Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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Thousands of years ago, people lived in Mesopotamia (near the modern day Middle East), Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica (near what we now call Central America). These different groups all invented their own kind of writing independently. By the 8th century B.C., the Phoenician alphabet had spread to Greece, where it was refined and enhanced to record the Greek language. Some Phoenician characters were kept, and others were removed, but the paramount innovation was the use of letters to represent vowels. Many scholars believe it was this addition—which allowed text to be read and pronounced without ambiguity—that marked the creation of the first “true” alphabet. Now, however, excavations at the inland city of Idalion on Cyprus by Dr. Maria Hadjicosti of the Department of Antiquities have finally brought to light a large archive of Phoenician texts, preserved because they were written not on perishable materials but on fragments of marble, stone, and pottery. These texts are now being studied in Nicosia by Professor Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo of the Sapienza University of Rome and Dr. José Ángel Zamora López of the Spanish National Research Agency, who have published their preliminary findings in Italian in the latest issue of the journal Semitica et Classica.

Religious ritual played a central role in inspiring foreign workers to learn to write. After a day’s work was done, Canaanite workers would have observed their Egyptian counterparts’ rituals in the beautiful temple complex to Hathor, and they would have marveled at the thousands of hieroglyphs used to dedicate gifts to the goddess. In Goldwasser’s account, they were not daunted by being unable to read the hieroglyphs around them; instead, they began writing things their own way, inventing a simpler, more versatile system to offer their own religious invocations. Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1995. Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, 2004, ISBN 0-8147-3654-8.

Why One Need to Know History Behind English Letters?

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 alphabets 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 codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and semaphore letters are not derived from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters. The root l-m-d mainly means "to teach", from an original meaning "to goad". H3925 in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible, 1979. Davidson, Lucy (18 March 2022). "How the Phoenician Alphabet Revolutionised Language". History Hit. United Kingdom . Retrieved 1 July 2022.

Flanders says the system is "dense with problems" — the main one being that Dewey believed he could take all the learning of the world and give it category numbers. The Syriac alphabet used after the third century CE evolved, through the Pahlavi scripts and Sogdian alphabet, into the alphabets of North Asia such as the Old Turkic alphabet (probably), the Old Uyghur alphabet, the Mongolian writing systems, and the Manchu alphabet. a b Humphrey, John William (2006). Ancient technology. Greenwood guides to historic events of the ancient world (illustrateded.). Greenwood Publishing Group. p.219. ISBN 9780313327636 . Retrieved 2009-10-18. By the 5th century BCE, among Jews the Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the Aramaic alphabet as officially used in the Persian empire (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The " Jewish square-script" variant now known simply as the Hebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about the 3rd century BCE (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century CE).Writing wasn’t just invented once by a single person. Many different ancient societies invented writing at different times and places. Sass, Benjamin; Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology; Makhon le-arkheʼologyah ʻa. sh. Sonyah u-Marḳo Nadler (2005). The alphabet at the turn of the millennium: the West Semitic alphabet ca. 1150-850 BCE: the antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian alphabets. Tel-Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology. ISBN 978-965-266-021-3. OCLC 63062039. In the 12th and 13th centuries, encyclopaedists were almost all churchmen and they organised their material theologically. The book is dense in places and technical terms are not always adequately explained. Readers are left to their own devices with matres lectionis (literally ‘mothers of reading’, but also a term for the diacritical marks used to indicate vowels in some writing systems which do not have them). The organisation of the material is not always intuitive; it is only about three-quarters of the way into the book that we get an explanation of how the alphabet was first created. But the reader’s effort is repaid in the depth and breadth of information provided. Inventing the Alphabet shines in the sections on the early modern period and the 18th century, where the world of antiquarianism and the Grand Tour comes alive. There are some small factual errors on the ancient side – describing Persian as a Semitic language, when it is Indo-European, for example. In 1905, a couple of Egyptologists, Sir William and Hilda Flinders Petrie, who were married, first excavated the temple, documenting thousands of votive offerings there. The pair also discovered curious signs on the side of a mine, and began to notice them elsewhere, on walls and small statues. Some signs were clearly related to hieroglyphs, yet they were simpler than the beautiful pictorial Egyptian script on the temple walls. The Petries recognized the signs as an alphabet, though decoding the letters would take another decade, and tracing the source of the invention far longer.

When people think about different alphabets they'll say, “Like Arabic? That can’t be the same as our alphabet, right?” They are confusing alphabet and script. Script is the different letter forms. If you think about Cyrillic writing for Russian, that’s a script. But the sequence of letters, the names of letters, and what we call the powers of letters – that is, the sound that’s associated with them – are the same across all alphabetic scripts.The Alphabet– its creation and development" on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time featuring Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard, Rosalind Thomas

The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth 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 after 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. N.While its development started from Egyptian hieroglyph “snake” that represented a different sound, a long way through Phoenician, Greek, Arabic, and Latin alphabets shaped its current representation. Only linguists could explain all processes but localization servicecan surely help if there is a translation task of similar complexity. Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, The World's Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 219–220 E.Similarly to many other letters, it came into English through Latin alphabet that adopted Greek letter Epsilon, originating from Semitic. Original Egyptian hieroglyph that served as the source had a form of a man with raised hands. Currently, letter E is the most used letter in English which any of document translation companiescan tell you for sure.Millard, A. R. (1986). "The infancy of the alphabet". World Archaeology. 17 (3): 390–398. doi: 10.1080/00438243.1986.9979978. JSTOR 124703. The Runic alphabet is derived from Italic, the Cyrillic alphabet from medieval Greek. The Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic scripts are derived from Aramaic (the latter as a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean). Ge'ez is from South Arabian.