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

Product Information

Cross, Frank Moore (1991). Senner, Wayne M. (ed.). The Invention and Development of the Alphabet. pp.77–90 [81]. ISBN 978-0-8032-9167-6 . Retrieved 30 June 2020. {{ cite book}}: |work= ignored ( help) O.It did not change its original shape much since the original Egyptian hieroglyph looked like the eye and denoted the same concept.

However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter (the acrophonic principle), in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and `ayin became Greek alpha and o (later renamed o micron), and stood for the vowels /a/ and /o/ rather than the consonants /ʔ/ and /ʕ/. As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraphs and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o (which became omega), or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u. [20]Humans began to communicate using speech some 50,000 years ago but writing has only been a part of the human story for the last 5,000 years. This, of course, is precisely why we have come to rely on the alphabet because of its entirely neutral nature. In other words, Dewey created a system that functioned for his white male Christian world, but is highly problematic for librarians trying to file, say, books on Islam or feminism today. The numbers of letters also differ from language to language since it may be equal to either 13 letters as in Hawaiian Braille alphabet or 58 as in Hindi alphabet. The English language has 26 letters in the alphabet that represent vowels and consonants. What Was the Most Recent Letter Added to The English Alphabet?

Barry B. Powell, Homer and Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Phoenician is well prolific in terms of writing systems derived from it, as many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, and consequently Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian scripts are derived from the Greek alphabet, which evolved from Phoenician; the Aramaic alphabet, also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that the Brahmi and subsequent Brahmic scripts of the Indian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed. There are doubters, though. Christopher Rollston, a Hebrew scholar at George Washington University, argues that the mysterious writers likely knew hieroglyphs. “It would be improbable that illiterate miners were capable of, or responsible for, the invention of the alphabet,” he says. But this objection seems less persuasive than Goldwasser’s account—if Egyptian scribes invented the alphabet, why did it promptly disappear from their literature for roughly 600 years?The shape of he continues hillul "jubilation" but the name means "window". [ citation needed] see: He (letter)#Origins. Why do people keep referring to this as the “Phoenician” alphabet, rather than the Canaanite alphabet? The Phoenicians referred to themselves as the Canaanites, (see Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia) and the first examples were found in the Sinai. Per the article above: “…Phoenician script itself seems to derive from an abjad in use in the Sinai peninsula in the early second millennium B.C.E…” By the 5th century BCE, among Jews the Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the Aramaic alphabet as officially used in the Persian empire (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The " Jewish square-script" variant now known simply as the Hebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about the 3rd century BCE (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century CE). However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform. The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single individual conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian. [21] [ clarification needed] It was eventually discovered [ clarification needed] that the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs.

Sometime during the second millennium B.C. (estimated between 1850 and 1700 B.C.), a group of Semitic-speaking people adapted a subset of Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the sounds of their language. This Proto-Sinaitic script is often considered the first alphabetic writing system, where unique symbols stood for single consonants (vowels were omitted). Written from right to left and spread by Phoenician maritime merchants who occupied part of modern Lebanon, Syria and Israel, this consonantal alphabet—also known as an abjad—consisted of 22 symbols simple enough for ordinary traders to learn and draw, making its use much more accessible and widespread. Flanders says the system is "dense with problems" — the main one being that Dewey believed he could take all the learning of the world and give it category numbers.

Feldman, Rachel (2010). "Most ancient Hebrew biblical inscription deciphered". Archived from the original on 7 June 2011 . Retrieved 15 June 2011. The alphabet remained on the cultural periphery of the Mediterranean until six centuries or more after its invention, seen only in words scratched on objects found across the Middle East, such as daggers and pottery, not in any bureaucracy or literature. But then, around 1200 B.C., came huge political upheavals, known as the late Bronze Age collapse. The major empires of the near east—the Mycenaean Empire in Greece, the Hittite Empire in Turkey and the ancient Egyptian Empire—all disintegrated amid internal civil strife, invasions and droughts. With the emergence of smaller city-states, local leaders began to use local languages to govern. In the land of Canaan, these were Semitic dialects, written down using alphabets derived from the Sinai mines. de Hoz, Javier (31 December 2010). Historia lingüística de la Península Ibérica en la antigüedad. Vol I. Madrid: CSIC. pp.495–499. ISBN 978-84-00-09260-3. 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. The modern Hebrew alphabet started out as a local variant of Imperial Aramaic. (The original Hebrew alphabet has been retained by the Samaritans.) [16] [17]