Friday 29 April 2011

Blog No. 3

From here I went back to my Google search, and found a place to look at video's which I thought might be interesting. I first chose a video titled "the first alphabet in history was found in Ugarit, Syria." This then took me to the YouTube site to view the website. This video contained just images of ancient writings using the alphabet. It was good to see how they used it, but didn't give me any further information about the development of the alphabet. On the side bar on YouTube, there are other suggestions. Here I found another video titled: "Origin of the Alphabet' at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0obs1n-nA&feature=related'.

After watching it, i came across a few points that i must tell you about. Firstly, 'the Latin alphabet is the most used system in the world, around 58 alphabets derived from the Latin alphabet are used today.' I didn't even think about it but the video mentions that 'it is the only alphabet used for web addresses.'
With all this said, it is very hard to use many video clips on YouTube, as you cannot be sure as to the knowledge of the author and also to the validity of their research. So for this reason, I am going to move away from videos and back to my Google search.
Back at the Google search, after looking through 5 pages of the results of my search, I dint find any other sites of much relevance, so I decided to go look at journal articles through the Swinburne library site.
At the library site, I went to the databases. I decided to use EBSCo as it is a general database, with information and research on many different topics.
I chose 3 different databases within EBSCOHost to search, those being,
  • Academic Search Complete - as it is a multi-disciplnary database with full-text articles.
  • Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre - it is a database full of magazines, newspapers, newswires and reference books. Being as it is Australian based, I should have more of an idea how reputable they are compared to an overseas database.
  • Communication & Mass Media Complete - as this is the basis to the alphabet, communication.
From here I did a search for the original alphabet.
 It is important to mention how I peruse the article and choose which ones to look into. Firstly, the title, see if it sounds relevant, then look at its subject terms. If both sound okay, i look into the record, and see what the abstract says. If it still sounds like something which might help, I will then look at the full text, if it is available.


The first article I found was Titled: Scriptworlds: Writing Systems and the Formation of World Literature by David Damrosch. After looking at the detailed record, the abstract said that the author writes about how global scripts usually only consider their original language and that this can impact literature and culture. Therefore, this article is not really what I am looking for.

After looking at 30 article titles, I didnt get any results that I felt would help, so i decided to change my search terms.I decided to search using 'History Alphabet.' From this search, I found the article 'Tsade and He: Two problems in the early history of the Greek Alphabet' by S.R. Slings. This article looks like it might be helpful, but from the abstract, looks like it may be a little technical.

The first point that the author makes, is that a dutch scholar C.J. Ruijgh has argued that the Greek alphabet cannot have been created around 800BCE, and that is more likely to have been around 1000BCE. After a little reading (and yes I was correct that it was a little technical), i realised that the article was just about the timing of when parts of the Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenicians. My blog is just about the development of the alphabet, not necessarily about arguing when each letter was changed. I am not saying that this article is completely useless for my research. From it, I can make sure that I state that 'the Greek alphabet was adapted from the Phoenician, at the earliest, shortly before 800BCE. Therefore, not mentioning a specific date, but giving a rough date.

The next article I found was "'Y' is for Branch' by Mary Carmichael talks about a theoretical neurobiologist at Caltech, Mark Changizi, thinks that our ancestors largely modeled their alphabets after natural features in their environment. She also mentions that Changizi found that a vast majority of common letters take no more than 3 strokes to write (he hypothesises that this may be perhaps because short term memory can hold only 3 basic visual pieces of information at a time.)

The next article i found that was relevent was 'The Alphabetic Body' by Brian Rotman. Unfortunately After beginning to read this article, I discovered that this article was more about how we will always read, but that writing may eventually be something that is rarely done due to technology advances.

The next article I found was titled 'First Alphabet Found in Egypt' by Elizabeth J. Himelfarb. In this article she discusses how John and Deborah Darnell, archaeologists from Yale, discovered 2 inscriptions representing the earliest-known phonetic alphabet. These inscriptions were carved into a natural limestone wall alongside hundreds of Egyptian inscriptions about 4,000 years ago. This script that they found, incorporated elements of earlier hieroglyphs and later Semitic characters. Experts have agreed the alphabetic entries were probably in inscribed around 1800B.C.

After searching another 100 titles, I did not find anything of any relevance. With this being said, I will now search using physical books from Swinburne Library. I did a search over the internet, and from the first 10 items retrieved, there are 3 which i think would be relevant and are at the Prahran campus. I will attend campus on Tuesday and get these books and keep you updated.

Monday 25 April 2011

Blog No. 2

For the information in this blog, I continued with the weblinks that wikipedia provided. I did not mention this in the last post, as I forgot. But I gave credibility to the website that they linked to, the BBC, as it is a very reputable website, it is a well known educated site to go to for well researched information. It gave plenty of information on the subject, as well as many different ways in which to convey the information, for example, all the information I have read so far as well as things such as radio clips on the topic, such as 
This is a radio program called "In our time", hosted by Melvyn Bragg, where he speaks with Eleanor Robson (historian of Ancient Iraq and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford), Alan Millard (Rankin Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool), Rosalind Thomas (Professor of Greek History at Royal Holloway, University of London).

The following information I found at (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890)

There is some doubt and confusion over the letters S and Z. Phoenician had a Z (Zai), two S's (Semk and Sádé) and an SH (Shin). Western Greek adopted the shape and position in the alphabet of the letter Shin, but gave it the sound of Semk and the name Sigma, which probably comes from the name Semk. They adopted the shape, sound and position of Zai but gave it the name Zeta which probably comes from the name Sádé. They continued to use the letter Sádé but called it San, which sounds like Shin. Since its sound was the same as Sigma, they gave up using it after a while.






This is very similar to the modern Greek alphabet, except that it is written from right to left.
The Greeks disliked writing from right to left, and experimented with an in-between form called boustrophedon, which literally means 'as the ox turns', meaning when an ox ploughs a field, it turns at the end of each line and continues in the opposite directions so that when you get to the end of the line, you just go down onto the next line and change direction. When writing left to right, the letters are mirror images of those used when writing right to left.
Eventually, the Greeks finally decided on a left to right direction, and the alphabet looked something like this:





The Etruscans
The Etruscans, people who lived in central Italy in the first millennium BC, spoke a language which is not related to any other known language and has never been deciphered. The Etruscans adopted the Western Greek alphabet and used it. Although their language has never been deciphered, we know the way they used the alphabet. This is important because some of the consequences are still with us today.
The Etruscan language did not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants, i.e. s and z were the same sound to them, as were t and d, p and b, k and g.
The Etruscans couldn't distinguish between the k sound and the g sound, so they used the Greek Gamma (<) which represents a G, to mean a K sound. Therefore, the Etruscan alphabet had three letters for the K sound: C, K and Q. It can be assumed that they pronounced each of these with a slightly different sound.
They adopted the Sigma, which was a zig-zag with four lines, to represent the s sound, but couldn't decide how many lines to put in the zig-zag, using anything from 3 to 6 lines. This is important because the three-line zig-zag that later became our S.

The Romans
The Italian peninsula was inhabited not only by the Western Greeks and the Etruscans, but also the Latins. These people founded the city of Rome and became known as the Romans, although their language was called Latin.

The Early Roman Alphabet
The Latin’s adopted writing from both the Etruscans and the Western Greeks around the 5th Century. They had no use for the Z, Θ, Φ and Ψ characters of the Western Greek alphabet, so they left them out of their alphabet.
The Romans needed a letter to represent the f sound in their language, as the Etruscan language didn't have an f sound, and neither did Western Greek. (The Greek Φ was at that time pronounced ph, that is, a p with an h sound after it). Instead they adapted the Etruscan letter F (which was pronounced 'w') and gave it the sound 'f'.
They adopted an Etruscan three-lined zig-zag S and then curved it to make the modern curvy S. The early Roman alphabet looked like this:
A B C D E F H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X
There are a few differences from our modern alphabet. The C represented both the hard 'k' sound in 'cat' and the 'g' sound in 'garden'. I represented both the vowel we call 'i' and the 'y' sound that we get in the word 'yellow'. V represented both the U sound of 'put' and a consonantal sound which was somewhere between 'v' and 'w'.

The Letter G
The Romans had three letters for writing the k sound, C, K and Q. Also, the C was also used as a g sound. The Romans continued to use Q in certain circumstances before U, and invented G, by adding a bar across the C.
With this cleared up, they had no real need for K, but they kept it just in case it became useful later, while using mainly C and Q for the writing of Latin.

The Eastern Greek Influence
In the 3rd Century BC, Greek words started to be used in Latin and there was a need to be able to write down these words. The Romans transliterated most of the letters, making do with such combinations as PH instead of Φ and TH instead of Θ.
But they had no way of writing two particular Greek sounds, so in about 100 AD, the Romans borrowed two letters from the Eastern Greek alphabet.
·         Y, which was very much the same as the V they had already got from Western Greek. In Eastern Greek it had retained a long stem while in Western Greek it had lost it. The Eastern Greek pronunciation was by now slightly different as well. It is the slender U sound we get in the French 'tu'.
·         Zeta Z for the z sound.
Both the Y and the Z were only used for writing Greek words so the letters were placed at the end of the alphabet.
So the alphabet then looked like this:
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
Due to the Roman dominance of Europe, the Roman alphabet became the standard alphabet throughout Western Europe, and eventually was spread throughout the Western World.

Other Letters
The Anglo-Saxon language was written down using Roman letters after the Norman invasion of Britain in the 11th Century. There was no letter for the w sound of Anglo-Saxon, as it didn't exist in Latin. At first, they used the Runic wen which is represented by a narrow triangular p, but it was easy to mix up with an actual p, so they started to write it using a double u, that's why the name is 'double u'. At that time, there was only one letter for both the vowel sound u and consonant sound v, and it looked like a V, so W looks like two V's. The W was placed in the alphabet beside the V to which it was related.
In some forms of handwriting, V was written with a rounded bottom, but it still represented both the vowel u and the consonant v. Sometime later, people started using the pointed V when they meant the consonant and the rounded U when they meant the vowel. Because these were considered to be variations of the same letter, they were put side by side in the alphabet.
The final letter to be added to the English alphabet was J. Much like the evolution of U and V, I and J started out as variations of a single letter. Scribes might put a long tail on a final I if there were a few in a row. For example, Henry the Eighth could be written 'Henry viij'. It was up to the scribe to decide which version of the letter he wanted to use. In about the 15th Century, people started to fix on the I for the vowel and the J for the consonant, but this was not fully accepted until the mid 17th Century.
So from the 17th Century onward, our alphabet contained the same 26 letters as we now use. But even then, many scholars still treated it as having only 24: they still considered U and V as one letter, and I and J as one letter. It was only in the mid-19th Century that scholars fully accepted that these were separate letters and that there are 26 letters in the alphabet.

Friday 15 April 2011

Blog 1

To start my research for 'History of the Original Alphabet', I began with a google search. I used the term 'original alphabet' which came back with about 30,300,000 results.

The first item that came up was Wikipedia. Due to the fact that I know that Wikipedia is sometimes unreliable because anyone can amend the information if the subject/page has not been locked, I simply used ‘external links’ that they provided. From here they offered 5 links.
After perusing these links, I realised that I had to make a decision about what area I was going to focus on.
The second link went into information about how they wrote using this alphabet (right to left and then then every second line in the opposite direction) and also about how they pronounce blends and accents, but this isn’t the history of the alphabet per say, that is more about the history of writing or reading. They also discussed breathing marks and iota subscripts.
 With this being said, I have decided that at this point,  I will be focusing on strictly the original alphabet and comparing it to the alphabet we use today, rather than how it is written, read and pronounced. Some information within graphs and what not, may go into detail regarding these parts of the alphabet. But I will be predominately focusing on comparison of the symbols only.

From the link Animated examples of how the English alphabet evolved by Robert Fradkin, University of Maryland, I found out that the Phoenician characters were rotated 90 degrees for the greek alphanet  or with the non-symmetrical characters, they were flipped horizontally when the direction of Greek switched from left to right.

From the link The Greek alphabet on h2g2, I found out that ‘The Greek alphabet was developed in about 1000 BC. It was a modification of Northern Semitic, the alphabet which Hebrew is also derived. In Semitic languages (which include Hebrew and Arabic), vowels are relatively unimportant and have a lot of consonantal sounds. Therefore their alphabet had no symbols for vowels. The Greeks changed the alphabet so that consonantal signs which represented sounds not used by the Greeks were re-used for vowel sounds. Therefore Greek alphabet was the first in the world with signs for both vowels and consonants.’ ‘Most of the alphabets used today are direct descendants of the Greek alphabet. The word alphabet itself is derived from the names of the first two Greek letters, Alpha and Beta.’
I found a table on this link that shows the letters symbol, its name as well as its pronunciation. You can see that some of the symbols are very similar to the ones we still use today, such as A, B, E, H, I, K, M, N, O, P, T, Y, and X.
Capital
Lower
Case
Name in
English
Name as
Pronounced
in Greek
Modern Pronunciation
Ancient Pronunciation
Α
α
alpha
alfa
a as in bath

Β
β
beta
veeta
v
b
Γ
γ
gamma
ghamma
Before A or O, this is a sound that does not occur in English, like a soft g, the voiced version of the kh below. Before E, I or Y it is pronounced y as in yet.
g
Δ
δ
delta
dhelta
dh represents the voiced th sound in this and that
d
Ε
ε
epsilon
epsilon
e as in pet

Ζ
ζ
zeta
zeeta
z
dz
Η
η
eta
eeta
ee as in feet
ay as in day
Θ
θ
theta
theeta
th unvoiced as in thin and thanks

Ι
ι
iota
yotta
ee as in feet; like y in yes when before vowel
i as in fit
Κ
κ
kappa
kappa
k

Λ
λ
lambda
lamdha
l

Μ
μ
mu
mee
m

Ν
ν
Nu
nee
n

Ξ
ξ
Xi
ksee
ks as x in fox, never as x in xylophone

Ο
ο
omicron
omicron
o as in got

Π
π
Pi
pee
p

Ρ
ρ
rho
ro
r trilled as in Spanish or Italian

Σ
σ or ς
sigma
sighma
s unvoiced as in sauce, not vase. The first lower-case form is for the start or the middle of words, the second for the last letter of words.

Τ
τ
tau
taf
t

Υ
υ
upsilon
eepsilon
ee as in feet
slender u as in French tu or German fünf
Φ
φ
phi
fee
f

Χ
χ
chi
khee
kh represents ch sound in Scottish word loch

Ψ
ψ
psi
psee
ps as in copse. The p is pronounced even at the start of words.

Ω
ω
omega
omegha
o as in got
o as in pole
This link also went into information about how they wrote using this alphabet (right to left and then then every second line in the opposite direction) and also about how they pronounce blends and accents, but this isn’t the history of the alphabet per say, that is more about the history of writing or reading. They also discussed breathing marks and iota subscripts.

In the link The Development of the Western Alphabet on h2g2, I found out that ‘The first alphabet was the direct ancestor of all the alphabets in use in the world today, including our familiar Roman one, the Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.’ ‘The first alphabet was North Semitic, and it was invented sometime between 1000-2000 BC somewhere in the Middle East. It is far from clear exactly how, when or even where this happened. The North Semitic people had a working alphabet of 22 letters by about 1200 BC.

'The alphabet was probably inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had already been used for 2000. It had 24 symbols for consonants, but they were always mixed in with hundreds of other symbols. Therefore, the system was complex and difficult. They decided to reduce the number of symbols to 22, making it simpler to draw/write. Also, the hieroglyphs were designed for the Egyptian language, the new alphabet was custom made by the Semites for their language, which, as mentioned above, is the ancestor of both Hebrew and Arabic.’

‘By about 1100 BC, the North Semitic alphabet had settled into a form known as Phoenician, (as it was used by the Phoenicians, the great Semitic traders who lived in the land to the east of the Mediterranean).

Phoenician evolved into three major alphabets over time: the Hebrew, the Arabic and the Greek. 

Western Greek
The earliest Greek alphabet was developed either directly from Phoenician itself or from an almost identical version of North Semitic. The Greek language places much more emphasis on vowels than the Semitic languages (Phoenician, Arabic, Hebrew etc), so the Greeks adapted the alphabet. Due to the fact that these changes were not carried out uniformly across the Greek speaking world, two slightly different varieties of alphabet evolved, Western Greek, also known as Chalcidian  and Eastern Greek (now used by all the Greek-speaking world). It is Western Greek which our alphabet is derived from.

Most of the names of the letters were carried straight over from Phoenician into Greek, with slight changes to make them suit the language, even those letters whose sounds changed such as 'Alf.

Phoenician
W Greek name
W Greek sound
1
'Alf
Alpha
a
2
Bét
Beta
b
3
Gaml
Gamma
g
4
Delt
Delta
d
5
Epsilon
e
6
Wau
Digamma
w
7
Zai
Zeta
zd
8
Hét
Heta
h
9
Thét
Theta
th
10
Yód
Iota
i
11
Kaf
Kappa
k
12
Lamd
Lambda
l
13
Mém
Mu
m
14
Nún
Nu
n
15
Semk


16
'Ain
Omicron
o
17
Pi
p
18
Sádé
San
s
19
Qóf
Koppa
k
20
Rósh
Rho
r
21
Shín
Sigma
s
22
Tau
Tau
t

Wau
Upsilon
u


Phi
ph


Ksi
ks


Chi
ch