Alphabetic Acrostic

An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.

The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite languages. However, Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters that diacritics modify to represent vowels (as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts), an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants (as in the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic), and an alphabet, a set of graphemes that represent both consonants and vowels. In this narrow sense of the word, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was based on the earlier Phoenician alphabet.

Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet, which was derived from the Greek alphabet, and which is now used by many languages worldwide, often with the addition of extra letters or diacritical marks. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines, there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille.

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 and number placements.

Etymology

The English word ''alphabet'' came into Middle English from the Late Latin word ''alphabetum'', which in turn originated in the Greek ἀλφάβητος (''alphabētos''), it was made from the first two letters, ''alpha'' (α) and ''beta'' (β). The names for the Greek letters came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet; ''aleph'', which also meant ''ox'', and ''bet'', which also meant ''house''.

History

Ancient Northeast African and Middle Eastern scripts

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, representing 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.

In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BCE, apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol. Dating to circa 1800 BCE and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BCE, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had developed about that time. Based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it probably was a syllabary, with symbols that were not needed being removed. An alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs, including three that indicate the following vowel invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BCE. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit.

The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called "Proto-Canaanite" before c. 1050 BCE. 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 distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script. The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) descended. Vowel-less alphabets are called abjads, currently exemplified in others such as, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution, and some "weak" consonants sometimes being used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable). These letters have a dual function since they can also be used as pure consonants.

The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a 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, and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of Phoenician was that it could write different languages since it recorded words phonemically.

The script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians. In Greece, they added vowels to the alphabet, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. It was the first alphabet in which vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Greek to represent vowels. Vowels are significant in the Greek language. The syllabical Linear B script that was used by the Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BCE had 87 symbols, including five vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation that caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.

European alphabets

The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula, giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which 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 most of the other languages of western and central Europe.

Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and Ȣ in Algonquian; borrowings from other alphabets, such as the thorn þ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from the Futhark runes; and modified existing letters, such as the eth ð of Old English and Icelandic, which is a modified ''d''. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian, and Italian, which uses the letters ''j, k, x, y,'' and ''w'' only in foreign words.

Another notable script is Elder Futhark, believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to other alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 CE to the late Middle Ages being engraved on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions found on bone and wood occasionally appear. These alphabets have since gotten replaced with the Latin alphabet. The exception being for decorative use, where the runes remained in use until the 20th century.

The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular.

The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the former Soviet Union. Cyrillic alphabets include Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by Clement of Ohrid, their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by Greek and Hebrew.

Asian alphabets

Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, many phonetic scripts exist in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic alphabet.

Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script, believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.

Hangul

In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet Hangul is a unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where design of many of the letters comes from a sound's place of articulation (P to look like the widened mouth, L to look like the tongue pulled in); creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day; and it places individual letters in syllable clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters, to allow for mixed-script writing (one syllable always takes up one type-space no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block).

Zhuyin

Zhuyin (sometimes called ''Bopomofo'') is a semi-syllabary. It transcribes Mandarin phonetically in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited. However, it is still widely used in Taiwan, where the Republic of China governs. Zhuyin developed from a form of Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet, the phonemes of syllable initials get represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary, the phonemes of the syllable finals are not; each possible final (excluding the medial glide) has its own character, an example being, ''luan'' written as ㄌㄨㄢ (''l-u-an''). The last symbol ㄢ takes place as the entire final ''-an''. While Zhuyin is not a mainstream writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system, for aiding pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers and cellphones.

Romanization

European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad (as with Urdu

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