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International Association of Young Linguists
Alphabet
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Monday, 23 July 2007
I INTRODUCTION
Alphabet, set of letters or other symbols, each representing a distinctive sound of a language. These letters can be
combined to write all the words of a language. The letters of an alphabet typically have names and a fixed order.
Alphabets are the most common type of writing in the world today. Only a few languages, such as Chinese and
Japanese, do not use an alphabet.
The first alphabet was probably developed at least 3,500 years ago by people who lived on the eastern shore of the
Mediterranean Sea and spoke a Semitic language. The earliest surviving alphabet is that of the Phoenicians (see
Phoenicia). Around 3,000 years ago the Phoenician alphabet spread east to other Semitic peoples and west to the
Greeks. The word alphabet comes from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. The Greeks helped
spread alphabetic writing to the Etruscans and the Romans and through much of the rest of the ancient world.
There are about 50 individual alphabets in use today. They vary greatly in appearance, historical descent, and the
degree to which they conform to the ideal of one letter for one sound. Like the Roman alphabet used for English, most
alphabets have between 20 and 30 letters. Languages with comparatively few sounds require fewer letters. The sounds
of the Hawaiian language, for example, are written using only 12 letters of the Roman alphabet, the fewest letters of any
language. Other alphabets, such as Sinhalese, the alphabet of Sri Lanka, have 50 letters or more.
II BEFORE THE ALPHABET
An alphabet attempts ideally to indicate each separate sound by a separate symbol. The Romans more or less achieved
this ideal with a 21-letter alphabet, which they used for writing their Latin language. Later European languages that
adopted the Roman alphabet approached this goal with varying success. Finnish and Turkish were highly successful,
whereas English, French, and Gaelic have strayed quite far. English, for example, can represent the long o sound with a
single o (as in go), the letters ow (as in glow), the letters oa (as in throat), and the letters ew (as in sew). The Korean
alphabet, which was invented by scholars in the mid-1400s, most completely achieves the ideal of one symbol for one
sound (see Korean Language).
Some writing systems represent a combination of sounds that form a syllable, rather than a single sound. The syllables
usually consist of a consonant and a vowel, such as su, but they can also represent an entire word, such as sun. Such
systems, called syllabaries, can come close to the ideal of a symbol for each sound, but they are not considered true
alphabets because each syllable represents more than a single sound. Syllabic writing systems are also more difficult to
learn than alphabets, because they have so many more symbols. Written Chinese, for example, uses thousands of
symbols, or characters. Each character represents a syllable, and the syllable also is a word that carries a meaning.
Japanese has two complete syllabaries—the hiragana and the katakana—which were devised to
supplement the characters that Japanese took over from the Chinese writing system.
A) Pictographic and Ideographic Systems
Early systems of writing used pictures to represent things and then to represent the sounds of those things. Pictographic
writing, in which a simplified picture of the sun stood for the word sun, was probably the first step toward a written
language. Chinese began as a pictographic language. To represent abstract ideas, the Chinese writing system combined
pictographs. For example, the pictographs for sun and tree were combined to represent the concept of east. This method
of combining pictographs to represent the words for ideas is known as an ideographic system. In written Chinese today,
however, most of the characters for tangible items no longer resemble specific objects.
Pictographs and ideographs provide an inefficient system for writing: There are simply too many things to represent.
Moreover, a string of pictures cannot reproduce what language creates: a sentence with a grammatical structure. A
crucial step in the development of writing was freeing the pictograph or ideograph from the thing it represented and
linking it to a sound. The ancient Sumerians generally receive credit for this advance.
B) Phonetic Systems
The Sumerians began writing about 3200 bc by drawing pictures on tablets of wet clay. In time they found it more
efficient to press the pictures into the clay with a writing instrument made from a reed. The wedge-shaped marks
produced by the reed, which are now known as cuneiform, soon lost their resemblance to the original pictures. Because
the Sumerian language was largely monosyllabic (consisting of single-syllable words), the sign for a word could equally
well stand for the sound of that syllable. Sumerian cuneiform was a mixture of word signs and syllables; some symbols
served both purposes, some were simply word signs.
The Akkadians, an early Semitic people, turned cuneiform into a syllabary about 2300 bc. Although they spoke a
language unrelated to Sumerian, they adopted the syllabic sound values associated with the cuneiform wedges, without
their meanings. The Akkadians then used the wedge shapes to create a phonetic (sound-based) system for writing their
own language. Whereas each symbol carried a meaning in the Sumerian language, the symbols provided only a guide to
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pronunciation in Akkadian. During the centuries after 2300 bc other Near Eastern peoples, including the Assyrians,
Babylonians, and Hittites, also began using syllabic, sound-based cuneiform for writing (see Assyro-Babylonian
Language; Hittite Language).
A phonetic, or sound, system greatly reduces the number of written characters needed, because languages have only a
limited number of sounds. The change from a pictographic-ideographic system to a phonetic system did not happen
immediately, however. Several ancient cultures employed both the old ideographs and the new phonetic symbols. The
ancient Egyptians created a pictographic system shortly after the Sumerians, about 3100 bc, by drawing on
papyrus—a paperlike material made from the papyrus plant. Egyptian hieroglyphs represented not only entire
words but also sounds whose meanings were unrelated to the pictures. Scholars do not know whether the Egyptians
developed a phonetic system independently or borrowed the idea from the Sumerians. Recent studies of the picture
writing of the Maya of Mexico and Central America indicate that their system also represented syllables. Such a wordbased system becomes an alphabet (single-sound based system) or syllabary (sound-group based system) when
pictographs or ideographs are used to represent a spoken sound without an associated meaning.
In many ancient cultures the symbol for a sound came from a pictograph for a common word, signifying the
word’s initial sound. In early Semitic languages, for example, the pictograph representing the word for house, beth
in the spoken language, eventually came to represent the sound of the consonant b, the first sound in beth. This Semitic
symbol, which originally stood for the entire word beth and later for the sound b, became the β of the Greek and
Roman alphabets and finally the uppercase B of the English alphabet. If English used the system of a picture to
represent the first sound of a word, we might write the word sat by drawing sun + apple + table. We would have to learn
not to interpret those pictures as circle + fruit + furniture.
III THE EARLIEST ALPHABETS
Most scholars believe that the first known alphabet developed along the eastern Mediterranean coast between 1700 and
1500 bc. Because this alphabet has not survived, scholars must draw conclusions about it from surviving alphabets that
developed from it. The people who developed this alphabet, which was known as North Semitic, seem to have had some
knowledge of cuneiform and hieroglyphic symbols. Some of the alphabet’s symbols may also have been taken
from related writing systems, such as those used by the Minoans and Hittites. The sounds represented in the North
Semitic alphabet consisted exclusively of consonants. The reader had to supply the vowel sounds of a word. As in nearly
all alphabets, the letters had names and a fixed order. Nearly all the alphabets now used in Europe, the Middle East, and
North Africa ultimately derive from the original Semitic alphabet.
A) North Semitic Alphabets
The Phoenicians, who lived in what is now Lebanon, created the earliest North Semitic alphabet known today. The
Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters to represent consonant sounds. Further north on the coast of what is now Syria,
another North Semitic-speaking group in the city-state of Ugarit developed an alphabet of 30 consonants, written in
cuneiform, about 1400 bc. The Ugaritic alphabet was written in cuneiform, although its wedge shapes did not resemble
Babylonian syllables. Its letters had the same order as the Phoenician alphabet, although the precise relationship
remains unclear between the Ugaritic letters pressed into clay and the Phoenician letters drawn on papyrus. Ugarit was
destroyed in 1200 bc, and scholars today know little about the development of its alphabet.
Other ancient Semitic groups, including the early Hebrews, the Moabites, and the Aramaeans, used variants of
Phoenician writing. Aramaic became the dominant language in the Middle East from the 6th century bc on, adopted by
the Persian Empire and by the Jews of Palestine. The square letter shapes of Aramaic diverged from the pointed
Phoenician letters, and they became the basis for several later alphabets, including Arabic and the form of written
Hebrew still used today.
The present-day Hebrew and Arabic alphabets still consist of consonant letters only, Hebrew having 22 letters and
Arabic 28. Some of these letters, however, acquired the added function of representing long vowels. Another method of
indicating vowels in written Hebrew or Arabic is by adding dots or dashes placed below, above, or to the side of the
consonant. This system for indicating vowels developed for Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic during the 8th and 9th
centuries ad to ensure the correct reading of sacred texts, and avoid the multiple readings possible when vowels are
missing. Bls, for example, could be read as bless, bliss, bills, or bales. Like Phoenician and other Semitic languages,
Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic are written from the right to the left. See Arabic Language; Hebrew Language; Aramaic
Language; Semitic Languages.
Many scholars believe that about 1000 bc four branches developed from the original North 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 now-extinct languages once used in the Arabian Peninsula and of the alphabets used for the modern
languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, in particular Amharic and Tigrinya. Canaanite was subdivided into Early Hebrew and
Phoenician, and the extremely important Aramaic branch became the basis of Semitic and non-Semitic scripts
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throughout western and southern Asia. The non-Semitic group was the basis of the alphabets of nearly all Indian and
Southeast Asian scripts.
B) Greek and Roman Alphabets
The Greeks adopted the Phoenician variant of the Semitic alphabet, including the order of the letters. Some scholars
believe this adoption occurred as early as 1100 bc, whereas others favor a date around 800 bc, shortly before the
earliest surviving text in the Greek alphabet was written—on a wine jug. The Greek and Phoenician languages
had many of the same consonants, but Greek was left without letters for some consonants and with letters it did not
need. The Greeks, as a result, were able to assign new sound values to the leftover Phoenician letters. Most importantly,
the Greeks let some letters represent vowel sounds, making Greek the first language to contain letters of equal status for
consonants and vowels. The Greeks also added four new letters—phi, psi, chi, and omega—to the end of
the alphabet, expanding it to 24 symbols. Although the Greeks originally adopted the right-to-left direction of Phoenician
writing, many Greek documents show one line written from right to left and the next line written from left to right. This
method is called boustrophedon, from Greek words meaning “ox-plow turning,” because it follows the
direction of an ox in plowing. By about 500 bc left to right had become the standard direction of Greek writing.
Among the important descendants of the Greek alphabet was the Etruscan alphabet, from which the Roman, or Latin,
system was derived. The earliest known example of the Roman alphabet is an inscription on a gold brooch from the 6th
century bc. Because of Roman conquests and the spread of the Latin language, the Roman alphabet became the basic
alphabet of all the languages of western Europe.
The Romans originally took 21 of the Greek and Etruscan letters to represent the sounds of their language. The Greek
letters upsilon (Y) and zeta (Z), unnecessary in early Latin, dropped out. But the Romans valued Greek culture highly and
borrowed many words from Greek. By the 1st century bc they had brought back the letters Y and Z for spelling some of
the borrowed words. These letters were eventually added to the end of the alphabet. During the Middle Ages, j and u
appeared in writing as variants of i and v, respectively; they acquired the status of separate letters during the
Renaissance. In northern Europe a two-letter sequence of vv or uu became fused into the new letter w, providing the 26
letters of the Roman alphabet used for modern English.
The Roman alphabet was adopted for use in the Germanic languages, including English and German, and the Romance
languages, including French and Spanish. It was adopted for some Slavic languages, such as Polish and Czech, and
Finno-Ugrian languages, such as Finnish and Estonian, after their speakers accepted Christianity during the Middle
Ages. Some of these languages added letters, or added diacritical marks (accents, dots, and other signs) to certain
letters, to indicate a sound for which no symbol existed. Germanic-speaking peoples, for example, revived the letter k,
which the Romans had almost never used. People in southern Europe, who spoke Romance languages, maintained the
hard c for the k sound. Modern English, with its mixed heritage from both Germanic and Romance languages, retains
both letters for the same sound, as in cat and kitten. The Spanish tilde, ñ, and the Czech haÄ•cek, ň, provide a symbol for
the ny sound, as in the English word canyon. The sound is written with the letter group gn in French and Italian, ny in
Hungarian, and nj in Croatian. The haÄ•cek turns c, s, and z into the symbols Ä•, š, and ž in Czech and certain other
Slavic languages, sounds that are spelled ch, sh, and zh (pronounced as in Zhivago) in English. In some languages
these characters have their own place in the alphabet.
C) Cyrillic Alphabet
About ad 860 two Greek missionaries, Constantine and his brother Methodius, from Constantinople (present-day
Ä°stanbul) converted the Slavs to Christianity. They also devised for the Slavs a system of writing known as Glagolitic,
which was loosely based on Greek. After Constantine died he was canonized as Saint Cyril, and Glagolitic was later
replaced by an alphabet that was closely based on Greek and named Cyrillic in his honor (see Cyrillic Alphabet).
Additional characters were devised for the alphabet to represent Slavic sounds that had no Greek equivalents. The
Cyrillic alphabet, in various forms, is used currently in Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and
Macedonian—languages spoken by Eastern Orthodox Christians. Slavic languages of Roman Catholics, including
Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Croatian, and Slovenian, use the Roman alphabet. 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. The Turkic languages of the Central Asian Republics—including Kazakh, Kyrghiz, and
Uzbek—had been written in the Arabic alphabet but switched to the Roman alphabet after the regions became
part of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The Soviet government later decreed that these languages should be written in the
Cyrillic script. After gaining independence in the early 1990s, most of the republics planned a gradual return to Roman
script.
D) Arabic Alphabet
The Arabic alphabet, another offshoot of the early Semitic one, probably originated about the 4th century ad. It spread to
such languages as Persian, Pashto, and Urdu and is generally used by the Islamic world in parts of Asia and Africa, and
in southern Europe. Arabic is written in either of two forms: Kufic, a heavy, bold, formal script, was devised at the end of
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the 7th century; or Naskhi, a cursive form and the parent of modern Arabic writing. The question arises whether the
various alphabets of India and Southeast Asia are indigenous (native) developments or offshoots of early Semitic. One of
the most important Indian alphabets, the Devanagari alphabet used in the Sanskrit language, is an ingenious
combination of syllabic and true alphabetic principles (see Indian Languages). The ancestors of the Devanagari
alphabet, whether Semitic or Indian, seem also to have given rise to the written alphabets of Bengali, Tamil, Telugu,
Sinhalese, Burmese, and Thai.
IV ALPHABETS FOR UNWRITTEN LANGUAGES
Most alphabets evolved gradually or were adapted from older prototypes. Some alphabets, however, were constructed
for languages previously unwritten, or for nations hitherto using alphabets of foreign origin. An outstanding example is
the Armenian alphabet invented by Saint Mashtots (also called Mesrop or Mesrob) in 405 and still in use today (see
Armenian Language). Mashtots’s Armenian alphabet, like Cyril’s Glagolitic alphabet for Slavic, roughly
follows Greek alphabetic order, but the shapes of the letters resemble those of no other alphabet. Georgian also has a
unique alphabet, which was created shortly after the Armenian alphabet, although the two languages are unrelated.
Another early effort was Gothic, an alphabet devised for the now extinct Germanic Gothic language by bishop Ulfilas in
the 4th century. Also of great interest is the Mongolian hP'ags-Pa script, which was created at the order of Mongol leader
Kublai Khan about 1269 and written vertically from top to bottom.
During the 19th century Christian missionaries invented several scripts to translate the Bible into Native American
languages. They based these systems on the Roman alphabet and in the Pacific Northwest, where Russian missionaries
worked, on the Cyrillic alphabet. One script, a syllabary, was invented for the Cree in northern Canada. It consisted of 35
main signs, arranged in groups. Not all scripts were invented by missionaries, however. A Cherokee syllabary was
invented soon after 1820 by the Native American leader Sequoyah. Sequoyah knew very little English and could not read
it. His syllabary emerged from the idea of writing, and he freely invented its 86 characters to represent the sounds of the
Cherokee language.
Many nations of Asia and Africa gained independence in the second half of the 20th century. The peoples of these
nations, including many linguistic and ethnic minorities, had a strong sense of the value of their own traditions and
languages. They wished to perpetuate their language and literary traditions, which had been transmitted orally for
hundreds of years, through writing. In addition, governments felt the need to establish literacy and effective
communication to facilitate economic development. An intensive effort to develop new alphabets followed. Most of the
new alphabets were based on a selection of Roman letters, heavily supplemented with other symbols to represent
special sounds. When linguists developed the alphabets, they typically drew additional characters from the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or from some variation of it. The IPA, developed in 1880, was originally intended to have a
distinctive symbol for every sound made in human language. Although such a goal was dropped as impractical, a
shortened IPA continues to be widely used.
V THE CHANGING ALPHABET
Any alphabet used by peoples speaking different languages undergoes modifications. Such is the case with respect
both to the number and form of letters used and to the subscripts and superscripts, or diacritical marks (accents, cedillas,
tildes, dots, and others), used with the basic symbols to indicate modifications of sound. The letter c with a cedilla, for
instance, appears regularly in French, Portuguese, and Turkish, but rarely, except in borrowed words, in English. The
value of ç in French, Portuguese, and English is that of s, as in the word façade. In Turkish ç represents the ch sound as in
church. It once represented ts in Spanish, but that sound no longer exists in standard Spanish. So, too, letters have
different sound values in different languages. The letter j, for example, as in English jam, has a y sound in German, as in
the word ja, meaning “yes.”
Although alphabets develop as attempts to establish a correspondence between sound and symbol, most alphabetically
written languages are highly unphonetic, largely because the system of writing remains static while the spoken language
evolves. As the spoken language changes, the result is nearly always a decrease in correspondence. Thus, the spelling
of the English word knight reflects the pronunciation of an earlier period of the language, when the initial k was
pronounced and the gh represented a sound, since lost, similar to the ch in the German word Ich, meaning
“I,” or the English loch. The Roman alphabet as used by English contains three totally unnecessary
consonant letters: c, q, and x. The two sounds of c, for instance, could be written with the letters k (“kat”)
and s (“sity”); qu could be written kw (“kwit”); and x could be written ks (“oks”).
The divergence between the written and spoken forms of certain languages, particularly English, has prompted
movements for spelling reform in the past.
At present, English spelling and pronunciation are only slightly related, as in the words leave, brief, light, bomb, know,
and scenery. Moreover, many words with similar spelling are pronounced differently: tough and cough, wind and find,
flood and brood. On the other hand, words with the same pronunciation may be spelled quite differently: ate and eight,
bare and bear, peace and piece. Spelling reform would require a corresponding reform of the alphabet to achieve the
ideal relationship of one letter for each sound. Some letters would have to be added. For example, the sound sh is
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written four different ways, as sh in shape, as ch in chartreuse, as ti in nation, and as s in sugar. Spelling reform would
create a single symbol for that sound. Vowels present even more problems than consonants. The letter a, for example, is
pronounced five different ways in the words same, cat, ball, any, and star. The letter o is pronounced differently in hot, to,
go, and for. Conversely, one vowel sound may be spelled in many ways; the oo sound is written eight ways in the words
soon, chew, true, tomb, rude, suit, youth, and beauty.
A major problem in English spelling reform would be determining whose speech to use as a model. Every language has
speech varieties; some differences result from geographic region, others arise from social class. For many speakers of
American English, the words dog and fog have the same vowel sound. But for some, the vowels differ: dog is
pronounced as if it were spelled dawg and fog as if it were spelled fahg.
VI ADOPTION OF NEW ALPHABETS
Adoption of a foreign alphabet has occurred many times in history. Generally, political domination or the necessity of a
common writing system for purposes of commerce has been responsible for adoption of new alphabets. The rapid
spread of Greek, Latin, and Arabic is traceable to such causes. In a few instances, new alphabets have been adopted at
least partially for reasons of reform. In the most dramatic instance, Turkish, which had been written in Arabic script until
1928, was converted to a Roman alphabet under the orders of Turkey’s president at the time, Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk. Atatürk’s desire to modernize and Westernize Turkey entered into the decision to adopt Roman script, but
he also wished to provide an alphabet more suitable to the Turkish language and more easily learned than Arabic.
Other languages that have changed alphabets include Mongolian, which converted to Cyrillic in 1939, and Vietnamese,
which has officially used the Roman alphabet since 1910, in place of an alphabet based on Chinese characters. The
Roman alphabet for writing Vietnamese was devised by French and Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century
and was used along with the Chinese alphabet for many years. In both cases a number of modifications were made in
the borrowed alphabet in order to make it useful and accurate. Vietnamese, for example, uses accented forms, such as à,
to denote tones.
Adoption of a completely new alphabet, for a people who already have one, is a relatively recent idea. Although many
have been invented and proposed for purposes of reform, none has yet been adopted. British playwright George Bernard
Shaw maintained that a new alphabet should be adopted and left money in his will to develop one. The resulting
alphabet of 48 letters (24 vowels and 24 consonants) was published in 1962. Although phonetically accurate, it was so
totally different from accustomed writing that it was never adopted. Other efforts have been made to alter English writing
for the purpose of helping children and adults who cannot read learn to read, before exposing them to the irregularities of
English spelling.
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