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

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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.

One thing missing at Idalion is literary texts. This may seem surprising, given the rich trove of mythical texts found at Ugarit, as well as the contemporary example of the Hebrew Bible and the development in Greece in the same period of the great Homeric epics. Perhaps Phoenician literature will emerge in future excavations and new archives—or, perhaps, as is often assumed, it was all written on perishable materials, and has simply been destroyed by time. But there is no evidence from other sources either that the Phoenicians wrote down their myths and stories. There are plenty of references to technical and scientific works composed in Phoenician—arithmetic, astronomy, and philosophy—but none to literature as we would recognize it until well into the Roman period. The alphabet means you don't have to know things to start looking things up. You don't require any knowledge, apart from the fact that, say, Derbyshire begins with a D," Flanders says. R is for random Josephine Quinn is Associate Professor in Ancient History at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world, and her new book In Search of the Phoenicians (Princeton Univ. Press) will be out in December. She co-directs the Tunisian–British excavations at Utica (Tunisia) and the Oxford Centre for Phoenician and Punic Studies. there are languages for which an alphabet is not an ideal writing system. The Semitic abjads really do fit the structure of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic very well, [more] than an alphabet would [...], since the spelling ensures that each root looks the same through its plethora of inflections and derivations." Peter Daniels, The World's Writing Systems, p. 27.Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, The World's Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 219–220 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 BCE, to become the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia except India:

Second is whether the early alphabet was systematized and taught carefully, or casually and chaotically transmitted—a script of scribes or of the people. Some time ago, in line with Goldwasser’s arguments, I argued (first in a 2004 article, then a few years later in my book, The Invention of Hebrew) that the alphabet showed no sign of scribal transmission in its first 500 years. It was, as Goldwasser says, a “script of the poor,” until it was adopted by scribes and rulers in a special new way—as a symbol of local culture and belonging. Does this hold up? The Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician. [38] With a different phonology, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script to represent their own sounds, including the vowels absent in Phoenician. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in the Indo-European Greek. However, Akkadian cuneiform, which wrote a related Semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the Phoenicians simply accepted the model of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. In any case, the Greeks repurposed the Phoenician letters of consonant sounds not present in Greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its leading consonant, and the letter took the value of the now-leading vowel. For example, ʾāleph, which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel /a/; he became /e/, ḥet became /eː/ (a long vowel), ʿayin became /o/ (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/. (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/, continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.) Writing wasn’t just invented once by a single person. Many different ancient societies invented writing at different times and places.

The Georgian scripts are of uncertain provenance, but appear to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family. Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet is derived from Chinese characters. 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.) Modern world is perfectly aware of what are the 26 letters of the alphabet since English has become the primary global language and the one that is associated with globalization-related technologies. The majority of English language learners are not particularly interested in knowing who invented the alphabet or what is the history behind every letter. Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called " abjads" since 1996, and "true alphabets" in the narrow sense, [8] [9] the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while the symbols in a pure abjad stand only for consonants. (So-called impure abjads may use diacritics or a few symbols to represent vowels.) In this sense, then the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, but not all scholars and linguists think this is enough to strip away the original meaning of an alphabet to one with both vowels and consonants. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, [10] in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.