Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Where does our alphabet come from? I mean, these characters didn't just come out of nowhere.
They have a long story behind them. Everything starts with Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are
three types of writing systems: logographies, syllabaries and alphabets. In logographies
each charcter represents a word, in syllabaries it represents a syllable and in alphabets
it represents a sound. Hieroglyphs were a logographic system, but they could be used
as an alphabet. This alphabet was an abjad, which means that it doesn't have symbols for
vowels. Lalter Phoenicians borrowed some of the hieroglyphs, which evolved into the Phoenician
alphabet. Unlike hierogliphs it was written from right to left. Its letters are: alf,
bet, gaml, delt, he, wau, zen, het, tet, yod, kaf, lamda, mem, nun, semka, eyn, pey, sade,
qof, rosh, shin and tau which meant ox, house, camel, door, window, hook, weapon, wall, wheel,
hand, palm (of the hand), goad, snake, fish, eye, mouth, hunt, needle head, head, tooth
and mark in Phoencian. Greek alphabet is derived from Phoenician alphabet. It reversed the
directon to left to right again (along with some letters) and changed letters alf, he,
het, yod and eyn into vowel letters making greek alphabet the first alphabet that was
not an abjad. Letters of greek alphabet were: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon (meaning
"simple e"), digamma, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron (meaning
"small o"), pi, san, koppa, rho, sigma, tau and five new letters: upsilon (which was a
wowel derived from waw and meaning "simple u"), phi, chi, psi and omega (wovel, meaning
"great o"). Digamma, san and koppa later became obsolete. Next alphabet is the Etruscan alphabet.
It had 26 letters derived from Greek alphabet (including digamma, san and koppa) set in
the same order except for lack of omega (it was created before omega was added to Greek
alphabet) and switching places of phi and chi. Later, equivalents of beta, kappa, xi,
omicron, koppa and chi were removed from the alphabet and an additional sign was added.
But before that happened a new alphabet was created based on it: the Latin alphabet. It
had the same letters as Etruscan alphabet but they looked differently and didn't have
letters corresponding to theta, xi, san, phi and psi. Consonants were pronounced just as
you would expect them to be except for: C, K and Q which all represented [k] and [g]
sounds, I, which represented both [i] and [j],
V, which represented [u] and [w]. In 3rd ceuntry BC Z was dropped and a new
letter, G, was placed in its position to represent all the [g] sounds. Emperor Claudius tried
to add three new letters to the alphabet: Antisigma for [bs] and [ps],
Turned F for [w], Half H probably for [ɨ] or [ʉ].
After the conquest of Greece in 1st ceuntry BC Latin alphabet addopted letter Y to represent
the [y] sound and readdopted Z. Letters also got names and alphabet went: a, be, ce, de,
e, ef, ge, ha, i, ka, el, em, en, o, pe, qu, er, es, te, u, eks, i Graeca, zeta. During
the Middle Ages lowercase forms of Latin and Greek letters developed independenly. S and
sigma had two lowecase forms called long S and short S in Latin. Short S and final sigma
were used only at the end of the word. Short S was also used next to f because long S and
f looked very similar, which was especially confusing when long s looked like this, which
caused long S to be replaced by short S everywhere between 18th and 19th century. Later three
more letters were added: J, U and W: J was originally an i with a swash used at
the end of Roman numerals. For example 23 was xxiij. Later J started representing only
the [j] sound and I only the [i] sound. U was originally a form of lovercase V that
was used everywhere but at the beginning of the words. At the beginning v was used. Same
as with j, [u] sound started to be represented only by U and [v] sound only by V.
W started as a VV digraph used in Germanic. Later uu replaced runic letter Wynn used in
Old English for the /w/ sound. Because v and u were the same letter and both were named
U it was spelled "double u". Later uu became a ligature and gradually became a letter on
its own, but the spelling stayed the same. And that's the history of our alphabet.