An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a

spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the

smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given
language.[1] 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.[2][3]
The first letters were invented in Ancient Egypt to serve as an aid in
writing Egyptian hieroglyphs; these are referred to as Egyptian uniliteral
signs by lexicographers.[4] This system was used until the 5th century CE,[5] and
fundamentally differed by adding pronunciation hints to existing hieroglyphs that
had previously carried no pronunciation information. Later on,
these phonemic symbols also became used to transcribe foreign words. [6] The first
fully phonemic script was the Proto-Sinaitic script, also descending from Egyptian
hieroglyphs, which was later modified to create the Phoenician alphabet. 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.[7][8][9][10]

Corresponding letters in the Phoenician and Latin

alphabets
Peter T. Daniels distinguishes true alphabets—which use letters to represent both
consonants and vowels—from both abugidas and abjads, which only need letters for
consonants. Abjads generally lack vowel indicators altogether, while abugidas
represent them with diacritics added to letters. In this narrower sense, the Greek
alphabet was the first true alphabet;[11][12] it was originally derived from
the Phoenician alphabet, which was an abjad.[13]
Alphabets usually have a standard ordering for their letters. This makes alphabets a
useful tool in collation, as words can be listed in a well-defined order—commonly
known as alphabetical order. This also means that letters may be used as a method
of "numbering" ordered items. Some systems demonstrate acrophony, a
phenomenon where letters have been given names distinct from their
pronunciations. Systems with acrophony include Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac;
systems without include the Latin alphabet.
More recently however, four cylinder seals dating to 2400 BC and found at the site
of Umm el-Marra, in present-day Syria, are incised with what is potentially the
earliest known alphabetic writings in the world. The discovery suggests that the
alphabet emerged 500 years earlier than previously thought, and undermines
leading ideas about how it was invented. [14][15][16][17] According to Christopher
Rollston, a scholar of the ancient Near East, the morphology of the letters on the
cylinder seals parallels quite nicely that of the existing corpus of early alphabetic
writing.[18] This theory however has yet to be universally accepted.
Etymology
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).[19] 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.[20]
History
Main article: History of the alphabet
Alphabets related to Phoenician
Ancient Near Eastern alphabets
The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are
called uniliterals,[21] which are glyphs that provide one sound. [22] These glyphs were
used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and,
later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. [6] The script was used a fair
amount in the 4th century CE.[23] However, after pagan temples were closed down, it
was forgotten in the 5th century until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.[5] There
was also cuneiform, primarily used to write several ancient languages,
including Sumerian.[24] The last known use of cuneiform was in 75 CE, after which
the script fell out of use.[25] In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently alphabetic
system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appeared in Egyptian turquoise mines in
the Sinai Peninsula c. 1840 BCE, apparently left by Canaanite workers. Orly
Goldwasser has connected the illiterate turquoise miner graffiti theory to the origin
of the alphabet.[9] In 1999, American Egyptologists John and Deborah
Darnell discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley.
The script dated to c. 1800 BCE and shows evidence of having been adapted from
specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to c. 2000 BCE, strongly
suggesting that the first alphabet had developed about that time. [26] The script was
based on letter appearances and names, believed to be based on Egyptian
hieroglyphs.[7] This script had no characters representing vowels. Originally, it
probably was a syllabary—a script where syllables are represented with characters
—with symbols that were not needed being removed. The best-attested Bronze Age
alphabet is Ugaritic, invented in Ugarit before the 15th century BCE. This was an
alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 signs, including three that indicate the following
vowel. This script was not used after the destruction of Ugarit in 1178 BCE.[27]
 A specimen of the Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the
earliest phonemic scripts
The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet,
conventionally called Proto-Canaanite, before c. 1050 BCE.[8] The oldest text in
Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram c. 1000 BCE.
This script is the parent script of all western alphabets. By the 10th century BCE,
two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave
rise to the Hebrew alphabet.[28]
The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script
from which the Ge'ez abugida was descended. Abugidas are writing systems with
characters comprising consonant–vowel sequences. Alphabets without obligatory
vowels are called abjads, with examples being Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. The
omission of vowels was not always a satisfactory solution due to the need of
preserving sacred texts. "Weak" consonants are used to indicate vowels. These
letters have a dual function since they can also be used as pure consonants. [29][30]
The Proto-Sinaitic script and the Ugaritic script were the first scripts with a limited
number of signs instead of using many different signs for words, in contrast to
cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Linear B. The Phoenician script was probably
the first phonemic script,[7][8] and it contained only about two dozen distinct letters,
making it a script simple enough for traders to learn. Another advantage of the
Phoenician alphabet was that it could write different languages since it recorded
words phonemically.[31]
The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians.
[8]
The Greek alphabet was the first in which vowels had independent letterforms
separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds
that did not exist in Phoenician to represent vowels. The Linear B syllabary, used
by Mycenaean Greeks from the 16th century BCE, had 87 symbols, including five
vowels. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, causing
many different alphabets to evolve from it. [32]
European alphabets
The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the
Italian peninsula c. 800–600 BCE giving rise to many different alphabets used to
write the Italic languages, like the Etruscan alphabet.[33] One of these became the
Latin alphabet, which spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their republic.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the alphabet survived in intellectual and
religious works. It came to be used for the Romance languages that descended from
Latin and most of the other languages of western and central Europe. Today, it is
the most widely used script in the world. [34]
The Etruscan alphabet remained nearly unchanged for several hundred years. Only
evolving once the Etruscan language changed itself. The letters used for non-
existent phonemes were dropped.[35] Afterwards, however, the alphabet went
through many different changes. The final classical form of Etruscan contained 20
letters. Four of them are vowels—⟨a, e, i, u⟩—six fewer letters than the earlier forms.
The script in its classical form was used until the 1st century CE. The Etruscan
language itself was not used during the Roman Empire, but the script was used for
religious texts.[36]
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet have ligatures, a combination of two letters
make one, such as æ in Danish and Icelandic and ⟨Ȣ⟩ in Algonquian; borrowings from
other alphabets, such as the thorn ⟨þ⟩ in Old English and Icelandic, which came from
the Futhark runes;[37] and modified existing letters, such as the eth ⟨ð⟩ of Old English
and Icelandic, which is a modified d. Other alphabets only use a subset of the Latin
alphabet, such as Hawaiian and Italian, which uses the letters j, k, x, y, and w only
in foreign words.[38]
Another notable script is Elder Futhark, believed to have evolved out of one of
the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to other alphabets known
collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic
languages from 100 CE to the late Middle Ages, being engraved on stone and
jewelry, although inscriptions found on bone and wood occasionally appear. These
alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet. The exception was for
decorative use, where the runes remained in use until the 20th century. [39]

Old Hungarian script

The Old Hungarian script was the writing system of the Hungarians. It was in use
during the entire history of Hungary, albeit not as an official writing system. From
the 19th century, it once again became more and more popular. [40]
The Glagolitic alphabet was the initial script of the liturgical language Old Church
Slavonic and became, together with the Greek uncial script, the basis of the Cyrillic
script. Cyrillic is one of the most widely used modern alphabetic scripts and is
notable for its use in Slavic languages and also for other languages within the
former Soviet Union. Cyrillic
alphabets include Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Belarusian,
and Ukrainian. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints
Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was created by Clement of Ohrid,
their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or
influenced by Greek and Hebrew.[41]
Asian alphabets
Many phonetic scripts exist in Asia. The Arabic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Syriac
alphabet, and other abjads of the Middle East are developments of the Aramaic
alphabet.[42][43]
Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script,
believed to be a descendant of Aramaic. [44]
European alphabets, especially Latin and Cyrillic, have been adapted for many
languages of Asia. Arabic is also widely used, sometimes as an abjad, as
with Urdu and Persian, and sometimes as a complete alphabet, as
with Kurdish and Uyghur.[45][46]
Other alphabets
Hangul
In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443 CE. Hangul is a
unique alphabet: it is a featural alphabet, where the design of many of the letters
comes from a sound's place of articulation, like P looking like the widened mouth
and L looking like the tongue pulled in. [47][better source needed] The creation of Hangul was
planned by the government of the day,[48] and it places individual letters in syllable
clusters with equal dimensions, in the same way as Chinese characters. This change
allows for mixed-script writing, where one syllable always takes up one type space
no matter how many letters get stacked into building that one sound-block. [49]
Bopomofo
Bopomofo, also referred to as zhuyin, is a semi-syllabary used primarily in Taiwan to
transcribe the sounds of Standard Chinese. Following the proclamation of the
People's Republic of China in 1949 and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin in 1956, the use
of bopomofo on the mainland is limited. Bopomofo developed from a form of
Chinese shorthand based on Chinese characters in the early 1900s and has
elements of both an alphabet and a syllabary. Like an alphabet, the phonemes
of syllable initials are represented by individual symbols, but like a syllabary, the
phonemes of the syllable finals are not; each possible final (excluding the medial
glide) has its own character, an example being luan written as ㄌㄨㄢ (l-u-an). The last
symbol ㄢ takes place as the entire final -an. While bopomofo is not a mainstream
writing system, it is still often used in ways similar to a romanization system, for
aiding pronunciation and as an input method for Chinese characters on computers
and cellphones.[50][better source needed]