History of the alphabet
The history of the alphabet goes back to a writing system for consonants. This was used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BC.[1]
Early history
Hieroglyphs in Egypt
By 2700 BC, the ancient Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the consonants of their language. A 23rd seems to have been for word-initial or word-final vowels. The first purely alphabetic script may have been developed around 2000 BC for Semitic workers in central Egypt.[2]
Over the next 500 years, it spread north. All later alphabets around the world have either descended from it or been inspired by one of its descendants.[3][4]
History Of The Alphabet Media
World distribution of the Arabic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
Greek alphabet on an ancient black figure vessel. There is a digamma but no ksi or omega. The letter phi upright in the photograph is missing a stroke and looks like the omicron Ο, but on the other side of the bottom it is a full Φ.
Etruscan writing, the beginning of the writing with the Latin alphabet.
World distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
World distribution of the Latin alphabet. The dark green areas show the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
Simplified relationship between various scripts leading to the development of modern lower case of standard Latin alphabet and that of the modern variants, Fraktur (used in Germany until recently) and Insular/Gaelic (Ireland). Several scripts coexisted such as half-uncial and uncial, which derive from Roman cursive and Greek uncial, and Visigothic, Merovingian (Luxeuil variant here) and Beneventan.
References
- ↑ Sampson, Geoffrey 1985. Writing systems: a linguistic introduction. Stanford University Press, p77. ISBN 0-8047-1254-9
- ↑ Hamilton, Gordon J. 2002. W.F. Albright and early alphabetic writing, Near Eastern Archaeology 65, #1 (March 2002): 35-42. page 39-49.
- ↑ Gaur, Albertine 1992. A history of writing. The British Library. ISBN 0-7123-0270-0
- ↑ Cristin, Anne-Marie (ed) 2002. A history of writing: from the hieroglyph to multimedia. Flammarion.