This script had no characters representing vowels. The script was based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. 2000 BCE, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had developed about that time. 1800 BCE and shows evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to c. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell, American Egyptologists, discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley in Egypt. Orly Goldwasser has connected the illiterate turquoise miner graffiti theory to the origin of the alphabet. In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently 'alphabetic' system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated 1840 BCE, apparently left by Canaanite workers. The last known use of the Cuneiform script was in 75 CE, after which the script fell out of use. However, it was primarily used to write Sumerian. The script was used to write several ancient languages. However, after pagan temples were closed down, it was forgotten in the 5th century until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The script was used a fair amount in the 4th century CE. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals, which are glyphs that provide one sound. Main article: History of the alphabet Alphabets related to Phoenician Ancient Near Eastern alphabets The names for the Greek letters, in turn, came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet: aleph, the word for ox, and bet, the word for house. The English word alphabet came into Middle English from the Late Latin word alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Greek, ἀλφάβητος ( alphábētos) it was made from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha (α) and beta (β). Some systems also used to have this system but later on abandoned it for a system similar to Latin, such as Cyrillic. However, this system is not present in all languages, such as the Latin alphabet, which adds a vowel after a character for each letter. It was used in some ancient alphabets, such as in Phoenician. This is known as acrophony It is present in some modern scripts, such as Greek, and many Semitic scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. There are also names for letters in some languages. It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of 'numbering' ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, which allows words to be sorted in a specific order, commonly known as the alphabetical order. Īlphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. In this narrower sense, the Greek alphabet was the first true alphabet, while the Phoenician alphabet it derived from was an abjad. Broadly, abjads lack vowel indicators altogether, while abugidas represent them with diacritics added to letters. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets, which have letters representing both consonants and vowels, from both abugidas and abjads, which only have letters for consonants. Corresponding letters in the Phoenician and Latin alphabets The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. The first fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was later modified to create the Phoenician alphabet.

Later on, these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words.

This system was used until the 5th century AD, and fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that had previously carried no pronunciation information. The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to aid writers already using Egyptian hieroglyphs, now referred to by lexicographers as the Egyptian uniliteral signs. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographic systems assign symbols to spoken words, morphemes, or other semantic units. Specifically, letters correspond to phonemes, the categories of sounds that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. For other uses, see Alphabet (disambiguation).Īn alphabet is a standardized set of written letters that represent particular spoken sounds in a language.

For the international technology conglomerate, see Alphabet Inc. For the English alphabet in particular, see English alphabet. This article is about alphabets in general.

Japanese alphabet letters spell words