An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) representing phonemes, units of sounds that distinguish words, of certain spoken languages.[1] Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.[2][3] The Egyptians have created the first alphabet in a technical sense.[4] The short uniliteral signs are used to write pronunciation guides for logograms, or a character that represents a word, or morpheme, and later on, being used to write foreign words.[5] This was used up to the 5th century AD.[6] The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, which developed into the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, abjads, and abugidas, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic.[7][8] It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula in modern-day Egypt, by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite languages.[9][10] The Phoenician alphabet with corresponding Latin letters Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters that diacritics modify to represent vowels, like in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts, an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, and an alphabet, a set of graphemes that represent both consonants and vowels. In this narrow sense of the word, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet,[11][12] which was based on the earlier Phoenician abjad. Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, which allows words to be sorted in a specific order, commonly known as the alphabetical order. 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. There are also names for letters in some languages. 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. It was used in some ancient alphabets, such as in Phoenician. However, this system is not present in all languages, such as the Latin alphabet, which adds a vowel after a character for each letter. Some systems also used to have this system but later on abandoned it for a system similar to Latin, such as Cyrillic. 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).[13] 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.[14] History Main article: History of the alphabet Ancient Near Eastern alphabets The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs that are called uniliterals,[15] which are glyphs that provide one sound.[16] These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.[5] The script was used a fair amount in the 4th century CE.[17] However, after pagan temples were closed down, it was forgotten in the 5th century until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.[6] There was also the Cuneiform script. The script was used to write several ancient languages. However, it was primarily used to write Sumerian.[18] The last known use of the Cuneiform script was in 75 CE, after which the script fell out of use.[19] 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 c. 15th century BCE, apparently left by Canaanite workers. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell, American Egyptologists, discovered an earlier version of this first alphabet at the Wadi el-Hol valley in Egypt. 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.[20] 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 (Syria) 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.[21] A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) 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 tenth century BCE, two other forms distinguish themselves, Canaanite and Aramaic. The Aramaic gave rise to the Hebrew script.[22] The South Arabian alphabet, a sister script to the Phoenician alphabet, is the script from which the Ge'ez alphabet, an abugida, a writing system where consonant-vowel sequences are written as units, which was used around the horn of Africa, descended. Vowel-less alphabets are called abjads, currently exemplified in others such as 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.[23][24] 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 the other widely used writing systems at the time, 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.[25] The Phoenician script was spread across the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians.[8] The Greek Alphabet was the first alphabet in which vowels have independent letter forms separate from those of consonants. The Greeks chose letters representing sounds that did not exist in Phoenician to represent vowels. The syllabical Linear B, a script that was used by the 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.[26] European alphabets The Greek alphabet, in Euboean form, was carried over by Greek colonists to the Italian peninsula circa 800-600 BCE giving rise to many different alphabets used to write the Italic languages, like the Etruscan alphabet.[27] 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 descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages) and most of the other languages of western and central Europe. Today, it is the most widely used script in the world.[28] 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.[29] 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, and 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 in imperial Rome, but the script was used for religious texts.[30] 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;[31] 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.[32] 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.[33] A photo of the 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.[34] 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.[35] Asian alphabets Beyond the logographic Chinese writing, 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.[36][37] Most alphabetic scripts of India and Eastern Asia descend from the Brahmi script, believed to be a descendant of Aramaic.[38] Hangul In Korea, Sejong the Great created the Hangul alphabet in 1443 CE.[39] 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.[40] The creation of Hangul was planned by the government of the day,[41] 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.[42] Zhuyin Zhuyin, sometimes referred to as Bopomofo, is a semi-syllabary. It transcribes Mandarin phonetically in the Republic of China. After the later establishment of the People's Republic of China and its adoption of Hanyu Pinyin, the use of Zhuyin today is limited. However, it is still widely used in Taiwan. Zhuyin 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 Zhuyin 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.[43] Romanization 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.[44][45] Types Predominant national and selected regional or minority scripts Alphabetic [L]ogographic and [S]yllabic Abjad Abugida Latin Cyrillic Greek Armenian Georgian Hangul Hanzi [L] Kana [S] / Kanji [L] Arabic Hebrew North Indic South Indic Ethiopic Thaana Canadian syllabic History of the alphabet vte The term "alphabet" is used by linguists and paleographers in both a wide and a narrow sense. In a broader sense, an alphabet is a segmental script at the phoneme level—that is, it has separate glyphs for individual sounds and not for larger units such as syllables or words. In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads, and abugidas. These three differ in how they treat vowels. Abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed. Abugidas are also consonant-based but indicate vowels with diacritics, a systematic graphic modification of the consonants.[46] The earliest known alphabet using this sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad. Its successor, Phoenician, is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet), and Hebrew (via Aramaic).[47][48] A Venn diagram showing the Greek (left), Cyrillic (bottom) and Latin (right) alphabets, which share many of the same letters, although they have different pronunciations Examples of present-day abjads are the Arabic and Hebrew scripts;[49] true alphabets include Latin, Cyrillic, and Korean Hangul; and abugidas, used to write Tigrinya, Amharic, Hindi, and Thai. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are also an abugida, rather than a syllabary, as their name would imply, because each glyph stands for a consonant and is modified by rotation to represent the following vowel. In a true syllabary, each consonant-vowel combination gets represented by a separate glyph.[50] All three types may be augmented with syllabic glyphs. Ugaritic, for example, is essentially an abjad but has syllabic letters for /ʔa, ʔi, ʔu/[51][52] These are the only times that vowels are indicated. Coptic has a letter for /ti/.[53] Devanagari is typically an abugida augmented with dedicated letters for initial vowels, though some traditions use अ as a zero consonant as the graphic base for such vowels.[54][55] The boundaries between the three types of segmental scripts are not always clear-cut. For example, Sorani Kurdish is written in the Arabic script, which, when used for other languages, is an abjad.[56] In Kurdish, writing the vowels is mandatory, and whole letters are used, so the script is a true alphabet. Other languages may use a Semitic abjad with forced vowel diacritics, effectively making them abugidas. On the other hand, the Phagspa script of the Mongol Empire was based closely on the Tibetan abugida, but vowel marks are written after the preceding consonant rather than as diacritic marks. Although short a is not written, as in the Indic abugidas, The source of the term "abugida," namely the Ge'ez abugida now used for Amharic and Tigrinya, has assimilated into their consonant modifications. It is no longer systematic and must be learned as a syllabary rather than as a segmental script. Even more extreme, the Pahlavi abjad eventually became logographic.[57]