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

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Main article: History of the Latin alphabet World distribution of the Latin alphabet. The dark green areas show the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts. The Alphabet– its creation and development" on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time featuring Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard, Rosalind Thomas

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…” P.It looked completely differently in Semitic and its current form was developed much later by Romans. Greek letter Pi that represents the same sound is more similar to modern Cyrillic alphabet. Q. Came from the Etruscans language via Roman adaptation. Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). Writing systems: A linguistic introduction. Stanford University Press. p. 77. ISBN 0-8047-1254-9. Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). Writing systems: a linguistic introduction. Second is whether the early alphabet was systematized and taught carefully, or casually and chaotically transmitted—a script of scribes or of the people. Some time ago, in line with Goldwasser’s arguments, I argued (first in a 2004 article, then a few years later in my book, The Invention of Hebrew) that the alphabet showed no sign of scribal transmission in its first 500 years. It was, as Goldwasser says, a “script of the poor,” until it was adopted by scribes and rulers in a special new way—as a symbol of local culture and belonging. Does this hold up?It seems writing was such a great idea, it just kept being created by humans living in all different parts of the world. Writing was invented in different places The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets. The sound values also changed significantly, both at the initial creation of new alphabets and from gradual pronunciation changes which did not immediately lead to spelling changes. [22] The Phoenician letter forms shown are idealized: actual Phoenician writing is less uniform, with significant variations by era and region. 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. Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters: a word was chosen with each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value. [30] For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for "house" was bet; hence the Phoenician letter was called bet and had the sound value b.

When people think about different alphabets they'll say, “Like Arabic? That can’t be the same as our alphabet, right?” They are confusing alphabet and script. Script is the different letter forms. If you think about Cyrillic writing for Russian, that’s a script. But the sequence of letters, the names of letters, and what we call the powers of letters – that is, the sound that’s associated with them – are the same across all alphabetic scripts. However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic, is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off (due to political divisions) into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Nabataean, the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of the Arabic alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the Second Temple period, from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from the Qumran Caves, such as the " Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll" dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC.But because all of our early alphabetic texts are instances of reuse—we have no “smoking gun” for its invention— there is no direct evidence about the social class or education of whoever developed this alphabet, nor about whether it was created by an individual at a single moment or a group over time. Yet the most heated arguments have been over precisely this. Anson Rainey thought the alphabet was invented by a “genius” educated in Egyptian writing at a bureaucratic center, while Orly Goldwasser takes as a “working hypothesis” that the inventors were a group of nonliterate Canaanites working in the desert. Without assuming a lone genius, Christopher Rollston accepts Rainey’s assertions about the inventors’ social class and education based on abroad general assumption about the nature of writing in the ancient world: “[u]ltimately, writing in antiquity was an elite venture”. By the Middle Ages in the West, punctuation starts to be fully developed. The great Malcolm Parkes, a wonderful medievalist, wrote a book called “Pause and Effect,” that has a lot of the scholarship on those transformations. We could have a whole philosophical discussion about this - punctuation doesn't really have semantic value, but it has structural import that becomes meaning-producing. M.Its original source is Egyptian hieroglyph that represented concept of “water”. The current appearance did not chance since Roman rule. Now, however, excavations at the inland city of Idalion on Cyprus by Dr. Maria Hadjicosti of the Department of Antiquities have finally brought to light a large archive of Phoenician texts, preserved because they were written not on perishable materials but on fragments of marble, stone, and pottery. These texts are now being studied in Nicosia by Professor Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo of the Sapienza University of Rome and Dr. José Ángel Zamora López of the Spanish National Research Agency, who have published their preliminary findings in Italian in the latest issue of the journal Semitica et Classica.