Chart showing details of four alphabets' descent from Phoenician abjad, from left to right Latin, Greek, original Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic.

The history of the alphabet goes back to a writing system for consonants. This was used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BC.[1]

Early history

Hieroglyphs in Egypt

By 2700 BC, the ancient Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the consonants of their language. A 23rd seems to have been for word-initial or word-final vowels. The first purely alphabetic script may have been developed around 2000 BC for Semitic workers in central Egypt.[2]

Over the next 500 years, it spread north. All later alphabets around the world have either descended from it or been inspired by one of its descendants.[3][4]

References

  1. ↑ Sampson, Geoffrey 1985. Writing systems: a linguistic introduction. Stanford University Press, p77. ISBN 0-8047-1254-9
  2. ↑ Hamilton, Gordon J. 2002. W.F. Albright and early alphabetic writing, Near Eastern Archaeology 65, #1 (March 2002): 35-42. page 39-49.
  3. ↑ Gaur, Albertine 1992. A history of writing. The British Library. ISBN 0-7123-0270-0
  4. ↑ Cristin, Anne-Marie (ed) 2002. A history of writing: from the hieroglyph to multimedia. Flammarion.
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