard Chinese sounds since the early 1900s.
How does Peter T. Daniels distinguish true alphabets from abugidas and abjads?
Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets that use letters to represent both consonants and vowels from abugidas and abjads. Abugidas indicate vowels with diacritics added to letters while abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether. The earliest known alphabet using this sense is the Wadi el-Hol script believed to be an abjad.