Alphabet

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Definition

by Jan van der Crabben

published on 28 April 2011
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Translated text available in: Portuguese

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Phoenician Alphabet
by Ansgar (Public Domain)

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had

a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of
their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These
glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical
inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.

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.

This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which in turn was
refined into the Phoenician alphabet. It also developed into the South Arabian alphabet,
from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Note that the scripts
mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters
representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called abjads and still exist in
scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac.
Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. In contrast to two other widely
used writing systems at the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, it contained
only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common
traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could be used to write
down many different languages since it recorded words phonemically.

Ogham Script: Consonants

by Rico38 (CC BY-SA)

Phoenician colonization allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean.

In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true
alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed
in Greek and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true"
alphabet, with both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its
early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused
many different alphabets to evolve from it.

The Cumae form of the Greek alphabet was carried over by Greek colonists from
Euboea to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets used to
inscribe the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread
across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman
Empire, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became
used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and then for the
other languages of Europe.

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Translations
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definition into another language! So far, we have translated it to: Portuguese

About the Author

Jan van der Crabben

Jan is the Founder and CEO of Ancient History Encyclopedia, leading the non-profit
company to best fulfil its mission to engage people with cultural heritage and to
improve history education worldwide. He holds an MA War Studies from King's
College.
    

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External Links
Greek alphabet

wikipedia.org

Phoenician alphabet

wikipedia.org

Cite This Work

APA Style
Crabben, J. V. D. (2011, April 28). Alphabet. Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved
from https://www.ancient.eu/alphabet/

Chicago Style
Crabben, Jan V. D. "Alphabet." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Last modified April 28,
2011. https://www.ancient.eu/alphabet/.

MLA Style
 Crabben, Jan V. D. "Alphabet." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History
Encyclopedia, 28 Apr 2011. Web. 12 Dec 2020.

License
Written by Jan van der Crabben, published on 28 April 2011 under the following
license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. This license lets others
remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author
and license their new creations under the identical terms. Please note that content linked from
this page may have different licensing terms.

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ADD EVENT   VISUAL TIMELINE

 c. 3200 BCE

Hieroglyphic script developed in Egypt.

 2000 BCE

Minoan hieroglyphic script is invented.

 1700 BCE

Minoan Linear A script.
  c. 1600 BCE

Canaanite alphabet.

 c. 1400 BCE

Ugaritic alphabet of 30 letters is invented.

 1100 BCE

Phoenician alphabet.

 c. 1000 BCE

Death of Ahiram (or Ahirom) of Byblos, whose sarcophagus bears the oldest inscription
of the Phoenician alphabet.

 800 BCE

Earliest examples of Greek alphabetic script.

 c. 350 CE - c. 950 CE
Estimated use of the Ogham in Ireland and southwestern England.

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