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Where did the alphabet come from? |
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Written by Kevin McGeough
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Friday, February 05 2010, 11:03 PM |
The alphabet you are currently reading has a long history shared with the writing systems of many other languages such as French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic.
The word “alphabet” is actually derived from the names of the first two letters in the Greek and Phoenician alphabets (“alpha” and “beta”).
Despite the fact that alphabets look different in many languages, almost all of the alphabets in use today are related to some extent.
What makes an alphabet an alphabet is that the letters each represent a single phoneme, the smallest meaningful unit of sound in a spoken language.
The letters of an alphabet are standardized, meaning the sound they refer to are readily understandable by speakers of the particular language. There are numerous other types of writing systems. Syllabaries are quite common; these are writing systems where each character represents a syllable.
Many writing systems also employ logograms, which represent an entire word. Some writing systems, such as Japanese and ancient Sumerian, employ combinations of syllabaries and logographies.
Many have argued that the benefit of an alphabetic writing system is that it uses a much smaller quantity of signs and is much easier to learn than other writing systems.
The oldest known alphabetic inscriptions were found in the western desert of Egypt, at a site called Wadi el-Hol. This is a site along an ancient road that connected the Egyptian cities of Thebes and Abydos. Among the many inscriptions found at this site were two alphabetic inscriptions and although dating rock inscriptions can be very difficult, the best evidence suggests these were inscribed sometime between 1850 and 1700 BCE.
Given our present state of knowledge, it is difficult to make sense of these inscriptions but they are very similar to other alphabetic inscriptions found in the Sinai desert (called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions by scholars) that date to around 1500 BCE.
The individuals who “invented” the alphabet used in the Wadi el-Hol and Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were familiar with Egyptian writing (both the formal writing known as hieroglyphs and the cursive writing known as Hieratic) but spoke a Semitic language.
Rather than use the complex Egyptian writing system to express ideas in their Semitic language, these writers created a simplified system based on Egyptian.
For example, these ancient Semitic speakers adapted the Egyptian symbol for “house” to use to represent the sound “b”, which is the first sound in the word for house in Semitic languages (bet). So, rather than standing in for an entire word, the letters represented one sound.
These linguistic innovators did this with enough signs to represent most of the sounds used in their language. Thus, rather than having to learn a new sign for every possible word or syllable, the reader only had to learn a sign to represent each sound.
Although the early history of the alphabet is still obscure, its eventual adaptation by English speakers is well understood. The Phoenicians, who lived in what is now known as Lebanon, were a Semitic speaking people who adapted the alphabet for their own uses.
As they colonized parts of the Mediterranean, they came into contact with Greek speaking peoples, these Greeks adopted (and adapted) the alphabet for their own use.
Greek colonists who moved to the region around Naples (in approximately the 8th century BCE) shared the alphabet with speakers of Italic languages, which eventually led to the use of the alphabet in Latin.
Then, as the Romans expanded their empire throughout Europe, the alphabet moved along with them and was eventually adopted for use in other European languages.
Kevin McGeough is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Lethbridge.
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