History of the alphabet

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt, more than a millennium after the beginnings of writing. The first alphabet was created around 2000 BC and belonged to the language of Semitic workers in Egypt ( see Proto -semitic alphabet). It was derived from the alphabetical approaches from the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Most of today's alphabets are descended either from this source alphabet, or were indirectly inspired by him. The first true alphabet was Greek, the most widely used Latin.

• 3.1 Adaptation by the Greeks
• 3.2 descendants of the Greek alphabet

Prehistory

Before the end of the fourth millennium BC there were two well-documented writings: the Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Both were well known in that part of the Middle East, which produced the first widely used alphabet, the Phoenician script. There is evidence that the cuneiform already had in some of the languages ​​they used, characteristics of the alphabet, as was also the case of the later Old Persian cuneiform. But these early forms seem to have not developed and therefore have no successors in later alphabet fonts. The Byblos script has graphic similarities with both the hieratic and with the Phoenician script. Since it is not yet deciphered, their possible role, however, can not be determined in the development of the alphabet.

Initial developments

Beginnings in Egypt

The Egyptians developed until around 2700 BC around a set of 22 hieroglyphics, which reproduced the consonants of the Egyptian language, as well as a 23, which was probably for vowels in word-initial and end. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to mark grammatical inflections, and later also for writing loan words and foreign names. Even if it was by its very nature alphabetically, it was not used in the sense of a true alphabet, but only in logo graphic function, while the complex traditional Egyptian writing continued to dominate. The first true alphabet font was probably used around the year 2000 by Semitic workers in Central Egypt. Over the next five centuries it spread to the north, and the later alphabets derived from it either in a direct line from or were inspired by their successors, with possible exceptions such as the Meroitic script is an adaptation of the Hieroglyphics in Nubia of the 3rd century BC BC, though many scientists also view this as affected by the first alphabet.

Semitic alphabet

The Egyptian writings of the Middle Bronze Age, including the Wadi el -Hol script, have not yet deciphered. However, it seems to them to act at least partly alphabetic writings. The oldest of these writings come from the Central Egypt of around 1800 BC These inscriptions form Gordon J. Hamilton believes it is a testament to the invention of the alphabet in Egypt.

The Semitic fonts used not only the existing Egyptian consonants, but integrated more hieroglyphics, and that they have a total of about thirty characters. Even if so far there is no evidence, it is believed that the individual characters received own semi tables names instead of the original numbers Egyptian use. It is not certain whether these glyphs if they found a copy of the Semitic language use, already constitute an alphabet on the principle of Akrophonie, or whether individual characters for consonant sequences or even whole words could stand. For example, the 'house' glyph could have stood for a b also in Semitic only (as the beginning of beyt = " house" ), or he could have both the consonants b and the sound sequence represented byt, just as he in the Egyptian both p so called from pr. At the time, as the Scripture came into Canaan to use, but it was already a purely alphabetic system of writing, and the original "house" hieroglyph stood only for the sound b.

The Phoenicians were the first people in Canaan, which used the alphabet regularly. For this reason, the following stages are called Phoenician script. Phoenicia was a state on the Mediterranean Sea in the center of a wide-ranging trade network. Thus the Phoenician alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean soon. Two of its variants were of great influence on the further development of writing: The Aramaic and the Greek alphabet.

Descendants of the Aramaic script

The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets set, just like in the Egyptian origin of writing, only consonants represent, therefore represented a consonant typeface indicates the Aramaic script, which itself was in the 7th century BC, from the Phoenician developed and the writing of the Persian Empire, is probably the predecessor of almost all modern Asian alphabets:

• The modern Hebrew alphabet originated as a variation of the Aramaic. ( The original Hebrew alphabet is still used by the Samaritans. )
• The Arabic alphabet has emerged about the Nabataean script from the Aramaic.
• The Syrian alphabet, which was used after the third century of our era was, with the Pahlavi and Sogdian as intermediates. Basis for the alphabets of northern Asia as ( presumably) the Orkhon runes, the Uighur, Mongolian and Manchurian the alphabet
• The origin of the Georgian alphabet is not backed up, but it probably belongs to the Persian- Aramaic ( or possibly to the Greek ) Font Family.
• The Aramaic alphabet is probably the ancestor of the " Indian script circle ", which spread over the Hindu and Buddhist religions, Tibet, Mongolia, to Indochina and the Malay Archipelago. China and Japan, however, already had their own writings and maintained their own logographic and syllabic scripts in.
• The Korean alphabet was invented in the 15th century. According to the traditional history, it was an independent development. Gari Ledyard, however, suggested that some of the consonants could have fallen to half a dozen letters that came from the Tibetan on the Phagspa - writing Chinese Yuan Dynasty; also the Tibetan alphabet belongs to the Indian script circle. Unlike the other alphabets other consonants from this core set have emerged as a distinctive feature of the system.

Table: The distribution of the alphabet to the west ( Greek, Latin ) and Eastern ( Indian writing circle, Korean). The exact assignment of the Phoenician to the Indic characters (via Aramaic ) is uncertain, especially for the sibilants and the letters in parentheses. The transmission of the alphabet from Tibetan (via Phagspa ) into Korean is also controversial.

Greek alphabet

Adaptation by the Greeks

No later than the 8th century BC the Greeks took over the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it for their language. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as in Phoenician and two alphabets are arranged in the same order. While own letters for vowels would rather have been an obstacle to the readability of Egyptian, Phoenician or Hebrew texts, their absence was a problem in the Greek language, since vowels there played a much more important role. Therefore, the Greeks used the Phoenician letter those which were not needed for the consonants in their own language, to represent vowels.

The names of the Phoenician letters always began with a consonant, each of which corresponded to the phonetic value of the corresponding letter. Following this principle acrophonic were now in Greek vowels at the beginning of the letter name. For example, it was in Greek neither glottal nor the hour, and the Phoenician letters in question were in Greek to a ( alpha ) and e ( epsilon), which the vowels / a / and / e / in place of the consonants / ʔ / and / h / corresponded. However, in twelve vowels of the Greek only ( depending on the dialect ) were five or six " unused " letters available, the Greeks created digraphs and other variations, such as ei, ou and o ( which became the Omega). Some gaps in the system were ignored, such as the distinction of long a, i and u

Variants of the Greek alphabet emerged. One of these, the variant of Cuma and Chalcis, was used west of Athens, in southern Italy. The eastern variant was used in Miletus in what is now Turkey and adopted by the Athenians, and finally the whole Greek-speaking world. The direction of writing changed over time, from the left-handed writing in Phoenician for right-handed method as in the present European writings.

Descendants of the Greek alphabet

The Greek is itself the source of all modern European writings. The alphabetic writing of the West Greek dialects in which the Eta was pronounced as in Phoenician as an hour, provided the basis for development of the Old Italic, and finally the Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects, in which there were / no / h, eta stand for a vowel. From the eastern Greek variant numerous other writings developed: the Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Gothic (which also characters from the Roman alphabet took over ), and possibly the Georgian and Armenian alphabet.

Although the development of the scriptures can be represented as essentially linear, there are putative interactions between different lines of development, or at least secondary influences undoubtedly beside the main development strands. Thus the Manchu script, which emerged from the writings abdschadischen West Asia, probably influenced by the Korean Hangul, which is either a stand-alone development or derived from the Abugidas South Asia. The Georgian script was probably apparent from the Aramaic script family, but was influenced by concepts of the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet, which is a descendant of the hieroglyphs themselves over the first Semitic alphabet was based on the Coptic script, which, however, eight more characters demotic origin recorded, similar to the Cyrillic alphabet at the beginning only the Greek alphabet by several of the Glagolitic borrowed special characters expanded (or the Gothic and Old English alphabet, the Greek or Latin by a few runic letters, the Gothic also some Latin letters recorded ). The used for Canadian aboriginal Cree font appears as a mixture of Pitman shorthand (which is indeed an abrupt newly developed written, but probably based on Latin italics) and Devanagari.

Development of the Roman alphabet

The root of the Latins, as the Romans were later known as the Greeks lived on the Italian peninsula. From the Etruscans, the BC lived in the first millennium in Central Italy, and the Western Greeks took over the Latins to the seventh century BC the font. The Latins were four of the letters of the Greek alphabet from Western in their writing. They took over from the Etruscans, the F, which had pronounced as / w / the Etruscans, and changed the S of the Etruscans to today's curvy shape. For presentation of the G- text in Greek and the K- text in Etruscan, the gamma was used. For these changes, the modern alphabet was created by the letters G, J, U, W, Y and Z and some other differences.

C, K and Q were in the Roman alphabet to represent all of both the / k / - are used as well as the / g / - Loud; the Romans created shortly after the G from the C and put it to the seventh place (which had previously belonged to the Z), so as not to alter the gematria ( the numerical sequence of the alphabet ). In the centuries following the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Romans from the Greek words began to take over. To illustrate this, they had to re-expand their alphabet. Therefore Of the Ostgriechen they took over the Y and Z which they anfügten to the end of the alphabet.

The Anglo-Saxons began after her conversion to Christianity by St. Augustine of Canterbury in the sixth century AD to write Old English with Roman letters. Since the runic Wunjo, which was loud / w used at the beginning of the /, it was easy to confuse with a P, was the w as a representation of a double u ( which was then written as a v) and was in the order next to the v placed. The actual U emerged as rounded version of the V and became representation of the vowel U in contrast to the consonant V. The J originated as a variation of I. Originally it was used only as the last character in a series of several I; in the 15th century began with the use of J for the consonants and the I for the vowel, which generally prevailed until the mid-17th century.

Letter names and sequence

The order of the letters in the alphabet has been documented since the 14th century BC, and indeed from the site of Ugarit on the coast in northern Syria. There plaques were discovered with over 1000 cuneiform characters that did not meet the Babylonian and contained only 30 different letters. In twelve of these panels, the characters are arranged in alphabetical order. There were two different sequences, one of which is largely the order in Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabet corresponded to which others are more of the Ethiopian alphabet.

It is not known how many characters was the proto -Semitic alphabet and the order in which were placed the characters. From his successors the Ugaritic No. 27 consonants, the South Arabian font 29 and the Phoenician alphabet only had 22 There were two different ranking principles, a ABGDE sequence in the Phoenician and a HMĦLQ - Sequence in Southern Arabian; Ugaritic kept both systems, which were largely in the later alphabets.

The letter names remained largely stable under many descendants of the Phoenician alphabet, including the Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. In Arabic and Roman alphabet, however, they were not used. The sequence of the letters also remained in the Roman, Armenian, Gothic and Cyrillic alphabet largely intact, but not in the Brahmi and runes and in Arabic, even though the latter also exists a abdschadische ranking as an alternative to conventional assembly.

The table schematically describes the Phoenician alphabet and its descendants.

These 22 consonants describe the North West Semitic phonology. Seven of the reconstructed Proto -Semitic consonants missing: the dental fricatives D, T, T, the voiceless alveolar lateral fricatives s, s, the voiced velar fricative ġ, and the distinction between voiceless velar and pharyngeal fricatives ( H, H), which for the Canaanite Chet merged. The six versions of letters that were added to the Arabic alphabet, they represent with the exception of ¶, which persists in Ge'ez as a separate phoneme ( ሠ ): D > ذال; T> ثاء; T> ضاد; ġ > غين; S> ظاء; ḫ > خاء. ( However, it should be noted that the information for the reconstruction of the 29 proto -Semitic letters largely derived from the Arabic script. )

Graphically independent alphabets

The only modern alphabet in official use, which is not graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet, is the Maldivian Thaana alphabet. Even though it was developed based on the Arabic, and possibly other alphabets, it is unique in that its letters form based on number of characters. The Osmaniya font that was created in the 1920s to the posting of Somaliland and their consonants were probably pure contraptions was officially used until 1972 in Somalia alongside the Latin alphabet.

Among the alphabets that are not officially used at the national level, there are several with apparently separate forms of writing. The Zhuyin alphabet originated from the Chinese characters. The East Indian Ol Chiki seems to traditional symbols for " danger ", " meeting ", etc., as well as inventions of his Creator to be based. ( The names of the letters seem akrophonisch the illustrated volume reflect, however, the final consonant or vowel decisive and not the beginning of the name).

The old Irish Ogham writing was based on underscore character, and the monumental Old Persian inscriptions were written in a kind of alphabetic cuneiform script, the Persian cuneiform.

Alphabets in other media

With the transition to new communications media often leads to fractures of the graphic form, or at least difficulties in clarifying the origin. For example, it is not immediately obvious that the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet is based on the prototypical Semitic Abdschad. While the finger alphabets derived from the local font alphabets, the Braille, Optical telegraphy, the flag alphabet and Morse code artificially designed forms. The pattern of optical telegraphy based for example on the arrangement of the letters in the Latin alphabet, but not the graphical form of the character itself As for the shorthand, so no connection with the font alphabet can be seen at least for the commonly used in the English-speaking Pitman shorthand.