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.
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