History of the alphabet

Alphabetic writing systems

The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician and the closely related Paleo Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet) and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE. Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal alphabets, with the term abjad coined for them in 1996, and "true alphabets" with letters for both consonants and vowels. In this narrower sense, the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Many linguists are skeptical of the value of wholly separating the two categories. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.

Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms (ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object visually depicted by the hieroglyph, as phonographs denoting sounds, or as determinatives which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds. Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet, or abjad. This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been an influence on the creation of the first alphabet (used to write a Semitic language). All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been inspired by one of its descendants by stimulus diffusion, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt. The Rongorongo script of Easter Island may also be an independently invented alphabet, but too little is known of it to be certain.

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:
The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan. It is the second most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script) and the most used abjad system. The modern Hebrew alphabet started out as a local variant of Imperial Aramaic. The original Hebrew alphabet has been retained by the Samaritans. 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. The Georgian scripts are of uncertain provenance, but appear to be part of either the Persian Aramaic or Greek family.

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.