History of the alphabet

[1] Its origins can be traced to the Proto-Sinaitic script that represented the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt.

[2] Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.

Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms (ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object visually depicted by the hieroglyph, as phonographs denoting sounds, or as determinatives which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds.

[13] Little of this Proto-Canaanite script has survived, but existing evidence suggests it retained its pictographic nature for half a millennium until it was adopted for governmental use in Canaan.

[15] The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad.

According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmus.

For example, Georgian scripts derive from the Semitic family, but were also strongly influenced in their conception by Greek.

A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen Demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write Coptic Egyptian.

Then there is Cree syllabics (an abugida), which is a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand developed by the missionary James Evans.

From the Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BC in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the 7th century.

The Anglo-Saxons began writing Old English using the Latin alphabet following its introduction alongside Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Christianise Britain in the 6th century.

The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the 14th century BC in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast.

The letter names proved stable among the many descendants of Phoenician, including the Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets.

The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic, but was abandoned in Brahmi, runes, and Arabic, although a traditional abjadi order remains or was re-introduced as an alternative in the latter.

The Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, and the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations.

The Santali alphabet of eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as "danger" and "meeting place", as well as pictographs invented by its creator.

Changes to a new writing medium sometimes caused a break in graphical form, or make the relationship difficult to trace.

It is not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet derives from a prototypical Semitic abjad, for example, although this appears to be the case.

Global distribution of the Arabic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
Greek alphabet on ancient black-figure pottery . There is a digamma but no ksi or omega . The letter phi upright in the photograph is missing a stroke and looks like the omicron Ο, but on the other side of the bottom it is a full Φ.
Etruscan writing, the beginning of the writing with the Latin alphabet
Global distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
Global 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.