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History of the alphabet

Overview

The history of the alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of letters basic written symbols or graphemes each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or...

begins in Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. The civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh, and...

, more than a millennium into the history of writing

History of writing

The history of writing follows the art of expressing thought by letters or other marks. In the history of how systems of representation of language through graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of...

. The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic

Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....

workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets

Middle Bronze Age alphabets

The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar undeciphered scripts, dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age , and believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabets:...

), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to...

and Latin

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...

alphabets, or were inspired by its design.

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Ancient Egypt

, more than a millennium into the history of writing

History of writing

. The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic

Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....

workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets

Middle Bronze Age alphabets

The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar undeciphered scripts, dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age , and believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabets:...

), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek

Greek alphabet

and Latin

Latin alphabet

alphabets, or were inspired by its design.

Pre-alphabetic scripts

Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform

Cuneiform script

Cuneiform script is the earliest known writing system in the world. Cuneiform writing emerged in the Sumerian civilization of southern Iraq around the 34th century BC during the middle Uruk period, beginning as a pictographic system of writing...

and Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...

. Both were well known in the part of the Middle East that produced the first widely used alphabet, the Phoenician

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BCE. Unlike its Canaanite predecessor, the Phoenician alphabet was non-pictorial. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization...

. There are signs that cuneiform was developing alphabetic properties in some of the languages it was adapted for, as was seen again later in the Old Persian cuneiform script

Old Persian cuneiform script

Old Persian cuneiform is a semi-alphabetic cuneiform script that was the primary script for the Old Persian language.Texts written in this cuneiform were found in Persepolis, Susa, Hamadan, Armenia, and along the Suez Canal. They were mostly inscriptions from the time period of Darius the Great...

, but it now appears these developments were a sideline and not ancestral to the alphabet. The Byblos syllabary

Byblos syllabary

The Byblos syllabary, also known as the Pseudo-hieroglyphic script, Proto-Byblian, Proto-Byblic, or Byblic, is an undeciphered writing system, known from ten inscriptions found in Byblos. The inscriptions are engraved on bronze plates and spatulas, and carved in stone...

has suggestive graphic similarities to both hieratic

Hieratic

Hieratic is a cursive writing system used in pharaonic Egypt that developed alongside the hieroglyphic system, to which it is intimately related. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus, allowing scribes to write quickly without resorting to the time consuming hieroglyphs...

Egyptian and to the Phoenician alphabet, but as it is undeciphered, little can be said about its role, if any, in the history of the alphabet.

Beginnings in Egypt

By 2700 BCE the ancient Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the individual consonant

Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper vocal tract, the upper vocal tract being defined as that part of the vocal tract that lies above the larynx...

s of their language, plus a 23rd that seems to have represented word-initial or word-final vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

s. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logogram

Logogram

A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are commonly known also as "ideograms" or "hieroglyphics", which...

s, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although alphabetic in nature, the system was not used for purely alphabetic writing. That is, while capable of being used as an alphabet, it was in fact always used with a strong logographic component, presumably due to strong cultural attachment to the complex Egyptian script. The first purely alphabetic script is thought to have been developed around 2000 BCE for Semitic

Semitic

In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages....

workers in central Egypt. Over the next five centuries it spread north, and all subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet

Meroitic script

The Meroitic script is an alphabetic script originally derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, used to write the Meroitic language of the Kingdom of Meroë/Kush. It was developed sometime during the Napatan Period , and first appears in the 2nd century BCE...

, a 3rd century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia

Nubia

Nubia is the region in the south of Egypt, along the Nile and in northern Sudan. Most of Nubia is situated in Sudan with about a quarter of its territory in Egypt...

to the south of Egypt - though even here many scholars suspect the influence of that first alphabet.

Semitic alphabet

The Middle Bronze Age scripts

Middle Bronze Age alphabets

The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar undeciphered scripts, dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age , and believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabets:...

of Egypt have yet to be deciphered. However, they appear to be at least partially, and perhaps completely, alphabetic. The oldest examples are found as graffiti

Graffito (archaeology)

The Graffito , , has been created by humans since Homo sapiens have been traversing this planet. There are even scratchings, doodlings, drawings, symbols, and art, etc...

from central Egypt and date to around 1800 BCE http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/521235.stm/http://www.trussel.com/prehist/news170.htm.
These inscriptions, according to Gordon J. Hamilton, are evidence that the place of the alphabet’s invention was likely in Egypt proper.

This Semitic script did not restrict itself to the existing Egyptian consonantal signs, but incorporated a number of other Egyptian hieroglyphs, for a total of perhaps thirty. It is thought, with no direct evidence, that they used Semitic rather than Egyptian names for them. So, for example, the hieroglyph per ("house" in Egyptian) became bayt ("house" in Semitic). It is unclear at this point whether these glyphs, when used to write the Semitic language, were purely alphabetic in nature, representing only the first consonant of their names according to the acrophonic principle

Acrophony

Acrophony is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself...

, or whether they could also represent sequences of consonants or even words as their hieroglyphic ancestors had. For example, the "house" glyph may have stood only for b (b as in beyt "house"), or it may have stood for both the consonant b and the sequence byt, as it had stood for both p and the sequence pr in Egyptian. However, by the time the script spread to Canaan

Canaan

Canaan is an ancient term for a region encompassing modern-day Israel and Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Jordan, Syria and northeastern Egypt...

, it was purely alphabetic, and the hieroglyph originally representing "house" stood only for b.

The first Canaanite state to make extensive use of the alphabet was Phoenicia

Phoenicia

Phoenicia what is now modern day Lebanon, was an ancient civilization centered in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal regions of modern day Lebanon, extending to parts of Israel, Syria and Palestine...

, and so later stages of the Canaanite script are called Phoenician

Phoenician alphabet

. Phoenicia was a maritime state at the center of a vast trade network, and soon the Phoenician alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean. Two variants of the Phoenician alphabet would have major impacts on the history of writing: the Aramaic alphabet

Aramaic alphabet

The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and became distinctive from it by the eighth century BCE. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels....

and the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890

Descendants of the Aramaic abjad

The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad
Abjad
An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....

. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE as the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:

The modern Hebrew alphabet
Hebrew alphabet
The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, and because of its place of origin, the Assyrian script is the better-known of two script standards used to write the...

started out as a local variant of Imperial Aramaic. (The original Hebrew alphabet has been retained by the Samaritans
Samaritan alphabet
The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic....

.)
The Arabic alphabet
Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world....

descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan
Jordan
Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, is a country in Western Asia spanning the southern part of the Syrian Desert down to the Gulf of Aqaba. Jordan shares borders with Syria to the north, Iraq to the northeast, Saudi Arabia to the east and south, the Gulf of Aqaba to the southwest,...

.
The Syriac alphabet
Syriac alphabet
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.-General...

used after the 3rd century CE evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian
Sogdian alphabet
The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdiana. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language,...

, into the alphabets of northern Asia, such as Orkhon
Orkhon script
The Old Turkic script is the alphabet used by the Göktürk and other early Turkic Khanates from at least the 8th century to record the Old Turkic language. It was later used by the Uyghur Empire...

(probably), Uyghur
Uyghur alphabet
Uyghur is a Turkic language with about 10 million speakers mainly in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Uyghur was originally written with the Orkhon alphabet, a runiform script derived from or inspired by the Sogdian script, which was ultimately derived from the Aramaic...

, Mongolian
Mongolian alphabet
Many Mongolian writing systems have been devised over the centuries. The number of scripts dedicated to the Mongolian language is matched by few other tongues.The oldest has also been the most successful one, and still in active use today...

, and Manchu
Manchu alphabet
The Manchu alphabet was used for recording the now near-extinct Manchu language; a similar script is used today by the Xibe people, who speak a language descended from Manchu...

.
The Georgian alphabet
Georgian alphabet
The Georgian alphabet is the writing system currently used to write the Georgian language and other South Caucasian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus...

is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family.
The Aramaic alphabet is also the most likely ancestor of the Brahmic alphabets
Brahmic family
The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central Asia and East Asia, descended from the Brāhmī script.The individual writing systems may be called Brahmic scripts or Indic scripts....

of the Indian subcontinent
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent and other terms, is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate south of the Himalayas, forming a peninsula which extends southward into the Indian Ocean...

, which spread to Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north of the Himalayas. It is home to the indigenous Tibetan people, and to some other ethnic groups such as Monpas and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han Chinese people. Tibet is the highest region on earth, with an average...

, Mongolia
Mongolia
Mongolia is a landlocked country in East and Central Asia. It borders Russia to the north and the People's Republic of China to the south, east and west. Although Mongolia does not share a border with Kazakhstan, its western-most point is only 24 miles from Kazakhstan's eastern tip. Ulan Bator,...

, Indochina
Indochina
Indochina, or the Indochinese Peninsula, is a region in Southeast Asia. It lies roughly east of India, south of China.The word has French origins, Indochine, and was adopted when French colonizers in Vietnam began expanding their territory to bordering countries.Historically, the countries of...

, and the Malay archipelago
Malay Archipelago
The Malay Archipelago and Maritime Southeast Asia are names given to the archipelago located between mainland Southeastern Asia and Australia. Located between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the group of 20,000 islands is the world's largest archipelago by area...

along with the Hindu
Hinduism
Hinduism is the predominant religion of the Indian subcontinent. Hinduism is often referred to as ', a Sanskrit phrase meaning "the eternal law", by its adherents. Generic "types" of Hinduism that attempt to accommodate a variety of complex views span folk and Vedic Hinduism to bhakti tradition, as...

and Buddhist
Buddhism
Buddhism, as traditionally conceived, is a path of salvation attained through insight into the ultimate nature of reality. It encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha...

religions. (China
China
China is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....

and Japan
Japan
is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, People's Republic of China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

, while absorbing Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism, as traditionally conceived, is a path of salvation attained through insight into the ultimate nature of reality. It encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha...

, were already literate and retained their logographic
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are commonly known also as "ideograms" or "hieroglyphics", which...

and syllabic
Syllabary
A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary typically represents an optional consonant sound followed by a vowel sound.-Languages using syllabaries:...

scripts.)
The Hangul
Hangul
Hangul is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logographic Sino-Korean hanja system...

alphabet was invented in Korea
Korea
Korea is a civilization and formerly unified nation currently divided into two states. Located on the Korean Peninsula, it borders China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait....

in the 15th century. Tradition holds that it was an autonomous invention; however, Gari Ledyard
Gari Ledyard
Gari Keith Ledyard is Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University. He is best known for his work on the history of the hangul alphabet.-Biography:...

suggests that portions of its consonantal system may be based on half a dozen letters derived from Tibetan
Tibetan script
The Tibetan script is an abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Denzongkha, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language. The printed form of the script is called uchen script while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday writing is...

via the imperial Phagspa alphabet
Phagspa script
The Phags-pa script was an abugida designed by the Tibetan Lama ´Gro-mgon Chos-rgyal ´Phags-pa for the emperor Kublai Khan during the Yuan Dynasty in China, as a unified script for all languages within the Yuan Dynasty, although...

of the Yuan dynasty
Yuan Dynasty
The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was both the continuation of the Mongol Empire and the Mongol founded historical state in Mongolia and China, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. Although the dynasty was established by Kublai Khan, he had his grandfather Genghis Khan placed on the...

of China; Tibetan is a Brahmic script. Uniquely among the world's alphabets, the rest of the consonants are derived from this core as a featural
Distinctive feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory.Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features,...

system.

{| class=wikitable style="text-align:center;"

|-
! colspan=2 | Western ←
! rowspan=2 | Phoenician
! colspan=3 | → Brahmic
! rowspan=2 | → Korean
|-
! Latin
! Greek
! Gujarati
! Devanagari
! Tibetan
|-
| A
| Α
|
| અ
| अ
| ཨ
|
|-
| B
| В
|
| બ
| ब
| བ
| ㅂ, ㅁ
|-
| C, G
| Г
|
| ગ
| ग
| ག
| ㄱ, (ㆁ)
|-
| D
| Δ
|
| ધ (ઢ)
| ध (ढ)
| -
|
|-
| E
| Ε
|
| હ
| ह
| ཧ
| (ㅱ)
|-
| F, V
| Ϝ, Υ
|
| વ
| व
| ཝ
|
|-
| Z
| Ζ
|
| દ (ડ)
| द (ड)
| ད (ཌ)
| ㄷ, ㄴ
|-
| H
| Η
|
| ઘ
| घ
| -
|
|-
| -
| Θ
|
| થ (ઠ)
| थ (ठ)
| ཐ (ཋ)
|
|-
| I, J
| Ι
|
| ય
| य
| ཡ
|
|-
| K
| Κ
|
| ક
| क
| ཀ
|
|-
| L
| Λ
|
| લ
| ल
| ལ
| ㄹ
|-
| M
| Μ
|
| મ
| म
| མ
|
|-
| N
| Ν
|
| ન
| न
| ན
|
|-
| -
| Ξ
|
| શ
| श
| ཤ
|
|-
| O
| Ο
|
| ?
|
|
|-
| P
| Π
|
| પ, ફ
| प, फ
| པ, ཕ
|
|-
| -
| Ϡ
|
| સ
| स
| ས
| ㅈ, ㅅ
|-
| Q
| Ϙ
|
| ખ
| ख
| ཁ
|
|-
| R
| Ρ
|
| ર
| र
| ར
|
|-
| S
| Σ
|
| ષ
| ष
| ཥ
|
|-
| T
| Τ
|
| ત (ટ)
| त (ट)
| ཏ (ཊ)
|
|}
Table: The spread of the alphabet west (Greek, Latin) and east (Brahmic, Korean). Note that the exact correspondence between Phoenician (through Aramaic) to Brahmic is uncertain, especially for the sibilants and the letters in parentheses. The transmission of the alphabet from Tibetan (through Phagspa) to Hangul is also controversial.

Transmission to Greece

By at least the 8th century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowel

Vowel

s played a much more important role. The Greeks adapted those Phoenician letters for consonants they didn't use to write vowels. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented, something called the acrophonic principle

Acrophony

Acrophony is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself...

. However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter, in Greek these letters now stood for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or h, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and he became Greek alpha
Alpha (letter)
Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Aleph...

and e (later renamed e psilon), and stood for the vowels and rather than the consonants and . As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraph

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

s and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o (which became omega), or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.

Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek or Chalcidian

Cumae alphabet

The Cumae alphabet was a western variant of the early Greek alphabet, used between the 8th to 5th centuries BC. It was specifically used in Euboea and the areas west of Athens, especially in the Greek colonies of southern Italy. It was this variant that gave rise to the Old Italic alphabets,...

, was west of Athens

Athens

Athens , the capital and largest city of Greece, dominates the Attica periphery; as one of the world's oldest cities, its recorded history spans around 3,400 years....

and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek

History of the Greek alphabet

The History of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms and continues to the present day. This article concentrates on the early period, before the codification of the now-standard Greek alphabet....

, was used in present-day Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in Western Asia and Thrace in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe...

, and the Athenians, and eventually the rest of the world that spoke Greek adopted this variation. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left.

Descendants of the Greek alphabet

Greek is in turn the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta

Eta (letter)

Eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 8. Letters that arose from Eta include the Latin H and the Cyrillic letter И....

remained an h, gave rise to the Old Italic

Old Italic alphabet

Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European languages...

and Roman alphabets. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic

Glagolitic alphabet

The Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagolъ "utterance"...

, Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script writing system isan alphabet developed in the First Bulgarian Empire, and used in the Slavic national languages of Russian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and...

, Armenian

Armenian alphabet

The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian monk. Until the 19th century, Classical Armenian was the literary language; since then, the Armenian alphabet has been used to...

, Gothic

Gothic alphabet

The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by Philostorgius to Ulfilas , used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. Before its creation in the fourth century in Nicopolis ad Istrum , Gothic was possibly written in runes. It was primarily used by Ulfilas to...

(which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian

Georgian alphabet

The Georgian alphabet is the writing system currently used to write the Georgian language and other South Caucasian languages , and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus...

.

Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet

Manchu alphabet

The Manchu alphabet was used for recording the now near-extinct Manchu language; a similar script is used today by the Xibe people, who speak a language descended from Manchu...

, descended from the abjad

Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol always or usually stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel....

s of West Asia, was also influenced by Korean hangul

Hangul

Hangul is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logographic Sino-Korean hanja system...

, which was either independent (the traditional view) or derived from the abugida

Abugida

An abugida , also called an alphasyllabary, is a segmental writing system which is based on consonants, and in which vowel notation is obligatory but secondary. This contrasts with an alphabet proper, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is...

s of South Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception by Greek. The Greek alphabet, itself ultimately a derivative of hieroglyphs through that first Semitic alphabet, later adopted an additional half dozen demotic

Demotic

Demotic may refer to:*Demotic Greek, a variety of the Greek language*Demotic , a script and stage of the Egyptian language...

hieroglyphs when it was used to write Coptic

Coptic alphabet

The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is first Alphabetic Script used for the Egyptian Language...

Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics

Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

Canadian Aboriginal syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of abugidas used to write a number of Aboriginal Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and Athabaskan language families....

(an abugida

Abugida

), which appears to be a fusion of Devanagari

Devanagari

Devanagari , also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal. It is written from left to right, lacks distinct letter cases, and is recognizable by a distinctive horizontal line running along the tops of the letters that links them together. Devanāgarī is the main script used to...

and Pitman shorthand

Pitman Shorthand

Pitman shorthand is a system of shorthand for the English language developed by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman , who first presented it in 1837. Like most systems of shorthand, it is a phonetic system; the symbols do not represent letters, but rather sounds, and words are, for the most part, written...

; the latter may be an independent invention, but likely has its ultimate origins in cursive Latin script.

Development of the Roman alphabet

A tribe known as the Latins

Latins

"Latins" can refer to several groups of people. Its meaning has changed throughout time, and can still refer to different things even today.-Antiquity:...

, who became known as the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscans

Etruscan civilization

Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to the culture and way of life of a people of ancient Italy and Corsica, residing between the Apennines and the River Tiber, whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci or Tusci...

, a tribe living in the first millennium BCE in central Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...

, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the fifth century. In adopted writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter

Etruscan language

The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna , in Italy...

F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ef or eff.-History:The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the sound /v/, and originally probably represented either a "hook" or a "club"...

, pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S

S is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound word; the plural is esses.- Usage :...

. To represent the G

G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled gee.-History:The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar from voiceless...

sound in Greek and the K

K is the eleventh letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled kay.-History and usage:...

sound in Etruscan, the Gamma

Gamma

Gamma uppercase Γ, lowercase γ; ) is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Gimel . Letters that arose from Gamma include the Roman C and G and the Cyrillic letters Ge Г and Ghe Ґ.In Modern Greek, it...

was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters G

, J

Ĵ or ĵ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, ....

, U

U is the twenty-first letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled u; the plural is ues, though this is rare.-History:...

, W

W is the twenty-third letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled double-u; the plural is double-ues, though this is rare.-History:...

, Y

The letter Y is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled wye or occasionally wy, plural wyes.-History:...

, and Z

Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed, , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta . In American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form...

, as well as some other differences.
C

Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless postalveolar affricate , and is equivalent to the voiceless postalveolar affricate, , or the voiceless retroflex affricate,...

, K

K is the eleventh letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled kay.-History and usage:...

, and Q

Q is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled cue.- History :The Semitic sound value of Qôp was , a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones...

in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the /k/ and /g/ sounds; the Romans soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, where Z

had been, to maintain the gematria

Gematria

Gematria or gimatria is a system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other, or bear some relation to the number itself as it may apply to a person's age, the calendar year, or the like...

(the numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries after Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great

Alexander III of Macedon, popularly known as Alexander the Great , was an Ancient Greek king of Macedon who created one of the largest empires in ancient history...

conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the third century BCE, the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again in order to write these words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed Y

The letter Y is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled wye or occasionally wy, plural wyes.-History:...

and Z

, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words.

The Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxons

Anglo-Saxons is the term usually used to describe the invading Germanic tribes in the south and east of Great Britain from the early 5th century AD, and their creation of the English nation, to the Norman conquest of 1066...

began using Roman letters to write Old English

Old English language

Old English , also called Anglo-Saxon, is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary...

as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury's

Augustine of Canterbury

Augustine of Canterbury was a Benedictine monk who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 598...

mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic

Runic alphabet

The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...

wen, which was first used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the time looked like a v, the double u looked like two v's, W

W is the twenty-third letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled double-u; the plural is double-ues, though this is rare.-History:...

was placed in the alphabet by V

V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled vee.-The letter:The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....

. U

U is the twenty-first letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled u; the plural is ues, though this is rare.-History:...

developed when people began to use the rounded U

U is the twenty-first letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled u; the plural is ues, though this is rare.-History:...

when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V

when the meant the consonant V

. J

Ĵ or ĵ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, ....

began as a variation of I

I is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name is spelled i; the plural is ies, though this is rare.-History:...

, in which a long tail was added to the final I

I is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name is spelled i; the plural is ies, though this is rare.-History:...

when there were several in a row. People began to use the J

Ĵ or ĵ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, ....

for the consonant and the I

I is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name is spelled i; the plural is ies, though this is rare.-History:...

for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century.

Letter names and sequence of some alphabets

The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BCE, in a place called Ugarit

Ugarit

Ugarit was an ancient cosmopolitan port city, sited on the Mediterranean coast...

located on Syria

Syria

Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south and Israel to the southwest....

’s northern coast. Tablets found there bear over one thousand cuneiform signs, but these signs are not Babylonian, and there are only thirty distinct characters. About twelve of the tablets have the signs set out in alphabetic order. There are two orders found, one which is nearly identical to the order used for Hebrew

Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, and because of its place of origin, the Assyrian script is the better-known of two script standards used to write the...

, Greek

Greek alphabet

, and Latin

Latin alphabet

, and a second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian

Ge'ez alphabet

Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is an abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church...

.

It is not known how many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had, nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet

Ugaritic alphabet

The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad , used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Northwest Semitic language discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 31 letters...

had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabet

South Arabian alphabet

The ancient South Arabian alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Yemeni Old South Arabic languages of the Sabaean, Qatabanian, Hadrami , Minaean, Himyarite, and proto-Ge'ez in Dʿmt...

s had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet

Phoenician alphabet

was reduced to 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, an ABGDE order in Phoenician, and an HMĦLQ order in the south; Ugaritic preserved both orders. Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of these scripts.

The letter names proved stable among many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan

Samaritan alphabet

The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic....

, Aramaic

Aramaic alphabet

, Syriac

Syriac alphabet

The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.-General...

, Hebrew

Hebrew alphabet

, and Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

. However, they were abandoned in Arabic

Arabic alphabet

The Arabic alphabet is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world....

and Latin

Latin alphabet

. The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, Armenian

Armenian alphabet

, Gothic

Gothic alphabet

, and Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet

, but was abandoned in Brahmi

Brahmi

Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of alphabets. The best known inscriptions in Brāhmī are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE...

, Runic

Runic alphabet

, and Arabic, although a traditional abjadi order remains or was re-introduced as an alternative in the latter.

The table is a schematic of the Phoenician alphabet and its descendants.

nr.	Proto-Canaanite	IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...	value	Ugaritic	Phoenician	Hebrew	Arabic	other descendants
1			1					Α A A The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled a; the plural is aes, though this is rare.- History :... А ᚨ Ansuz rune The a-rune , Younger Futhark was probably named after the Æsir, in Proto-Germanic *Ansuz.The shape of the rune is likely from Neo-Etruscan a , like Latin A ultimately from Phoenician Aleph....
2			2					Β Beta (letter) Beta is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 2. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Beth . Letters that arose from Beta include the Roman B and the Cyrillic letters Б and В... B B B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled bee, plural bees.-History:The letter B might have started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet... В-Б ᛒ
3			3					Γ C C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless postalveolar affricate , and is equivalent to the voiceless postalveolar affricate, , or the voiceless retroflex affricate,... -G G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled gee.-History:The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar from voiceless... Г ᚲ
4			4					Δ D D D is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled dee, plural dees.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this... Д
5	jubilation Hallel Hallel is a Jewish prayer—a verbatim recitation from Psalms 113-118, which is used for praise and thanksgiving that is recited by observant Jews on Jewish holidays.- Hallel and the Jewish holy days :... "		5					Ε E E E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. It is also the second vowel in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled e; the plural is ees, though this is rare... Е-Є
6			6					F F F is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ef or eff.-History:The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the sound /v/, and originally probably represented either a "hook" or a "club"... -V V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled vee.-The letter:The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.... -Y Y The letter Y is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled wye or occasionally wy, plural wyes.-History:... У ᚢ
7			7					Ζ Z Z Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed, , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta . In American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form... З
8			8					Η H H H is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English is aitch , plural aitches, though it is also pronounced haitch in some dialects .-History:... И ᚺ
9			9					Θ Ѳ
10			10					Ι I I I is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name is spelled i; the plural is ies, though this is rare.-History:... І ᛁ
11			20					Κ K K K is the eleventh letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled kay.-History and usage:... К
12			30					Λ L L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni and Dogrib alphabets, and of several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language... Л ᛚ
13			40					Μ M M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled em.-History:The letter M derives its shape from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water. It is known that Semitic people working in Egypt c... М
14			50					Ν N N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled en.- Usage :N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages,... Н
15			60				-	Ξ X X X is the twenty-fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ex, plural exes .-History:...
16			70					Ο O O O is the fifteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled o; the plural is oes, though this is rare.- History :... О
17			80					Π P P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled pee.-History:The Semitic Pê , as well as the Greek Π or π , and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive.-Usage:In English and... П
18			90
19			100					Q Q Q is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled cue.- History :The Semitic sound value of Qôp was , a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones... Ҁ
20			200					Ρ R R R is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ar; its name in Hiberno-English is or .-History:... Р ᚱ
21	sun Shamash Shamash or Šamaš was the common Akkadian name of the sun god and god of justice in Babylonia and Assyria, corresponding to Sumerian Utu.-History and meaning:... "		300					Σ S S S is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound word; the plural is esses.- Usage :... С Ш ᛊ
22			400					Τ T T T is the twentieth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled tee. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :... Т ᛏ

These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic. Of the reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonants, seven are missing: the
interdental fricatives , the voiceless lateral fricatives , the voiced uvular fricative , and the distinction between uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives , in Canaanite merged in . The six variant letters added in the Arabic alphabet

Arabic alphabet

account for these (except for , which survives as a separate phoneme in Ge'ez

Ge'ez alphabet

Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is an abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez, now the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church...

):
> ;
> ;
> ;
> ;
> ;
> (but note that this reconstruction of 29 Proto-Semitic consonants is heavily informed by Arabic; see Proto-Semitic for details).

Graphically independent alphabets

The only modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian

Thaana

Thaana, Taana or Tāna is the modern writing system of the Divehi language spoken in the Maldives...

script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps other existing alphabets, it derives its letter forms from numerals. The Osmanya alphabet devised for Somali

Somali language

The Somali language is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Its nearest relatives are Afar and Oromo. Somali is the best documented of the Cushitic languages, with academic studies of it from before 1900....

in the 1920s

1920s

The 1920s was the decade that ran from January 1, 1920, to December 31, 1929. It is sometimes referred to as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age, when speaking about the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom...

was co-official in Somalia with the Latin alphabet until 1972, and the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations.

Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet derives from Chinese character

Chinese character

A Chinese character, also known as a Han character , is a logogram used in writing Chinese , Japanese , less frequently Korean , and formerly Vietnamese , and other languages...

s. The Santali alphabet of eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as "danger" and "meeting place", as well as pictographs invented by its creator. (The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le "swelling" represents e, while en "thresh grain" represents n.)

In the ancient world, Ogham

Ogham

Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to represent the Old Irish language, and occasionally the Brythonic ancestor of Welsh...

consisted of tally marks, and the monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem to have been created for the occasion.

Alphabets in other media

Changes to a new writing medium sometimes caused a break in graphical form, or make the relationship difficult to trace. It is not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet

Ugaritic alphabet

The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad , used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Northwest Semitic language discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 31 letters...

derives from a prototypical Semitic abjad, for example, although this appears to be the case. And while manual alphabets are a direct continuation of the local written alphabet (both the British two-handed

Two-handed manual alphabet

Several manual alphabets in use around the world employ two hands for some or all of the letters.- BANZSL alphabet :This alphabet is used in the BANZSL group of sign languages...

and the French

French Sign Language

French Sign Language is the sign language of the deaf in the nation of France. According to Ethnologue, it has 50,000 to 100,000 native signers....

/American one-handed

American Sign Language alphabet

The American Manual Alphabet is a manual alphabet that augments the vocabulary of American Sign Language when spelling individual letters of a word is the preferred or only option, such as with proper names or the titles of works...

alphabets retain the forms of the Latin alphabet, as the Indian manual alphabet

Indian Sign Language

Indo-Pakistani Sign Language is the predominant sign language variety in South Asia, used by at least several hundred thousand deaf signers...

does Devanagari

Devanagari

, and the Korean

Korean manual alphabet

The Korean manual alphabet is used by the Deaf in South Korea who speak Korean Sign Language. It is a one-handed alphabet that mimics the shapes of the letters in hangul, and is used when signing Korean as well as being integrated into KSL.-Consonants:...

does Hangul), Braille

Braille

The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write. Braille was devised in 1821 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character or cell is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two columns of three dots each...

, semaphore, maritime signal flags

International maritime signal flags

The system of international maritime signal flags is a way of representing individual letters of the alphabet in signals to or from ships. It is a component of the International Code of Signals...

, and the Morse code

Morse code

Morse code is a type of character encoding that transmits telegraphic information using rhythm. Morse code uses a standardized sequence of short and long elements to represent the letters, numerals, punctuation and special characters of a given message...

s are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and semaphore letters, for example, are derived from the alphabetic order of the Latin alphabet, but not from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Modern shorthand

Shorthand

Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...

also appears to be graphically unrelated. If it derives from the Latin alphabet, the connection has been lost to history.

External links

Animated examples of how the English alphabet evolved
BBC site for the Greek alphabet
Site by a scholar about the Greek alphabet
Article republished from an Athenian newspaper
Information about the Georgian Script
An alphabetic 'family tree'.
"The Alphabet – its creation and development" on BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a domestic UK radio station that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967.-Outline:...

’s In Our Time
In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)
In Our Time is a live BBC radio discussion programme hosted by Melvyn Bragg. Each week, three guest speakers cover a specific historical, philosophical, religious, artistic or scientific topic...

featuring Eleanor Robson, Alan Millard, Rosalind Thomas
Alphabet & protoalphabet the manifest of astrologic doctrine?

History of the alphabet

Pre-alphabetic scripts

Beginnings in Egypt

Semitic alphabet

Descendants of the Aramaic abjad

Transmission to Greece

Descendants of the Greek alphabet

Development of the Roman alphabet

Letter names and sequence of some alphabets

Graphically independent alphabets

Alphabets in other media

See also

Further reading

External links