Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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Pierre Tallet, former president of the French Society of Egyptology, supports Goldwasser’s theory: “Of course [the theory] makes sense, as it is clear that whoever wrote these inscriptions in the Sinai did not know hieroglyphs,” he told me. “And the words they are writing are in a Semitic language, so they must have been Canaanites, who we know were there from the Egyptians’ own written record here in the temple.” These 22 consonants account for the phonology of Northwest Semitic. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, seven are missing: the interdental fricatives ḏ, ṯ, ṱ, the voiceless lateral fricatives ś, ṣ́, the voiced uvular fricative ġ, and the distinction between uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives ḫ, ḥ, in Canaanite merged in ḥet. The six variant letters added in the Arabic alphabet include these (except for ś, which survives as a separate phoneme in Ge'ez ሠ): Greek is in turn the source of all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an /h/, gave rise to the Old Italic alphabet which in turn developed into the Old Roman alphabet. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian. [21] Read also: Features all accurate certified Arabic translation servicesshould offer. Why One Need to Know History Behind English Letters?

An impressive list of English dialects represents almost every part of the world so that English alphabet is used not only in Standard English, also known as Received Pronunciation and which is used when you need certified legal translation services, but in multiple variations of this language as well. The major forms of English native dialects are North American English, Canadian English, and Australian English. Many countries that experienced strong influence from Great Britain or the United States’ side developed specific and somewhat unique dialects, such as Indian English, Hiberno-English dialects, or Philippine English. Usually, the differences are observed not in the number of letters in the alphabet but on pronunciation level as well as vocabulary and grammar.D.Experts argue that this letter was inspired by Egyptian hieroglyph denoting “door” and it was later developed in Semitic letter Dalet that, in turn, was borrowed by Greek and Latin alphabets. Main article: History of the Latin alphabet World distribution of the Latin alphabet. The dark green areas show the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts. Seth Sanders is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the author of The Invention of Hebrew (University of Illinois Press, 2009) . When alphabetic writing began, with the early Greek alphabet, the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to the consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. The Ionic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant into the Italic alphabets (including the Latin alphabet).

The Phoenicians lived near what we now call the Middle East. They invented an alphabet with 22 consonants and no vowels (A, E, I, O or U). Vowels only became part of the alphabet much later.

After the Japanese annexation, which occurred in 1910, Japanese was made the official language of Korea. However, the Korean alphabet was still taught in Korean-established schools built after the annexation and Korean was written in a mixed Hanja-Hangul script, where most lexical roots were written in Hanja and grammatical forms in the Korean alphabet. Japan banned earlier Korean literature from public schooling, which became mandatory for children. [35] a b c Cross, Frank Moore (1980). "Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The American Schools of Oriental Research. 238 (238 (Spring, 1980)): 1–20. doi: 10.2307/1356511. JSTOR 1356511. S2CID 222445150.