The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent 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. The first letter in Arabic [script] is the alif, and that is the same as the alef [in Hebrew] which is the same as the “a.” The letters look really different. Part of that has to do with the way that the letter forms are made, what the technologies were, and so forth, and also, modifications over time. But there is only one alphabet.

de Hoz, Javier (31 December 2010). Historia lingüística de la Península Ibérica en la antigüedad. Vol I. Madrid: CSIC. pp.495–499. ISBN 978-84-00-09260-3. 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?

When people think about different alphabets they'll say, “Like Arabic? That can’t be the same as our alphabet, right?” They are confusing alphabet and script. Script is the different letter forms. If you think about Cyrillic writing for Russian, that’s a script. But the sequence of letters, the names of letters, and what we call the powers of letters – that is, the sound that’s associated with them – are the same across all alphabetic scripts.

First, is there any connection between the Egyptian and West Semitic sound values of the early alphabet’s sign inventory? No. The alphabet was derived from the Egyptian sign inventory on a strictly visual basis, with no reference to the Egyptian sound values. This is clear from a comparison between the sound values of each of the 26 probable original alphabetic signs and their Egyptian sources. In no case do they attempt to represent the same sound. Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the beginning: a short history of the Hebrew language. New York, NY [u.a.]: New York Univ. Press. p.23. ISBN 978-0-8147-3654-8 . Retrieved 23 May 2017. By 1000 B.C.E., however, we see Phoenician writings [..] The letter j is i with a flourish; u and v were the same letter in early scripts and were used depending on their position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts; w is a ligature of vv; in insular the rune wynn is used as a w (three other runes in use were the thorn (þ), ʻféʼ (ᚠ) as an abbreviation for cattle/goods and maðr (ᛘ) for man). Goldwasser, O. (2010). "How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (2): 40–53.

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The Alphabet– its creation and development" on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time featuring Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard, Rosalind Thomas Because the Canaanites are well-known from the Bible, and the Phoenicians are hardly known at all and were just a small subset of the Cananites (the Canaanite seagoing city-states on the coast of Lebanon). If researchers referred to as the Canaanite alphabet, this would be much more meaningful to the general public. Read also: Features all accurate certified Arabic translation servicesshould offer. Why One Need to Know History Behind English Letters?

So, we cannot answer definitively about the social class or educational level of the inventor(s) of the alphabet. However, we can (and should) ask if the early alphabetic inscriptions show any signs of scribal training—whether in Egyptian writing or in the alphabet itself. Because in fact there is ample evidence about what linguistic knowledge the earliest alphabetic writers did and did not draw on. The alphabet means you don't have to know things to start looking things up. You don't require any knowledge, apart from the fact that, say, Derbyshire begins with a D," Flanders says. R is for random the letter name nūn is a word for "fish", but the glyph is presumably from the depiction of a snake, which would point to an original name נחש "snake". This Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph (the "acrophonic principle"). [13] So, for example, the hieroglyph per ("house" in Egyptian) was used to write the sound [b] in Semitic, because [b] was the first sound in the Semitic word for "house", bayt. [14] The script was used only sporadically, and retained its pictographic nature, for half a millennium, until adopted for governmental use in Canaan [ citation needed]. The first Canaanite states to make extensive use of the alphabet were the Phoenician city-states and so later stages of the Canaanite script are called Phoenician. The Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a vast trade network and soon the Phoenician alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean. Two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of writing: the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet. [15] Descendants of the Aramaic abjad [ edit ] Chart showing details of four alphabets' descent from Phoenician abjad, from left to right Latin, Greek, original Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic. World distribution of the Arabic 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.

Phoenician colonization allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it. Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. Main article: History of the alphabet Each letter of Phoenician gave way to a new form in its daughter scripts. Left to right: Latin, Greek, Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic. E.Similarly to many other letters, it came into English through Latin alphabet that adopted Greek letter Epsilon, originating from Semitic. Original Egyptian hieroglyph that served as the source had a form of a man with raised hands. Currently, letter E is the most used letter in English which any of document translation companiescan tell you for sure.

The Georgian scripts are of uncertain provenance, but appear to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family. To me, this is an amazing intellectual achievement. If I said to you, “As a speaker, you know nothing about linguistics. I want you to analyze English as you use it and tell me how many sounds there are.” You couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. Could you, listening to a native Japanese speaker, know how many sounds though there were in that language that are meaningful? So, what happens in the ancient Near East around 1700 BCE is that there is a sufficient understanding of the sound structure of language to begin make a set of signs to represent those sounds. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet, so called when used to write early Hebrew. The Samaritan alphabet is a development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC. The South Arabian script may be derived from a stage of the Proto-Sinaitic script predating the mature development of the Phoenician alphabet proper. The Geʽez script developed from South Arabian. C.It has the Phoenician origin, where it had a different shape with the angle, and came into English through Latin.One thing missing at Idalion is literary texts. This may seem surprising, given the rich trove of mythical texts found at Ugarit, as well as the contemporary example of the Hebrew Bible and the development in Greece in the same period of the great Homeric epics. Perhaps Phoenician literature will emerge in future excavations and new archives—or, perhaps, as is often assumed, it was all written on perishable materials, and has simply been destroyed by time. But there is no evidence from other sources either that the Phoenicians wrote down their myths and stories. There are plenty of references to technical and scientific works composed in Phoenician—arithmetic, astronomy, and philosophy—but none to literature as we would recognize it until well into the Roman period. The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan.