THE HISTORY OF THE ALPHABET
INTRODUCTION
Writing is among the greatest inventions in human history, possibly the greatest invention, since it made history possible. (Robinson, 1995) After the cities appeared, people needed a way of keeping track of the vast number of things and people that were crowded together in the city’s many houses, palaces, store-rooms and workshops. (Avi-Yonah, 1974) The early city dwellers made-up marks or signs to represent the things and people they wanted to keep track of, and this is how the idea of writing first began. (Avi-Yonah, 1974) Once people could read and write, it wasn’t necessary to depend on memory to preserve knowledge, information could be written down, and it would be preserved exactly, as long as the material written on survived. (Avi-Yonah, 1974)
The ABC is such a simple experience for most of us, that once early school days are over, its use and form are taken for granted. (Gardner, 1982) As adults we rarely stop to think about the mental-cum-physical process that turns our thoughts into symbols on a piece of paper or on a computer screen. (Robinson, 1995) However, behind today’s letter shapes is a heritage as diverse and fascinating as that of any other art form. (Gardner, 1982)
EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHS
The earliest Egyptian writing dates back to 3100BC. (Robinson, 1995) Egyptian hieroglyphs had 24 symbols for consonants, but they were constantly mixed in with hundreds of other symbols, making the system complex and difficult. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) Due to the fact that these consonant symbols were mixed in with hundreds of other symbols, these writings were known as hieroglyphs and not an alphabet per say.
Archaeologists from Yale, John and Deborah Darnell, discovered 2 inscriptions carved into a natural limestone wall representing the earliest-known phonetic alphabet, believed to have probably been inscribed around 1800B.C. (Himelfarb, 2000) These inscriptions were carved into a wall alongside hundreds of Egyptian inscriptions about 4,000 years ago. (Himelfarb, 2000) This script incorporated elements of earlier hieroglyphs and later Semitic characters. (Himelfarb, 2000)
SEMITIC ALPHABET
The first alphabet was the direct ancestor of all the alphabets used in the world today, including our familiar Roman/Latin one, the Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The alphabet was assumed to have been inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, which had already been used for 2000 years. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The Semites decided to decrease the number of symbols to 22, making it simpler to draw/write. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) Also, the hieroglyphs were intended for the Egyptian language, the new alphabet was custom made by the Semites for their language. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) It was invented sometime between 1000-2000 BC, somewhere in the Middle East. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The North Semitic people had a their 22 letter alphabet working by about 1200 BC. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) By about 1100 BC, the North Semitic alphabet had settled into a form known as Phoenician. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) It was named Phoenician as it was used by the great Semitic traders who lived in the land to the east of the Mediterranean, known as Phoenicians. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
The Semitic/Phoenician languages still use the ancient way of writing from right to left. (Avi-Yonah, 1974) Phoenician has since evolved into three major alphabets over time: the Hebrew, the Arabic and the Greek (which is where our Roman/Latin alphabet is derived). (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
GREEK ALPHABET
The Greek alphabet was developed in about 1000 BC as a modification of Northern Semitic. (The Greek alphabet, 2002) Most of the names of the letters were carried straight over from Phoenician into Greek, with slight changes to make them suit the language. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) In Semitic languages, vowels are relatively unimportant and have a lot of consonantal sounds, therefore their alphabet had no symbols for vowels. (The Greek alphabet, 2002) The Greeks changed the alphabet so that consonantal signs which represented sounds not used by the Greeks, were re-used for vowel sounds. (The Greek alphabet, 2002) 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). (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) It is Western Greek which our alphabet is derived from. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The Phoenician characters were rotated 90 degrees for the Greek alphabet or with the non-symmetrical characters, they were flipped horizontally when the direction of Greek switched from left to right. (Fradkin, 2000)
Most of the alphabets used today are direct descendants of the Greek alphabet. (The Greek alphabet, 2002) After all, the word alphabet itself is derived from the names of the first two Greek letters, Alpha and Beta. (The Greek alphabet, 2002)
ETRUSCAN ALPHABET
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 although it has never been deciphered, we know the way they used the alphabet. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The Etruscans adopted the Western Greek alphabet and used it. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) This is important because some of the consequences are still with us today. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The Etruscan language didn’t 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 Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The Etruscans couldn't distinguish between the k and the g sound, so they used the Greek Gamma (<) which represents a G, to mean a K sound. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) Therefore, the Etruscan alphabet had three letters for the K sound: C, K and Q. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) It can be assumed that they pronounced each of these with a slightly different sound. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) 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, 3 to 6 lines. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) This is important because the three-line zig-zag that later became our S.
LATIN/ROMAN ALPHABET
The Latin alphabet is the most used system in the world, around 58 alphabets derived from the Latin alphabet are used today. (Wbais, 2009) The Latin/Roman alphabet is the only alphabet used for web addresses. (Wbais, 2009)
Around the 5th Century, the Latin’s adopted writing from the Etruscans and the Western Greeks. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) They left out the Z, Θ, Φ and Ψ characters of the Western Greek alphabet for the simple fact that they had no use for them. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
There were also a few letters that they needed to add to make the alphabet theirs. They needed a letter to represent the f sound, as the Etruscan language didn't have an f sound, and neither did Western Greek, so they adapted the Etruscan letter F (which was pronounced 'w') and gave it the sound 'f'. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) They also adopted an Etruscan three-lined zig-zag S but curved it to make the modern curvy S. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
At this time, 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 still a few more differences from our modern alphabet, such as; 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 Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) As mentioned above, the Romans took the Etruscans three letters for writing the k sound, C, K and Q. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) Also, the C was also used as a g sound. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The Romans continued to use Q in certain circumstances before U, and invented G, by adding a bar across the C. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) With this cleared up, they did not need K, but decided to keep it just in case it became useful later. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
In the 3rd Century BC, Greek words started to be used in Latin, so the Romans transliterated most of the letters, making do with such combinations as PH instead of Φ and TH instead of Θ. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) 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, very much the same as the V they got from Western Greek, is the slender U sound we get in the French 'tu';
· Zeta Z for the z sound. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
These letters (Y and Z) were placed at the end of the alphabet as they were only used for writing Greek words. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
At this time the alphabet 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 governance of Europe, the Roman alphabet became the standard alphabet throughout Western Europe, and eventually spread throughout the Western World. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) After the Norman invasion of Britain in the 11th Century, the Anglo-Saxon language was written down using Roman letters. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) Unfortunately, there was no letter for the w sound of Anglo-Saxon, as it didn't exist in Latin. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) To begin with, they used the Runic wen which is represented by a narrow triangular p, but it was easily mixed up with the actual p, so they began writing it with a double u, which is how it got its name. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) The final letter to be added to the English alphabet was J. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) 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, i.e. Henry the Eighth could be written 'Henry viij'. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) 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. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) So from the 17th Century onward, our alphabet contained the same 26 letters as we now use. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) With this said, 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. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004) It wasn’t until the mid-19th Century that scholars fully accepted that these were separate letters and that there are 26 letters in the alphabet. (The Development of the Western Alphabet, 2004)
CONCLUSION
The alphabet is very much something that we take for-granted. As stated above, it is something that we learn early on in life and then barely think of for the rest. It is very interesting to think of how the alphabet began and also the evolution it has made from then until now. 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.) (Carmichael, 2006)
We will always read, but that writing may eventually be something that is rarely done due to technology advances. (Rotman, 2002)
REFERENCE LIST:
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Slings, S.R., 1998, ‘Tsade and he: Two problems in the early history of the Greek Alphabet’, Mnemosyne, vol. 51 Issue 6 pp641-658, EBSCOhost, viewed 13th April 2011.
The Development of the Western Alphabet: Edited Guide Entry – Everything / Language & Linguistics / Alphabets and Writing Systems, 2004, BBC, Viewed 10th of April 2011, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890>.
The Greek alphabet: Edited Guide Entry – Everything / Language & Linguistics / Alphabets and Writing Systems, 2002, BBC, viewed 10th of April 2011, < http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A216073>
Wbais 2009, The Origin of the Alphabet, 2009, 3 December, viewed 11th April 2011, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0obs1n-nA&feature=related'>.
