History of the alphabet | ||
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The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script. [1] Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. [2] Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. [3] [4] This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. [5] [6] The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, [7] Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet) and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal alphabets, with the term abjad coined for them in 1996, and "true alphabets" with letters for both consonants and vowels. In this narrower sense, the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Many linguists are skeptical of the value of wholly separating the two categories. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, [8] in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.
Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms (ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object visually depicted by the hieroglyph, as phonographs denoting sounds, or as determinatives which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds. [9] Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet, or abjad. This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been an influence on the creation of the first alphabet (used to write a Semitic language). [10] All subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been inspired by one of its descendants by stimulus diffusion, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd-century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt. The Rongorongo script of Easter Island may also be an independently invented alphabet, but too little is known of it to be certain. [11]
The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el-Hol and date to c. 1850 BCE. [12] The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.
Egyptian prototype | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Phoenician | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Acrophony | ʾalp 'ox' | bet 'house' | gaml 'thrown hunting club' | digg 'fish' or 'door' | haw, hillul 'jubilation' | waw 'hook' | zen, ziqq 'handcuff' | ḥet 'courtyard' or 'fence' | ṭēt 'wheel' | yad 'arm' | kap 'hand' |
Egyptian prototype | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Phoenician | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Acrophony | lamd 'goad' | mem 'water' | nun 'large fish' or 'snake' | samek 'support' or 'pillar' | ʿen 'eye' | piʾt 'bend' | ṣad 'plant' | qup 'monkey' or 'cord of wool' | raʾs 'head' | šananuma 'bow' | taw 'signature' |
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] For example, the hieroglyph per 'house' was used to write the sound [ b ] in Semitic, because [ b ] was the first sound in the Semitic word bayt 'house'. [14] Little of this proto-Canaanite script has survived, but existing evidence suggests it retained its pictographic nature for half a millennium until it was adopted for governmental use in Canaan. [15] 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. [16]
The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad . The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE, to become the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia except India:
By at least the 8th century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their own language, [19] creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmus. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. [19] However, whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more important role. [20] The Greeks used for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which weren't used in Greek speech. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented; this is called the acrophonic principle.
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 (the acrophonic principle), in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and `ayin became Greek alpha and o (later renamed omicron ), and stood for the vowels /a/ and /o/ rather than the consonants /ʔ/ and /ʕ/. As this fortunate development only provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraphs 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. [21]
Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as the Cumae alphabet, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor. The Athenians (c. 400 BCE) adopted that latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. 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. Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon, then to left-to-right writing.
Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an /h/, gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. 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, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic—which used both Greek and Roman letters—and perhaps Georgian. [22]
Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, Georgian scripts derive from the Semitic family, but were also strongly influenced in their conception by Greek. A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics (an abugida), which is a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand developed by the missionary James Evans. [23]
A tribe known as the Latins, who became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BCE in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the seventh century. In adopting writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter F, pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. To represent the G sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan, the gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters G, J, U, W, Y, and Z, as well as some other differences.
C, K, and Q in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the /k/ and /ɡ/ sounds; the Romans soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, where Z had been, to maintain the gematria (the numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries after Alexander the Great 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 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 began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic 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 was placed in the alphabet after V. U developed when people began to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. J began as a variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century.
The order of the letters of the alphabet is attested from the fourteenth century BCE in the town of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. [24] 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 of which is nearly identical to the order used for Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and a second order very similar to that used for Ethiopian. [25]
It is not known how many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet 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 the many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, they were largely abandoned in Tifinagh, Latin and Cyrillic. The letter sequence continued more or less intact into Latin, Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic, but was abandoned in Brahmi, Runic, 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 Proto-Sinaitic script and its descendants.
No. | Reconstruction | IPA | value | Proto-Sinaitic | Proto-Canaanite [26] | Ugaritic | Phoenician | Imperial Aramaic | Hebrew | Arabic | Greek | Latin | Cyrillic | Runic |
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1 | ʾalp 'ox' [27] [28] | /ʔ/ | 1 | 𐎀 | 𐤀ʾālep | 𐡀 'ālap̱ | אʾālef | ﺍ ʾalif | Α alpha | A | А azŭ | ᚨ *ansuz | ||
2 | bayt 'house' [27] | /b/ | 2 | 𐎁 | 𐤁bēt | 𐡁 bēṯ | בbēṯ | ﺏbāʾ | Β bēta | B | В vĕdĕ, Б buky | ᛒ *berkanan | ||
3 | gaml 'throwstick' | /ɡ/ | 3 | 𐎂 | 𐤂gīmel | 𐡂 gāmal | גgīmel | ﺝjīm | Γ gamma | C, G | Г glagoli | ᚲ *kaunan | ||
4 | dalt 'door', digg 'fish' | /d/ | 4 | / | 𐎄 | 𐤃dālet | 𐡃 dālaṯ | דdāleṯ | ﺩdāl, ذḏāl | Δ delta | D | Д dobro | ||
5 | haw "window" / hillul "jubilation" [27] | /h/ | 5 | 𐎅 | 𐤄hē | 𐡄 hē | הhē | هhāʾ | Ε epsilon | E | Е ye, Є estĭ | |||
6 | wāw 'hook' [27] | /w/ | 6 | 𐎆 | 𐤅wāw | 𐡅 waw | וvāv | وwāw | Ϝ digamma, Υ upsilon | F, U, V, W, Y | Оу / Ꙋ ukŭ → У | ᚢ *ûruz / *ûran | ||
7 | ziqq 'manacle' [27] | /z/ | 7 | 𐎇 | 𐤆zayin | 𐡆 zayn | זzayin | زzayn or zāy | Ζ zēta | Z | Ꙁ / З zemlya | |||
8 | dayp "eyebrow" [27] | /ð/ | – | ( 𐡃 dalaṯ) | (ذḏāl) | |||||||||
9 | ḥaṣir 'mansion' [27] | /ħ/ | 8 | 𐎈 | 𐤇ḥēt | 𐡇 ḥēṯ | חḥēṯ | حḥāʾ, خḫāʾ | Η ēta | H | И iže | ᚺ *haglaz | ||
10 | ḫayt 'thread' [27] | /x/ | – | 𐎃 | (خḫāʾ) | |||||||||
11 | ṭab 'good' [27] | /tˤ/ | 9 | [lower-alpha 1] | ( ) | 𐎉 | (𐤈ṭēt) | ( 𐡈 ṭeṯ) | (טṭēṯ) | (طṭāʾ, ظẓāʾ) | (Θ thēta) | (Ѳ fita) | ||
12 | yad 'hand' [27] | /j/ | 10 | 𐎊 | 𐤉yōd | 𐡉 yoḏ | יyōḏ | يyāʾ | Ι iota | I, J | І ižei | ᛁ *isaz | ||
13 | kap 'palm' [27] | /k/ | 20 | 𐎋 | 𐤊kap | 𐡊 kāp̱ | כ ךkāf | كkāf | Κ kappa | K | К kako | |||
14 | lamd 'goad' [27] | /l/ | 30 | 𐎍 | 𐤋lāmed | 𐡋 lāmaḏ | לlāmeḏ | لlām | Λ lambda | L | Л lyudiye | ᛚ *laguz / *laukaz | ||
15 | Maym 'waters' [27] | /m/ | 40 | 𐎎 | 𐤌mēm | 𐡌 mim | מ םmēm | مmīm | Μ mu | M | М myslite | |||
16 | naḥš 'snake' [27] | /n/ | 50 | 𐎐 | 𐤍nun | 𐡍 nun | נ ןnun | نnūn | Ν nu | N | Н našĭ | |||
17 | samk 'support' | /s/ | 60 | — | 𐎒 | 𐤎sāmek | 𐡎 semkaṯ | סsāmeḵ | Ξ ksi, (Χ chi) | (X) | Ѯ ksi, (Х xĕrŭ) | |||
18 | ʿayn 'eye' [27] | /ʕ/ | 70 | 𐎓 | 𐤏ʿayin | 𐡏 ʿayn | עʿayin | عʿayn | Ο omikron | O | О onŭ | |||
19 | ġinab 'grape' [27] [28] | /ɣ/ | – | 𐎙 | (غġayn) | |||||||||
20 | pay 'mouth' [27] / piʾt 'corner' | /p/ | 80 | 𐎔 | 𐤐pē | 𐡐 pē | פ ףpē | فfāʾ | Π pi | P | П pokoi | |||
21 | (ṣad) /ṣimaḥ 'plant' [28] or ṣirar 'bag' [27] | /sˤ/, /ɬˤ/?, /θˤ/ | 90 | — | 𐎕 | 𐤑 ṣādē | 𐡑 ṣāḏē | צ ץṣāḏi | صṣād, | Ϻ san, (Ϡ sampi) | Ц tsi, Ч črvĭ | |||
( 𐡏 ʿayn) | (ضḍād) | |||||||||||||
𐎑 | ( 𐡈 ṭeṯ) | (ظẓāʾ) | ||||||||||||
22 | qup 'monkey' [32] / qaw 'cord', 'line' [28] | /kˤ/ or /q/ | 100 | 𐎖 | 𐤒qōp | 𐡒 qop̱ | קqōf | قqāf | Ϙ koppa | Q | Ҁ koppa | |||
23 | raʾš 'head' [27] | /r/ or /ɾ/ | 200 | 𐎗 | 𐤓rēš | 𐡓 rēš | רrēš | رrāʾ | Ρ rho | R | Р rĭtsi | ᚱ *raidô | ||
24 | śamš 'sun' [27] [28] | /ʃ/ | – | [27] / [33] | ( ) | 𐎌 | 𐤔šin | 𐡔 šin | (שšin) | (سsīn) | Σ sigma, ϛ stigma | S | С slovo, Ш ša, Щ šta, Ꙃ / Ѕ dzĕlo | ᛊ *sowilô |
25 | ṯad 'breast' [27] | /θ/, /ɬ/ | 300 | ? [lower-alpha 2] [34] | (שׂ śin) | (شšīn) | ||||||||
𐡕 taw | שšin | سsīn, (ثṯāʾ) | ||||||||||||
26 | taw 'mark' [27] | /t/ | 400 | 𐎚 | 𐤕tāw | תtāv | تtāʾ, ثṯāʾ | Τ tau | T | Т tvrdo | ᛏ *tîwaz | |||
These 26 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, the voiceless fricatives ś, ṣ́, and ṯ̣ are missing. The phonemes ḏ, ṯ, ḫ, ġ disappeared in Canaanite, merging with z, š, ḥ, ʿ in Canaanite scripts, respectively. The six variant letters added in the Arabic alphabet include these (except for ś, which survives as a separate phoneme in Ge'ez ሠ):
One modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet is the Maldivian 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. Another is the Korean Hangul, which was created independently in 1443. The Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, 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 bopomofo phonetic alphabet is graphically derived from Chinese characters. 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 early medieval Ireland, Ogham 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.
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 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 and the French/American one-handed alphabets retain the forms of the Latin alphabet, as the Indian manual alphabet does Devanagari, and the Korean does Hangul), Braille, semaphore, maritime signal flags, and the Morse codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and semaphore letters are not derived from the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters.
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.
An abjad, also abgad, is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introduced in 1990 by Peter T. Daniels. Other terms for the same concept include partial phonemic script, segmentally linear defective phonographic script, consonantary, consonant writing, and consonantal alphabet.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
The Phoenician alphabet is a consonantal alphabet used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most the 1st millennium BC. It was the first mature alphabet, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenecian was written horizontally, from right to left. Its developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Ugaritic writing system is a Cuneiform Abjad with syllabic elements used from around either 1400 BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.
Proto-Canaanite is the name given to
The Paleo-Hebrew script, also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in inscriptions of Canaanite languages from the region of Southern Canaan, also known as biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Hebrew Bible due to its similarity to the Samaritan script, as the Talmud stated that the Hebrew ancient script was still used by the Samaritans. The Talmud described it as the "Libona'a script", translated by some as "Lebanon script". Use of the term "Paleo-Hebrew alphabet" is due to a 1954 suggestion by Solomon Birnbaum, who argued that "[t]o apply the term Phoenician [from Northern Canaan, today's Lebanon] to the script of the Hebrews [from Southern Canaan, today's Israel-Palestine] is hardly suitable". The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets are two slight regional variants of the same script.
Zayin is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician zayn 𐤆, Hebrew zayīn ז, Aramaic zain 𐡆, Syriac zayn ܙ, and Arabic zāy ز. It represents the sound.
Heth, sometimes written Chet or Ḥet, is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ḥēt 𐤇, Hebrew ḥēt ח, Aramaic ḥēṯ 𐡇, Syriac ḥēṯ ܚ, and Arabic ḥāʾ ح.
Teth, also written as Ṭēth or Tet, is the ninth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ṭēt 𐤈, Hebrew ṭēt ט, Aramaic ṭēṯ 𐡈, Syriac ṭēṯ ܛ, and Arabic ṭāʾ ط. It is the 16th letter of the modern Arabic alphabet. The Persian ṭa is pronounced as a hard "t" sound and is the 19th letter in the modern Persian alphabet. The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the Greek theta (Θ), originally an aspirated voiceless dental stop but now used for the voiceless dental fricative. The Arabic letter (ط) is sometimes transliterated as Tah in English, for example in Arabic script in Unicode.
Ayin is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ʿayin 𐤏, Hebrew ʿayin ע, Aramaic ʿē 𐡏, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع.
He is the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician hē 𐤄, Hebrew hē ה, Aramaic hē 𐡄, Syriac hē ܗ, and Arabic hāʾ ه. Its sound value is the voiceless glottal fricative.
Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic ʾalif ا, and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.
The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30-40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script.
Bet, Beth, Beh, or Vet is the second letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician bēt 𐤁, Hebrew bēt ב, Aramaic bēṯ 𐡁, Syriac bēṯ ܒ, and Arabic bāʾ ب. Its sound value is the voiced bilabial stop ⟨b⟩ or the voiced labiodental fricative ⟨v⟩.
A defective script is a writing system that does not represent all the phonemic distinctions of a language. This means that the concept is always relative to a given language. Taking the Latin alphabet used in Italian orthography as an example, the Italian language has seven vowels, but the alphabet has only five vowel letters to represent them; in general, the difference between the phonemes close and open is simply ignored, though stress marks, if used, may distinguish them. Among the Italian consonants, both and are written ⟨s⟩, and both and are written ⟨z⟩; stress and hiatus are also not reliably distinguished.
The Byblos script, also known as the Byblos syllabary, Pseudo-hieroglyphic script, Proto-Byblian, Proto-Byblic, or Byblic, is an undeciphered writing system, known from ten inscriptions found in Byblos, a coastal city in Lebanon. The inscriptions are engraved on bronze plates and spatulas, and carved in stone. They were excavated by Maurice Dunand, from 1928 to 1932, and published in 1945 in his monograph Byblia Grammata. The inscriptions are conventionally dated to the second millennium BC, probably between the 18th and 15th centuries BC.
The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants.
A writing system comprises a particular set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. Writing systems can generally be classified according to how symbols function according to these rules, with the most common types being alphabets, syllabaries, and logographies. Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes. Abjads generally only have letters for consonants, while pure alphabets have letters for both consonants and vowels. Abugidas use characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras. Logographies use characters that represent semantic units, such as words or morphemes.