Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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There are doubters, though. Christopher Rollston, a Hebrew scholar at George Washington University, argues that the mysterious writers likely knew hieroglyphs. “It would be improbable that illiterate miners were capable of, or responsible for, the invention of the alphabet,” he says. But this objection seems less persuasive than Goldwasser’s account—if Egyptian scribes invented the alphabet, why did it promptly disappear from their literature for roughly 600 years? The glyph was taken to represent a wheel, but it possibly derives from the hieroglyph nefer hieroglyph 𓄤 and would originally have been called tab טוב "good". The earliest known alphabetic (or "proto-alphabetic") inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic (or Proto-Canaanite) script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle and Late Bronze Age. The script was not widely used until the rise of Syro-Hittite states in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. Here is a large cuneiform example found in Turkey. By Bjørn Christian Tørrissen - Own work by http://bjornfree.com/galleries.html, CC BY-SA 3.0, CC BY Descendants World 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.

Sharing no mother tongue, sharing no writing systems, they developed this kind of shorthand," Flanders says. Goldwasser, Orly (Mar–Apr 2010). "How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society. 36 (1). ISSN 0098-9444 . Retrieved 6 Nov 2011.Punctuation has its history as time goes on, [but] doesn't exist in the very early stages – there was not even word spacing. But there were various signs. The Semitic languages do not require explicit notation of vowels. Its consonants and consonant combinations, but they often have markings that indicate breath and sound. And so, as with many other modifications, punctuation came later. It is important to remember that British alphabet does not include digraphs that are widely used in the language such as ch, th, gh, wh, zh, and others. The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, [20] which were deciphered by Champollion in the early 19th century.

He estimates that Cadmus lived sixteen hundred years before his time (while the historical adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was barely 350 years before Herodotus). [17]Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic on Coins, reading and transliterating Proto-Hebrew, online edition. (Judaea Coin Archive) Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: an Introduction to West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography (Magnes Press– Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1982) Millard, A. R. (1986). "The Infancy of the Alphabet". World Archaeology. 17 (3): 390–398. doi: 10.1080/00438243.1986.9979978. JSTOR 124703.

Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, including Greek, Old Italic and Anatolian scripts. The alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol, which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn. The other scripts of the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, employed many complex characters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency; [12] which had restricted literacy to a small elite. The root l-m-d mainly means "to teach", from an original meaning "to goad". H3925 in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible, 1979. And so when the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published, which it first was in his day, he objected strenuously to this new publication because it was random. Why should things that begin with A be at the beginning?" B.L. Ullman, "The Origin and Development of the Alphabet," American Journal of Archaeology 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1927): 311–328.I'm not sure he really knew too much about the world, and he based [his system] on an Anglo-centric, European-centric, Christian-centric worldview." I.Being adopted from Phoenician Yodh letter, Ihas changed its form in the Greek alphabet and turned into an Iota letter. Its current form as the straight line is similar to Etruscan one. The Coptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the Hellenistic period, with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at the time. Those additional letters are based on the Demotic script.