The history of Alphabets

The history of the alphabet begins in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Both writing systems were developed independently, and they are very different from each other. This alphabet was invented to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt and was at least influenced by the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieratic script. The most widely used alphabet today is the Latin alphabet.^] It derives from the Greek, the first true alphabet in that it consistently assigns letters to both consonants and vowels.

It is from the Greeks that we get our name for the word “alphabet.” It comes from the first two letters of their alphabet, Alpha and Beta. These names actually came from the Phoenicians; however, whose first two letters were ‘Aleph and Beth.

Scholars are not quite sure when the Greeks first came into contact with the Phoenician alphabet; however it seems to have been about 1000 BC. They changed the alphabet some, both the look of the symbols as well as adding some symbols of their own. For example their alphabet had an F character, unlike the Phoenicians, although it originally stood for the “w” sound.” Because different languages use different sounds, the need to create new letters was common as the alphabet was distributed.

The Greeks were the first to introduce vowels into the alphabet. While the Phoenicians did have the letter “aleph” which became “alpha,” it originally represented a gutteral tone, rather than what we consider the letter “a.” Within Greece there were many different alphabets, most of them had about 25 letters and were mostly similar, with some slight differences.