1. Historical Development of Alphabets:
– The English word ‘alphabet’ originated from the Late Latin word ‘alphabetum’.
– The Greek alphabet introduced independent vowel letter forms, distinct from consonants.
– The Latin alphabet evolved from Etruscan and became widespread in Europe after the Roman expansion.
– The Latin alphabet influenced the development of Romance languages and other European scripts.
– The Phoenician script, the parent of western alphabets, spread across the Mediterranean.
2. Evolution and Adaptations of Alphabets:
– Alphabets related to Phoenician like Proto-Sinaitic and South Arabian scripts.
– Etruscan alphabet remained unchanged for several hundred years.
– Latin alphabet has ligatures like æ in Danish and Icelandic.
– Runic alphabets used for Germanic languages until late Middle Ages.
– Latin and Cyrillic alphabets adapted for Asian languages.
3. Unique Alphabets and Adaptations:
– Hangul alphabet created by Sejong the Great in Korea in 1443 CE.
– Zhuyin (Bopomofo) is semi-syllabary transcribing Mandarin phonetically.
– Some alphabets only use a subset of the Latin alphabet.
– Etruscan script used for religious texts in imperial Rome.
– Runes replaced with Latin alphabet, except for decorative use.
4. Alphabetic Order and Acrophony:
– Alphabets are associated with a standard ordering for collation purposes.
– The Latin alphabet’s basic order is well-established, derived from the Northwest Semitic Abgad order.
– Phoenician associated each letter with a word starting with the same sound.
– Cyrillic originally used acrophony with Slavic words before adopting a system similar to Latin.
– Different languages have varying conventions for modified letters and letter combinations.
5. Orthography and Pronunciation Systems:
– An orthography is developed when an alphabet represents a language, providing spelling rules.
– Orthography maps alphabet letters to spoken language phonemes.
– Spanish and Finnish languages come close to achieving a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds.
– English pronunciation often needs to be memorized due to historical changes and loanwords.
– The degree of correspondence between alphabet letters and language phonemes varies.
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters correspond to phonemes, the categories of sounds that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral signs by lexicographers. This system was used until the 5th century AD, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was later modified to create the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic.
Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets—which use letters to represent both consonants and vowels—from both abugidas and abjads, which only need letters for consonants. Abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether, while abugidas represent them with diacritics added to letters. In this narrower sense, the Greek alphabet was the first true alphabet; it was originally derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which was an abjad.
Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a useful tool in collation, as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly known as alphabetical order. This also means that letters may be used as a method of "numbering" ordered items. Letters also have names in some languages; this is known as acrophony, and it is present in scripts including Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. However, acrophony is not present in all languages, such as the Latin alphabet, which simply adds a vowel after the character representing each letter. Some systems also used to have acrophony but later abandoned it, such as Cyrillic.
