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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

Alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which is used to write one or more languages based on the general
principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems,
such as syllabaries (in which each character represents a syllable) and logographies (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or
semantic unit).
The Phoenician script was the first phonemic script and was the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic and Hebrew.
[1][2] According to terminology introduced by Peter T. Daniels, an "alphabet" in the narrow sense is one that represents both vowels and consonants as
letters equally. The first "true alphabet" in this sense was the Greek alphabet,[3][4] which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician
alphabet. In other alphabetic scripts, such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent only
consonants; such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or
modifications of consonantal base letters, as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts.
There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular being the Latin alphabet[5] (which was derived from the Greek). Many languages use
modified forms of the Latin alphabet, with additional letters formed using diacritical marks. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines
(linear writing), there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille, fingerspelling, and Morse code.
Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words
to be sorted in alphabetical order. It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of "numbering" ordered items, in such contexts
as numbered lists.

Etymology
The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek
(alphabtos), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.[6] Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the
Phoenician alphabet, and originally meant ox and house respectively.
Informally the term "ABCs" is sometimes used for the alphabet as in the alphabet song (Now I know my ABCs ...), and knowing one's ABCs for
literacy, or as a metaphor for knowing the basics about anything.[7]

History
Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts
The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By the 27th century BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs which are called
uniliterals,[8] 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.[9]
In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appears in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai
peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BC, apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an even earlier
version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol dated to circa 1800 BC and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian
hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BC, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had been developed circa that time.[10] Based on letter
appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.[1] This script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it
probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs including three which indicate the
following vowel was invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BC. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit.[11]
The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" before ca. 1050 BC.[2]
The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By
the tenth century two other forms can be distinguished namely Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to Hebrew.[12] The South Arabian
alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Vowelless alphabets, which
are not true alphabets, are called abjads, currently exemplified in scripts including Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not a
satisfactory solution and some "weak" consonants were used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable (matres lectionis). These had dual function
since they were also used as pure consonants.[13]
The Proto-Sinatic or Proto Canaanite script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with limited number of signs, in contrast to the other widely
used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably the first phonemic script[1][2]
and 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.
The script was spread by the Phoenicians, across the Mediterranean.[2] In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the
ancestor of all alphabets in the West. The indication of the vowels is the same way as the indication of the consonants, therefore it was the first true
alphabet. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent the vowels. The vowels are significant in the Greek
language, and the syllabical Linear B script which was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BC had 87 symbols including 5 vowels.
In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.

European alphabets
The Greek alphabet, in its Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, where it gave rise to a variety of alphabets
used to write 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 state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant
languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and then for most of the other languages of Europe.
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented with ligatures, such as in Danish and Icelandic and in Algonquian; by borrowings from

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