History of the alphabet

The history of the alphabet began in ancient Egypt more than a millennium after the beginnings of writing . The first alphabet was created around 2000 BC. And belonged to the language of the Semitic workers in Egypt (see Protosinaitic script ). It was derived from alphabetical approaches in the Egyptian hieroglyphs . Most of today's alphabets are either derived from this original alphabet or they were indirectly inspired by it. The first real alphabet was the Greek , the most widely used the Latin .

prehistory

Before the end of the fourth millennium BC BC there were two well-documented scripts: the Mesopotamian cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphics . Both were well known in the part of the Middle East that produced the first popular alphabet, the Phoenician script . There is evidence that cuneiform script already had characteristics of the alphabet in some of the languages ​​that used it, as was the case with the later ancient Persian cuneiform script . However, these early forms do not seem to have evolved and therefore have no successors in later alphabetic scripts. The Byblos script has graphic similarities with both the hieratic and Phoenician script. Since it has not yet been deciphered, its possible role in the development of the alphabet cannot be determined.

First developments

Beginnings in Egypt

The Egyptians developed until around 2700 BC. A set of 22 hieroglyphs, which reproduced the consonants of the Egyptian language, as well as a 23rd, which probably stood for vowels at the beginning and end of a word. These glyphs were used as pronunciation aids for logograms , to mark grammatical inflections , and later also for writing loan words and foreign-language names. Although alphabetical in nature, it was not used in the sense of a real alphabet, but only in a logographical function, while the complex traditional Egyptian script continued to dominate. The first real alphabet was probably around the year 2000 BC. Used by Semitic workers in central Egypt. In the next five centuries it spread northward, and the later alphabets either descended directly from it or were inspired by its successors, with possible exceptions such as Meroitic script , an adaptation of hieroglyphic script in Nubia in the 3rd century BC. BC, even if many scholars also consider this to be influenced by the first alphabet.

Semitic alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet (middle column) is the mother of various modern alphabets; v. l. n. r .: Latin , Greek , Phoenician , Hebrew , Arabic ;
the modern equivalents of the Phoenician letters are on the same level as the "originals" in the middle column;
related letters are highlighted in the same color; Arrows assign letters to their respective equivalents

The Egyptian scripts of the Middle Bronze Age , including the Wadi-el-Hol script , have not yet been deciphered. However, they seem to be at least partly alphabetical scripts. The oldest of these writings come from Central Egypt around 1800 BC. According to Gordon J. Hamilton, these inscriptions are evidence of the invention of the alphabet in Egypt.

The Semitic scripts not only used the existing Egyptian consonant characters, but also integrated other hieroglyphs, so that they had a total of about thirty characters. Even if there is no evidence so far, it is assumed that the individual characters were given their own Semitic names instead of using the original Egyptian names. It is not certain whether these glyphs, when they were used as the script of the Semitic language, already represented an alphabet based on the principle of acrophony , or whether individual characters could stand for consonant sequences or even entire words. For example, the "house" glyph could only have stood for a b in Semitic (as the beginning of beyt = "house"), or it could have represented both the consonant b and the phonetic sequence byt , just as they did both p in Egyptian also referred to as pr . At the time when the script came into use in Canaan , it was already a purely alphabetical script, and the original "house" hieroglyph only stood for the sound b .

The Phoenicians were the first people in Canaan to use the alphabet regularly. For this reason the following stages of development are called Phoenician script . Phenicia was a Mediterranean state at the center of an extensive trading network. As a result, the Phoenician alphabet soon spread throughout the Mediterranean. Two of its variants were of great influence on the further development of the script: the Aramaic and the Greek alphabet .

Descendants of the Aramaic script

→ Main article : Genealogy of the alphabets derived from the Protosinaite script

As in the original Egyptian script, the Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets only represented consonants, i.e. a consonant script . The Aramaic script, which changed in the 7th century BC. BC developed from the Phoenician and became the script of the Persian Empire , is probably the predecessor of almost all modern Asian alphabets:

• The modern Hebrew alphabet originated as a variation of the Aramaic. (The original Hebrew alphabet is still used by the Samaritans .)
• The Arabic alphabet emerged from the Aramaic via the Nabataean script .
• The Syrian alphabet , which was used after the 3rd century CE, with the Pahlavi and Sogdian as intermediate stages, was the basis for the alphabets of North Asia such as (presumably) the Orkhon runes , the Uighur , Mongolian and Manchurian alphabet.
• The origin of the Georgian alphabet is not certain, but it probably belongs to the Persian-Aramaic (or possibly the Greek) font family.
• The Aramaic alphabet is probably also the ancestor of the " Indian group of writings ", which spread through the Hindu and Buddhist religions to Tibet , Mongolia , Indochina and the Malay archipelago . China and Japan, however, already had their own scripts and retained their own logographic and syllabary scripts.
• The Korean alphabet was invented in the 15th century. According to the history of its origins, it was an independent development. Gari Ledyard suspects, however, that some of the consonant signs could have been reduced to half a dozen letters that emerged from Tibetan via the Phagspa script of the Chinese Yuan dynasty ; the Tibetan alphabet also belongs to the Indian group of scripts. In contrast to the other alphabets, the other consonant characters emerged from this core sentence as a distinctive system of features .

western scriptures ←		Phoenician	→ Indian writing circle			→ Korean
Roman	Greek		gujarati	devanagari	Tibetan
A.	Α		અ	अ	ཨ
B.	В		બ	ब	བ	ㅂ, ㅁ
C, G	Г		ગ	ग	ག	ㄱ, (ㆁ)
D.	Δ		ધ (ઢ)	ध (ढ)	-
E.	Ε		હ	ह	ཧ	(ㅱ)
F, V	Ϝ, Υ		વ	व	ཝ
Z	Ζ		દ (ડ)	द (ड)	ད (ཌ)	ㄷ, ㄴ
H	Η		ઘ	घ	-
-	Θ		થ (ઠ)	थ (ठ)	ཐ (ཋ)
I, J	Ι		ય	य	ཡ
K	Κ		ક	क	ཀ
L.	Λ		લ	ल	ལ	ㄹ
M.	Μ		મ	म	མ
N	Ν		ન	न	ན
-	Ξ		શ	श	ཤ
O	Ο		?
P	Π		પ, ફ	प, फ	པ, ཕ
-	Ϡ		સ	स	ས	ㅈ, ㅅ
Q	Ϙ		ખ	ख	ཁ
R.	Ρ		ર	र	ར
S.	Σ		ષ	ष	ཥ
T	Τ		ત (ટ)	त (ट)	ཏ (ཊ)

Table : Distribution of the alphabet to the west (Greek, Latin) and east (Indian writing circle, Korean): The exact assignment of the Phoenician to the Indian characters (via Aramaic) is uncertain, especially for the sibilants and the letters in brackets. The transfer of the alphabet from Tibetan (via Phagspa ) to Korean is also controversial.

Greek alphabet

Adaptation by the Greeks

No later than the 8th century BC The Greeks also adopted the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it for their language. The letters in the Greek alphabet are the same as in Phoenician, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. While own letters for vowels would have been more of an obstacle to the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician or Hebrew texts, their lack in the Greek language was a problem, since vowels played a much more important role there. Therefore, the Greeks used those Phoenician letters, which were not needed for the consonants in their own language, to represent vowels.

The names of the Phoenician letters always began with a consonant, which corresponded to the sound value of the corresponding letter. Following this acrophonic principle, vowels were now at the beginning of the letter names in Greek. For example, there was neither the glottic stroke nor the h in Greek , and the Phoenician letters in question became a ( alpha ) and e ( epsilon ) in Greek , corresponding to the vowels / a / and / e / in place of the consonants / ʔ / and / h / corresponded to. However, since only five or six “unused” letters were available (depending on the dialect) for twelve vowels of Greek, the Greeks created digraphs and other variations, for example ei , ou and o (which became the omega ). However, some loopholes in the system have been ignored, for example the distinction between the long a , i and u .

Variants of the Greek alphabet emerged. One of these, the variant of Cumae and Chalkis , was used west of Athens and in southern Italy . The eastern variant was used in Miletus, in what is now Turkey, and adopted by the Athenians and eventually by the entire Greek-speaking world. The direction of writing changed over time, from the counterclockwise spelling in Phoenician to the clockwise method as in today's European scripts.

Descendants of the Greek alphabet

Greek, in turn, is the origin of all modern European scripts. The alphabetic writing of the Western Greek dialects, in which the Eta was pronounced as an h as in Phoenician , provided the development basis for the ancient Italian and finally the Roman alphabet . In the Eastern Greek dialects where there was no / h /, eta stood for a vowel. Numerous other scripts developed from the Eastern Greek variant: the Glagolitic , Cyrillic , Gothic (which, however, also took characters from the Roman alphabet) and possibly the Georgian and Armenian alphabet.

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Although the development of the scriptures can be represented as essentially linear, there are presumed interactions between different development lines or undoubtedly at least secondary influences besides the main development lines. The Manchurian script, which emerged from the Abdjadic scripts of Western Asia, was probably also influenced by the Korean Hangeul , which either represents an independent development or was derived from the Abugidas of South Asia. The Georgian script may have emerged from the Aramaic family of scripts, but was influenced by concepts from the Greek alphabet. The Greek alphabet, which itself is a descendant of the hieroglyphs from the first Semitic alphabet, was the basis for the Coptic script , which, however, incorporated eight further characters of demotic origin, similar to the Cyrillicus at the beginning, only the Greek alphabet with several special characters borrowed from the Glagoliza extended (or the Gothic and Old English alphabet added a few runic letters to the Greek or Latin alphabet, with the Gothic also including some Latin letters). The Cree script used for Native Canadian languages appears as a mixture of Pitman shorthand (which is an abruptly redeveloped script, but is probably based on Latin italics) and Devanagari .

Development of the Roman alphabet

The tribe of Latins , later known as the Romans, lived like the Greeks on the Italian peninsula. From the Etruscans , who in the first millennium BC Lived in central Italy, and the western Greeks took over the Latins around the seventh century BC. The script. The Latins left out four of the letters of the Western Greek alphabet in their script. They took over the F from the Etruscans , which the Etruscans had pronounced / w / , and changed the Etruscan S to its curvy shape today. The gamma was used to represent the G sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan . From these changes the modern alphabet emerged except for the letters G , J , U , W , Y and Z and a few other differences.

C , K and Q could all be used in the Roman alphabet to represent both the / k / and / g / sounds; the Romans created the G from the C shortly afterwards and placed it in the seventh position (which had previously belonged to the Z ) so as not to change the gematria (the numerical sequence of the alphabet). In the centuries after the conquest of Alexander the Great , the Romans began to adopt words from the Greek. To represent these, they had to expand their alphabet again. They therefore adopted the Y and the Z from the Eastern Greeks , which they added to the end of the alphabet.

The Anglo-Saxons began to write Old English with Roman letters after their conversion to Christianity by Augustine of Canterbury in the sixth century AD . Since the runic Wunjo , which was used in the beginning for the sound / w /, could easily be confused with a P, the w arose as a representation of a double u (which was then written as a v) and was added to the order next to the v set. The actual U arose as a rounded version of the V and became representation of the vowel U, unlike the consonant V. The J arose as a variation of the I . Originally it was only used as the last character in a series of several I's; in the 15th century the use of the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel began, which became generally accepted until the middle of the 17th century.

Letter names and sequence

The order of the letters in the alphabet has been around since the 14th century BC. Documented from the place Ugarit on the coast in northern Syria . There tablets with over 1000 cuneiform characters were discovered that did not correspond to the Babylonian and only contained 30 different letters. The characters are arranged in alphabetical order on twelve of these panels. There were two different sequences, one of which largely corresponded to the sequence in the Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabet, the other more that of the Ethiopian alphabet.

It is not known how many characters the Protosinaitic alphabet consisted of and in what order the characters were arranged. Of its successors, the Ugaritic script had 27 consonant characters, the Old South Arabic script 29 and the Phoenician alphabet only 22. There were two different ordering principles, an ABGDE sequence in Phoenician and an HMĦLQ sequence in South Arabic; Ugaritic preserved both systems, which were largely preserved in the later alphabets.

Letter names remained largely stable among many descendants of the Phoenician alphabet, including the Samaritan , Aramaic , Syrian , Hebrew, and Greek script. However , they were not used in the Arabic and Roman alphabet. The sequence of letters also remained largely intact in the Roman, Armenian , Gothic and Cyrillic alphabet, but not in the Brahmi and runic script and in Arabic, even if the latter also has an Abdjadic sequence as an alternative to the conventional arrangement.

The table describes schematically the Phoenician alphabet and its descendants.

No.	Protosinaitic	IPA	value	ugaritic	Phoenician	Hebrew	Arabic	Greek	Roman	Cyrillic	Runes
1	ʾĀlep ("ox")	/ ʔ /	1	? ʼalpa	ʼĀlep	א	ﺍ	Α	A.	А	ᚨ
2	Beth ("house")	/ b /	2	? beta	bēt	ב	ﺏ	Β	B.	В - Б	ᛒ
3	Gaml ("throwing stick")	/G/	3	? gamla	gīmel	ג	ﺝ	Γ	C - G	Г	ᚲ
4th	Dalet ("door") / Digg ("fish")	/ d /	4th	? delta	dālet	ד	ﺩ	Δ	D.	Д
5	haw ("window") / hll ("hallel" / praise)	/H/	5	? ho	hē	ה	هـ	Ε	E.	Е - Є
6th	wāw ("hook")	/ β /	6th	? where	wāw	ו	و	Ϝ - Υ	F - V - Y	У	ᚢ
7th	zen ("weapon") / Ziqq ("handcuff")	/ z /	7th	? zeta	zayin	ז	ز	Ζ	Z	З
8th	ḥet ("thread" / "fence"?)	/ ħ / / / x /	8th	? ḥota	ḥēt	ח	ح	Η	H	И	ᚺ
9	ṭēt ("wheel")	/ tˁ /	9	? ṭet	ṭēt	ט	ط	Θ		Ѳ
10	yad ("arm")	/ y /	10	? yod	yōd	י	ي	Ι	I.		ᛁ
11	kap ("hand")	/ k /	20th	? cape	cape	כ	ك	Κ	K	К
12	lamd ("stick")	/ l /	30th	? lamda	lāmed	ל	ل	Λ	L.	Л	ᛚ
13	mem ("water")	/ m /	40	? mem	mēm	מ	م	Μ	M.	М
14th	naḥš ("snake") / nun ("fish")	/ n /	50	? now	now	נ	ن	Ν	N	Н
15th	samek ("prop" / "fish"?)	/ s /	60	? samka	sāmek	ס	-	Ξ	X
16	ʻEn ("eye")	/ ʕ /	70	? ʻain	ʻAyin	ע	ع	Ο	O	О
17th	pu ("mouth") / piʼt ("angle")	/ p /	80	? pu	pē	פ	ف	Π	P	П
18th	ṣad ("plant")	/ sˁ /	90	? ṣade	ṣādē	צ	ص	Ϡ
19th	qup ("rope"?)	/ kˁ /	100	? qopa	qōph	ק	ق	Ϙ	Q	Ҁ
20th	raʼs ("head")	/ r / / / ɾ /	200	? raša	rēš	ר	ر	Ρ	R.	Р	ᚱ
21st	šin ("tooth") / šimš (" sun ")	/ ʃ /	300	? šin	šin	ש	ش	Σ	S.	Ш	ᛊ
22nd	taw ("mark")	/ t /	400	? to	tāw	ת	ت	Τ	T	Т	ᛏ

These 22 consonants describe the Northwest Semitic phonology. Seven of the reconstructed proto-Semitic consonants are missing: the dental fricatives ḏ, ṯ, ṱ, the voiceless alveolar lateral fricatives ś, ṣ́, the voiced velar fricative ġ and the distinction between voiceless velar and pharyngeal fricatives (ḫ, ḥ), which in Canaanite correspond to Chet merged. The six letter variants that were added to the Arabic alphabet represent this with the exception of the ś, which continues to exist in Ethiopian as a separate phoneme (ሠ): ḏ>ﺫال; ṯ>ثاء; ṱ>ضاد; ġ>غين; ṣ́>ظاء; ḫ>خاء. (It should be mentioned, however, that the information for the reconstruction of the 29 proto-Semitic letters is largely derived from the Arabic script.)

Graphically independent alphabets

The only modern alphabet in official use that is not graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian Thaana alphabet . Even if it was developed based on the Arabic and possibly other alphabets, it is unique in that its letter shape is based on numerical symbols. The Osmaniya script , which was created in the 1920s to spell Somali and whose consonant characters were probably pure reinvention, was officially used in Somalia alongside the Latin alphabet until 1972.

Among the alphabets that are not officially used at the national level, there are several with apparently distinct script forms. The Zhuyin alphabet arose from the Chinese characters . The East Indian Ol Chiki seems to be based on traditional symbols for "danger", "meeting place" etc. as well as on the inventions of its creator. (The names of the letters seem to reflect the sound represented acrophonically , but the final consonant or vowel is decisive and not the beginning of the name.)

The Old Irish Ogham script was based on line characters, and the monumental Old Persian inscriptions were written in a kind of alphabetic cuneiform, the Persian cuneiform .

Alphabets in special character systems

Claude Chappe's Alphabet for Optical Telegraphy

American finger alphabet

The Latin alphabet is included indirectly in some special systems of symbols. Examples are Braille , Morse code , optical telegraphy and the winker alphabet . The characters in these systems mostly have artificially designed shapes that no longer have anything to do with the shape of the Latin letters. For the Greek alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet, the letters in Braille are reproduced according to their transliteration into the Latin alphabet.

In the case of the finger alphabet , the shape of some characters is derived from the lower case letters of the Latin alphabet. This can be seen, for example, with the characters for c, i, o, w and y. For the letter z, the index finger traces the shape of the letter with a zigzag movement.

In shorthand , at least in the English-speaking Pitman shorthand, there is no connection to the written alphabet.

See also

• Genealogy of the alphabets derived from the Protosinaite script
• History of writing
• History of the Arabic script

literature

• Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (eds.): The World's Writing Systems. 1996, ISBN 0-19-507993-0 .
• David Diringer : History of the Alphabet. 1977, ISBN 0-905418-12-3 .
• Stephen R. Fischer: A History of Writing. Reaction Books, 2005, CN 136481
• Joel M. Hoffman: In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. 2004, ISBN 0-8147-3654-8 .
• Robert K. Logan: The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization. William Morrow and Company, New York 1986.
• Joseph Naveh: Early History of the Alphabet: an Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography. Magnes Press / Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1982
• BL Ullman: The Origin and Development of the Alphabet. In: American Journal of Archeology 31, No. 3 (July 1927), pp. 311-328.

Web links

• Animated examples of the development history of the alphabet
• Scientist page on the Greek alphabet

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Elizabeth J. Himelfarb: First Alphabet Found in Egypt. In: Archeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000), p. 21.
2. ^ AR Millard: The Infancy of the Alphabet. In: World Archeology , Vol. 17, No. 3, 1986, pp. 390-398 (396)
3. ↑ Harald Haarmann: History of writing. 2nd Edition. CH Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-47998-7 , p. 96
4. ↑ news.bbc.co.uk
5. ↑ trussel.com
6. ^ Gordon J. Hamilton: WF Albright and Early Alphabetic Writing . In: Near Eastern Archeology , 65, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 35-42, here pp. 39-49.
7. ↑ JT Hooker, CBF Walker, WV Davies, John Chadwick, John F. Healey, BF Cook, Larissa Bonfante: Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. University of California Press, Berkeley 1990, pp. 211-213.
8. ^ McCarter, P. Kyle: The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet. The Biblical Archaeologist, 37, No. 3 (Sep., 1974), pp. 54-68, here p. 57.
9. ↑ JT Hooker, CBF Walker, WV Davies, John Chadwick, John F. Healey, BF Cook, Larissa Bonfante: Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet . University of California Press, Berkeley 1990, p. 212.
10. ↑ JT Hooker, CBF Walker, WV Davies, John Chadwick, John F. Healey, BF Cook, Larissa Bonfante: Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. University of California Press, Berkeley 1990, p. 222.
11. ^ Andrew Robinson: The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. Thames & Hudson, New York 1995, p. 172.
12. ^ Gari K. Ledyard: The Korean Language Reform of 1446. Seoul: Shingu munhwasa, 1998.
13. ^ McCarter, P. Kyle: The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet. In: The Biblical Archaeologist , 37, No. 3 (Sep., 1974), pp. 54-68, here p. 62.
14. ^ Andrew Robinson: The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. Thames & Hudson, New York 1995, p. 170.
15. ^ Andrew Robinson: The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. Thames & Hudson, New York 1995
16. ^ The Development of the Western Alphabet . BBC, [updated April 8, 2004; cited 1 May 2007].
17. ^ Andrew Robinson: The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. Thames & Hudson, New York 1995, p. 162.
18. ^ AR Millard: The Infancy of the Alphabet . In: World Archeology , Volume 17, No. 3, Early Writing Systems (Feb., 1986), pp. 390-398, here p. 395.