Alphabet

I

Introduction

Alphabet (from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet), set of written symbols, each representing a given sound or sounds, which can be variously combined to form all the words of a language.

An alphabet attempts ideally to indicate each separate sound by a separate symbol, although this end is seldom attained, except in the Korean alphabet (the most perfect phonetic system known) and, to a lesser degree, in the Japanese syllabaries. Alphabets are distinguished from syllabaries and from pictographic and ideographic systems. A syllabary represents each separate syllable (usually a sequence of from one to four spoken sounds pronounced as an uninterrupted unit) by a single symbol. Japanese, for example, has two complete syllabaries—the hiragana and the katakana—devised to supplement the characters originally taken over from Chinese. A pictographic system represents picturable objects, for example, a drawing of the Sun stands for the spoken word sun. An ideographic system combines various pictographs for the purpose of indicating non-picturable ideas. Thus, the Chinese pictographs for sun and tree are combined to represent the Chinese spoken word for east. Most alphabets have about 20-30 symbols, though Rotokas, used in the Solomon Islands, has only 11 letters while Armenian, the largest alphabet, has 39 letters.

Early systems of writing were of the pictographic-ideographic variety; among them are the cuneiform of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the written symbols still used in the Chinese and Japanese languages, and Mayan picture writing (see Native American Languages). What converts such a system into an alphabet or syllabary is the use of a pictograph or ideograph to represent a sound rather than an object or an idea. The sound is usually the initial sound of the spoken word denoted by the original pictograph. Thus, in early Semitic, a pictograph representing a house, for which the Semitic spoken word was beth, eventually came to symbolize the initial b sound of beth. This Semitic symbol, standing originally for the entire word beth and later for the sound of b, ultimately became the b of the English alphabet.

II

North Semitic Alphabet

In 1993-1994 American Egyptologists surveying ancient travel routes in southern Egypt discovered inscriptions in a semi-cursive Semitic script in the Nile valley in Egypt, dated at about 1900 bc to 1800 bc, which constitute the earliest evidence of semi-alphabetic writing. Before this discovery, the general supposition was that the first known alphabet developed in Palestine and Syria between 1700 and 1500 bc. This alphabet, known as North Semitic, evolved from a combination of cuneiform and hieroglyphic symbols; some symbols might have been taken from kindred systems, such as the Cretan and Hittite. The North Semitic alphabet consisted exclusively of 22 consonants. The vowel sounds of a word had to be supplied by the speaker or reader. The Hebrew, Arabic, and Phoenician alphabets were based on this model and the present-day Hebrew and Arabic alphabets still consist of consonantal letters only, the former having 22 and the latter 28. Some of these, however, may be used to represent long vowels, and vowels may also be indicated in writing by optional vowel points and dashes placed below, above, or to the side of the consonant. Writing is from the right to the left.

Many scholars believe that around 1000 bc four branches developed from the original Semitic alphabet: South Semitic, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Greek. (Other scholars, however, believe that South Semitic developed independently from North Semitic or that both developed from a common ancestor.) The South Semitic branch was the ancestor of the alphabets of extinct languages used in the Arabian Peninsula and in the modern languages of Ethiopia. Canaanite was subdivided into Early Hebrew and Phoenician, and the extremely important Aramaic branch became the basis of Semitic and non-Semitic scripts throughout western Asia. The non-Semitic group was the basis of the alphabets of nearly all Indian scripts; the Semitic sub-branch includes Square Hebrew, which superseded Early Hebrew to become the prototype of modern Hebrew writing.

III

Greek and Roman Alphabets

Around 1000-900 bc the Greeks adapted the Phoenician variant of the Semitic alphabet, expanding its 22 consonant symbols to 24 (even more in some dialects), and setting apart some of the original consonant symbols to serve exclusively as vowels. There were several forms of the Greek alphabet, Chalcidian (western) and Ionic (eastern) being the most prominent. After about 500 bc, Greek was regularly written from left to right and the Ionic script was dominant. The Greek alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean world, giving rise to various modified forms, including the Etruscan (from Chalcidian), Oscan, Umbrian, and Roman (or Latin) alphabets. The Roman alphabet developed mainly from the Etruscan script. Because of Roman conquests and the spread of the Latin language, that language’s Roman alphabet became the basic alphabet of all the languages of Western Europe.

IV

Cyrillic Alphabet

In about ad 860 Greek missionaries from Constantinople converted the Slavs to Christianity and devised for them a system of writing known as Cyrillic from the name of one of its inventors, the apostle to the South Slavs, St Cyril. The Cyrillic alphabet, like the Roman, stems from the Greek; it is based on the 9th-century uncial writing style. Additional characters, however, were devised to represent Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalents. The Cyrillic alphabet in various forms is used currently in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Belarusan, Turkmen (Turkmenistan), Kazakh (Kazakhstan), Kyrgyz (Kyrgyzstan), Kurmanji (Turkey), Northern Uzbek, and Bulgarian among others. It is not used in Polish, Czech, Slovak, or Slovenian however, which are written in modified Roman alphabets. An interesting division exists in the Balkans, where the Roman Catholic Croats use the Roman alphabet, but the Greek Orthodox Serbs employ Cyrillic for the same language.