Alphabet is a series of letters in a specific order representing the speech sounds of a language. Linguists (language scholars) have defined an alphabet as having letters representing both the consonants and vowels of a language. But, for the purposes of this article, a series of letters that are all consonants may also be considered an alphabet. The word alphabet comes from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. The alphabet for English is called the Roman alphabet, but the history of this alphabet began long before ancient Rome. For writing before the invention of letters, see Writing system .
The earliest alphabets
Semitic scripts.
The earliest known alphabet had letters only for consonants. This earliest alphabet is called Proto-Sinaitic. In the early 1900’s, the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie found examples of Proto-Sinaitic writing at an Egyptian outpost in the Sinai Peninsula called Serabit el-Khadim. The writing at this site, where the Egyptians mined turquoise in ancient times, is dated to around 1500 B.C. In the 1990’s, other archaeologists found similar writing in limestone inscriptions in Egypt at Wadi el-Hol. This writing is dated to around 1900 to 1800 B.C.
Scholars have deciphered only a few words of Proto-Sinaitic, that of Serabit el-Khadim. But language experts think the letters record a Semitic language, an early relative of Hebrew and Arabic. The pictograms used in Proto-Sinaitic letters are adapted from Egyptian writing, but the letters do not stand for the same sounds in Semitic as in Egyptian. See Pictogram .
For scholars, the surprising thing about Proto-Sinaitic writing is who developed it. The people at these sites would have been foreign workers living in Egypt. With no formal training, these workers created a writing system using 27 symbols to represent the sounds of their language. They adapted this system from the Egyptian writing system, which required years of study to master and which had hundreds of symbols.
Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician.
In about the 1400’s B.C., the people in an area centered on modern-day Israel used another alphabet system, Proto-Canaanite. Proto-Canaanite adopted the pictograms used in Proto-Sinaitic. By around 1000 B.C., Proto-Canaanite letters had developed into what scholars call Phoenician. The Phoenician script had a set of 22 letters.
The Phoenicians lived along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in an area centered on modern-day Lebanon. The Phoenicians were seafaring merchants and traders. Their letter system became important because it was the Phoenicians who introduced the Greeks to writing. Thus, the Phoenician letters spread indirectly, through the Greek alphabet, to many languages.
Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic
all developed writing systems based either directly or indirectly upon Phoenician letters. Aramaic was the most important language of the ancient Middle East for centuries, starting in about 900 B.C., and its script developed many local varieties across the region. The Israelites, for example, wrote Hebrew with a form of Phoenician letters until about the 500’s B.C. After that time, they wrote Hebrew in one of the local varieties of Aramaic.
Arab scribes first wrote down Arabic shortly before the Qur’ān was composed in the A.D. 600’s. Arabic writing developed out of another variety of Aramaic.
Scripts of Asia.
Farther east, varieties of Aramaic writing provided the foundation of many scripts. Aramaic was the basis of Brahmi scripts in India. In these scripts, vowels are written with marks attached to the consonant letters. Hundreds of regional scripts of this kind developed across South and Southeast Asia. Another group of scripts developed in Central Asia, out of yet another variety of Aramaic script. The best known of this group is Mongolian.
The Greek alphabet
The Greeks
came in contact with Phoenician traders and learned writing from them around 800 B.C. The Greeks borrowed Phoenician symbols to form the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician language had more consonants than the Greek (such as H, W, and Y), and the Greeks used the extra letters to represent vowel sounds.
The Greeks also adapted their letter names from Phoenician. In Phoenician, the names of letters were actual words, but in Greek the letter names have no meaning. For example, the first letter in Phoenician, alp, meant ox, and the letter represented an ox head. Alp became alpha in Greek. The second letter, bayt, meant house in Phoenician, and the letter portrayed a simplified house with an entrance. This letter became beta in Greek. The shapes of the letters changed gradually over the centuries, and some were added and some dropped.
With Greek, for the first time, a script read from left-to-right. Previously, the reader read from right-to-left.
The Roman alphabet
The Etruscans,
in what is now central Italy, learned the Greek alphabet from Greek colonists near Naples in around 700 B.C. The Etruscans did not use B, C, D, or O in writing their own language, but they kept these letters in their alphabet. Consequently, when the Romans learned the alphabet from the Etruscans, they took over 20 letters. They gradually added G, Y, and Z. Other peoples in ancient Italy used about a dozen similar alphabets for languages about which scholars know little.
Capital letters,
known as majuscules, are the Roman letter forms that developed from Etruscan letters. The most beautiful Roman capitals are often said to be those used in the inscriptions on the column built in A.D. 113 to honor the emperor Trajan. These letters probably have their thick-and-thin strokes and their serifs (small finishing strokes) because the stonecarvers followed the shapes written by a writing master with an edged pen or brush. The word capital comes from a Latin word that meant concerning the head. The term capital letter refers to the use of this set of letters at the head of a page or sentence.
Small letters,
known as minuscules, gradually developed from capitals. Scribes in the court of the emperor Charlemagne perfected the shapes used in modern small letters early in the A.D. 800’s.
The names upper-case and lower-case for capitals and small letters are based upon how printers once stored the individual pieces of type. They kept the minuscules in a case below the case for capital letters.
The English alphabet
added three letters to the alphabet used by the Romans: J, U, and W. English does not have a separate character for every distinctive sound in the language. Instead, it uses digraphs (pairs of letters) for some sounds, such as ch, sh, th. English also has several characters that represent more than one sound.
Other alphabets
Scripts have often followed religions. For example, the early Christian church was centered in Rome. Wherever early Christian missionaries traveled, they brought the Latin language and its Roman alphabet with them. In time, the local languages also came to be written with the Roman alphabet.
Similarly, Islamic missionaries brought Arabic writing with them. Persian is written in the Arabic script, as was Turkish at one time.
Missionaries from the Eastern Orthodox Churches did not insist on using Greek but translated their sacred books into local languages. Because of this practice, the Egyptian language Coptic used a version of the Greek alphabet that also has seven letters from an older Egyptian writing, Demotic.
Saint Mesrop, an Armenian monk of the A.D. 400’s, is said to have created alphabets for the Armenian and Georgian languages. Letters in these alphabets come in the same order as in the Greek alphabet, but the shapes are entirely different from the Greek letters. Extra Armenian letters are inserted within the Greek order, but extra Georgian letters are added at the end.
In the late 800’s, Saints Cyril and Methodius, two Greek monks who were missionaries among the Slavs, invented the Glagolitic alphabet. They based Glagolitic on Greek and used it to write the language of the Slavs, called Old Church Slavonic. Before 900, the Cyrillic alphabet was modeled on a more formal Greek alphabet with extra letters borrowed from Glagolitic. Cyrillic is still used for Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and many minority languages in Russia and in many countries formerly in the Soviet Union.
In the 1400’s, the king of Korea, Sejong, began an alphabet project. Sejong wanted a simple form of Korean writing to introduce Buddhist scripture and ideas to the common people. At this time, the Korean writing system used Chinese characters and was difficult to learn. King Sejong’s alphabet was first published in 1446. The alphabet had 28 letters, of which 24 are still in use. Today the alphabet is known as Hangeul (also spelled Han’gul). In Hangeul, letters are not written in a row as they are in such languages as English. Instead, the letters for each syllable are combined into a square shape that looks something like a Chinese character.
