The origin of the alphabet and its spread

Brief:

My research brief was to look at the spread of the original alphabet and its adaptation by various peoples around the world.

(Horton 2007)

I was interested to understand how and why the alphabet initially came into existence, and then how it changed over time and spread to areas beyond its original development. I was also interested in who was using it, and for what purpose.

Cuneiform & Heiroglyphics:



From images painted and carved on walls, to marks on clay tablets to record property, over time, writing developed into complex pictograms to record and communicate information and ideas, including administrative records, laws, religious beliefs and how great the ruler was, that civilisations felt a need to record and communicate. A large number, perhaps several hundred pictograms, were needed to cover all the different information and ideas of a civilisation. As well as the complexity of the pictograms, there were also complex rules for how they were used. This complexity meant only a handful of people, the elite scribe class, knew how to use them.

Proto-Sinaitic script:

Round 1900 BC, Egypt was a flourishing civilisation around the rich Nile River valley and delta. Its prosperity drew the people of surrounding states to work for it. Gold and gems were valued amongst its upper classes and one gem that was particularly popular was turquoise. An area it was mined was Serabit, in the Sinai.

There at Serabit, there is evidence of a temple and other structures. These were covered in hieroglyphics, suggesting Serabit was an important location for the Egyptians. Around these hieroglyphs, some simpler, rather primitive, characters have been found. Their primitive nature suggests they were not written by the Egyptian scribes. They are pictorial though and it’s deduced they were done by the miners and other workers connected with the mine, who were mostly itinerant workers from countries around Egypt, notably Canaan (the area known as Palestine).



Each character doesn't represent a single word but rather a sound which is a part of a word. Each is the beginning sound of the word its image represents and in every case each represented a consonant sound. For example, the sound ‘b’ is represented by a primitive diagram of a house, ‘bayt’ being the Canaanite word for ‘house’ and the sound ‘n’ is represented by an image of a snake, the Canaanite word for which was ‘nahash’. The letters were sometimes written left to right, sometimes right to left and sometimes top down, which supports the idea the letters were written by people who were not used to writing, but got their ideas from seeing the written hieroglyphs and adapting them into something they, who couldn’t write otherwise and didn't know the hieroglyph meaning, could use – and share. Unlike hieroglyphics, these characters/letters did not link spelling with meaning.

Ugaritic & Phoenician alphabets:

Round 1400 BC the characters/letters lost their pictographic nature and became lines. This is described as the Canaanite alphabet.

In the 12th century BC both Egypt and Mesopotamia fell into decline and the states around them like Canaan, Phoenicia, Aramea and Israel became stronger. They became more complex too so there was a need for written down information for administrative purposes and to pass on religion. Initially the Canaanites who took over Egypt after the Egyptians, adopted hieroglyphics, perhaps because they suggested power. But over time, probably due to the complexity of hieroglyphics - and out of common sense, the simpler alphabetic characters were adopted.

The Phoenicians were a prosperous people on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean round Lebanon today. They adopted and used the simpler alphabetic writing and adjusted it to their own spoken language. The Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was consonantal and Phoenician remained so too.

In Ugarit, another prosperous state a little further north along the Mediterranean, they too had developed an alphabet. Ugarit seems to have been quite a cosmopolitan city and perhaps as a result came in contact with many languages and their written forms. They were familiar with Cuneiform from Mesopotamia, and developed an alphabet made up of simplified Cuneiform characters and again based on consonantal sounds. It had a definite order as evidenced by a number of small clay tablets that have been found at Ugarit. All have characters in the same order. With the decline of Ugarit, this alphabet died out.

The spread:

With their flair for trade, the Phoenicians took their written language to all corners of the Mediterranean and into the Indian Ocean and part way down the African coast.

Round 825 BC they established Carthage on the North African Mediterranean coast (today its Tunisia). The language written there was very similar to Phoenician but came to be called Punic. A modified form of Punic is still in use by Berbers today.

The other states around it: Israel and Aramea adapted it to their spoken languages. A modified form of the script which came to be called South Arabian, was used in areas in the south and eventually its use crossed the Red Sea and moved down to Ethiopia. When Christianity was introduced the language was changed to add in vowel sounds and came to be written left to right.

The written Arabic script came into being with the Nabataens, the rulers of Petra, round 200 BC. They spoke Arabic but wrote Aramaic. Their writing became more and more cursive and started to take on the form of Arabic. With the Quran, there was a need to communicate with written language, and this reinforced its usefulness.

Aramea round 900 BC added letters for the long vowels and introduced apaces between words. Aramea was powerful for a time but after it came the Assyrians who found written Aramaean useful and adopted it for administrative purposes even though it didn't match their spoken language fully. And then the Persians took over and again Aramean was adapted to their spoken language. They actually used cuneiform for formal purposes but Aramaic for administrative purposes. Successive rulers found it easier to adopt a previous rulers written language and so Aramaic spread north and with various groups coming from Mongolia and thereabouts they too found a need for written language for administrative reasons and it was taken up by them too. When the Manchus became powerful they got the Mongols to teach them their version - and then adapted it. For a time this was the official language in China.

Brahmi:

Brahmi is said to have developed from Aramaic which was the language of Persia. Darius the Great, a Persian, conquered lands all the way to the Indus Valley and used Aramaic as his written language. It’s believed this written language used by the Persians, had an influence on the development of the Brahmi language. There's no evidence for this, although there are some similarities, mostly that it has an order. Some believe the influence was minimal but the proximitiy of the Persians using Aramaic adjacent to India, is likely to have had a certain influence.

The formal version of Brahmi, Sanskrit, was used to write religious texts. With the spread of the Hindu and Buddhist religions east into South East Asia and further south, as well as north into Tibet, this influenced the written languages in these areas. Different spoken languages usually adapted the Brahmi alphabet to take into account the sounds of their particular spoken language. These included Vietnamese, Lao, Thai and Indonesian. Despite changing for this, their alphabets still retained the phonemes of Sanskrit and the same order of letters ie pronunciation from the back to the front of the mouth.

Today many of them have been superseded by Roman and Arabic alphabets.

Greek alphabet:

The Greeks were neighbours of the Phoenicians and obviously had a trading relationship with them. There was already a written language in existence in parts of Greece, but it was quite complex. It seems likely that the simpler Phoenician written language influenced them to look at simplifying theirs. But compared with the Phoenician spoken language, the Greek spoken language had vowels that were impossible to match to the Phoenician alphabet made up of consonants. So they matched Greek sounds with those in the Phoenician alphabet and found that there were some Phoenician sounds that didn’t exist in Greek, so they were able to assign those redundant Phoenician letters to a Greek vowel sound. With more sounds than Phoenician letters, they created new letters and put them at the end of the alphabet.



Roman alphabet:

The prosperity of the Greeks meant they had colonies further west in the Mediterranean. In what is known today as Italy, in the area of Tuscany, there were a people called the Etruscans. They were an up and coming state and had contact with these Greek colonies. Again prosperity seems to have created a need for written records, so the Etruscans borrowed the most available source, the Greek alphabet. Their spoken language was different to Greek and so there was a need to adapt the Greek alphabet to the sounds of their language.

Over time, the Etruscans became less powerful and Rome to the south became stronger. The same needs came to the fore, and Rome found it useful to take up an existing written langauge and adapt it to their spoken tongue. And so the Latin alphabet came into existence.

As the Roman Empire became more and more powerful and spread throughout the Mediterranean and into northern Europe, so Latin also spread and influenced other written languages.

As part of the spread of Christianity and the need to record the scriptures, Latin came to be used for religious texts. So not only was Latin used for administrative purposes, but also for religious texts. The latter use outlived the Roman Empire.

The alphabet today:

As the alphabet spread it was changed to include letters for sounds in particular spoken languages, including vowels. Some languages that had vowel sounds chose to add extra letters or reassign letters, but others chose to add a mark or a dot on or around letters. Arabic is one of those as is Brahmi.

Despite the fall of the Roman Empire, the Latin alphabet remained in use, largely because it was convenient to use a written form most had some familiarity with. But smaller states adapted it to their own spoken languages, and its form changed over time.

Charlemagne in the 8th century AD became interested in education and spreading knowledge. He brought together the learned scholars of the time and found they all wrote a different Latin, so he did considerable work on standardising into one, the many forms of Latin that had evolved.

To the north of Europe, the barbaric English didn’t take up Latin when the Romans were there, but later Irish missionaries introduced it with Christianity.

The introduction of the printing press in the 1400s again brought standardisation to the written forms of languages that had evolved.

Cyrillic

By mid 800s, the Byzantine civilisation which had adopted Christianity were asked to come and teach it to people of the area of Slovakia. So the emperor sent a priest, Cyril, there but Cyril was concerned the message be understood correctly and to do so adapted Greek to the phonemes of Slovakia. It wasn't till some time later that this language which had been adapted somewhat in the meantime came into greater use and became known as Cyrillic. Its use spread to areas around there and into Russia and later Turkey.

Conclusion:

The Canaanite miners back around 1900BC and their interest in having some form of written communication they could use, that didn’t have the complexity and exclusivity of the written language their masters used (Gnanadesikan 2008 describes it as the 'For Dummies' version of writing), started off a trend to make language more democratic and accessible to the world.

Its spread, in a low key way by these itinerant workers, offered an convenient and easy written form for later prosperous states to take up as theirs and adapt to their particular spoken languages.

Trade took it around the Mediterranean and further afield, being adopted for convenience and then adapted to local spoken languages. It spread east, west and south into Africa where there are still remnants today in Ethiopian languages.
Its spread east resulted in Darius adopting it as his administrative language and taking it with him to the Indus Valley. Its existence next door to a country that was expanding, influenced the development of the spoken languages of India and too its eastern neighbours.

As the alphabet was adapted over time the form of its letters were influenced by the materials used. More linear characters were easier to write on clay, whereas round characters, like in Indian script, were easier to write on palm leaves when using a metal stylus pen.


Bibliography:

Ager, S 2010, Ge'ez script, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm
Ager, S 2010, Old English/Anglo-Saxon (Englisc), viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm
Alphabets 1998, viewed 13 April 2010, www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabets.htm
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 7: Old Hebrew to Greek and Aramaic, 17 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Bqe5rfi5s&feature=related
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 8: The Proto-Sinaitic Alphabet, 19 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TF0QQ1ptsI&feature=related
Baron, NS 2001, Alphabet to Email: how written English evolved and where its heading, Routledge, London
Baugh, AC & Cable, T 2002, A History of the English Language, Routledge, London
Benner J 2007, The Ugarit Alphabet, Ancient Hebrew Research Centre, viewed 13 April 2010, http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/22_alphabet.html
Brookfield, K 1993, Writing, Dorling Kindersley Limited, London
Comrie, B, Matthew, S & Polinsky, M 2003, The Atlas of Languages: The origin and development of languages throughout the world, Quarto Inc, London
Crystal, D 1997, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
DjArnousSyr, The first alphabet in history was found in Ugarit, Syria, 27 October 2008, viewed 26 April 2010
eHow, History Question: Who invented the alphabet? 22 May 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
Firmage, RA 1993, The Alphabet Abecedarium: some notes on letters, Bloomsbury, London
Gnanadesikan, A 2009, The Writing Revolution: cuneiform to the internet, John Wiley & Sons, EBooks Corporation
Gnomon 2004, The Development of the Western Alphabet, viewed 13 April 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890
Goldwasser, O 2010, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs, Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02 Mar/Apr 2010, viewed 20 April 2010, www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=2&ArticleID=6
Horton, K 2007, E*Rock/Crystal Beast, http://www.flickr.com/photos/karenhorton/158258717/in/set-72157602443997513/ viewed 4 June 2010,
In Our Time: The Alphabet 2003, [radio program], BBC Radio 4, 18 December, viewed 13 April 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054950
Jean, G 1987, Writing; The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, New Horizons, London
Lo, L 2010, Ethiopic, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.ancientscripts.com/ethiopic.html
Pryst, J n.d., Phoenicia, viewed 17 April 2010, http://www.ancientopedia.com/phoenicia/
Sacks, D 2004, The Alphabet: unravelling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z, Arrow Books, London
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet: unravelling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z, Hutchinson, London
teachertubeWriting, The History of Alphabet, 29 September 2009, viewed 26 April 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDuW7iVdqbw
Sesame Street, Sesame Street: The Alphabet with Elmo, 21 May 2009, viewed 16 May 2010
Ugaritic 2010, viewed 17 April 2010, http://ancientscripts.com/ugaritic.html
Woodard, R 1997, Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer: a linguistic interpretation of the origin of the Greek alphabet and the continuity of Ancient Greek literacy, Oxford University Press, EBooks Corporation, viewed 25 April 2010
Woodard, R (ed) 2008, The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, Cambridge University Press, EBooks Corporation, viewed 25 April 2010

The journey . . .

My topic:

My topic was to look at:
- why the original alphabet evolved
- how it evolved
- how it changed over time
- how it spread beyond the original area of use
- who was using it and
- why they were using it.


Briefly, the original alphabet seems to have evolved as a simpler option to what had gone before. With heiroglyphics there were so many symbols to remember whereas the alphabet reduced those to twenty something characters. Not only did it make it easier to use, it made it accessible to a broader part of the population.

It changed over time primarily when a different spoken language adopted it. With a different spoken language, often there were differences in sounds and perhaps some letters were redundant or others not represented at all.

To look at the alphabet, you really have to take a step back and look at the history of writing itself and why people started to write, and then the practicalities of that.

Writing seems to have started to record things, in order to be more accurate rather than relying on memory. It might have been to keep accounts, or maybe to record the law. Usually it was also used to record the praises of the ruler of the time. Religion and often later literature came into it. Early written forms, eg heiroglyphics, became so complex that usually they could only be written by specially trained scribes, who because of their skills had high level positions in society. With simplifying it to an alphabet it made it more accessible to more people. Some have said it democratized writing. It also made it far more practical and practicality won out! The elites weren't able to hold their privileged status as narrowly as they had previously.

It spread as part of trade, and then political and military conquests and later with religion.

In its political spread, sometimes the success of a society for a lengthy period was to some extent related to having an easy to write language. Written language helped the Roman Empire keep tabs and control of its farflung parts. Without one written language this would have been far more difficult.

What was written on and what was used for that and its effects on written language is another interesting aspect of the alphabet's development. Cuneiform on clay tablets seems to have arisen because in Mesopotamia or Iraq there was lots of clay around and it was therefore a convenient medium. When there wasn't a plentiful supply of clay, other mediums like stone or papyrus or skins were used. The writing implement also had an affect, as in India, where a metal stylus writing on palm leaf resulted in rounded letters.


Resources:

Wikipedia was a useful resource to get an overview and start with and although it has question marks about its reliability, I didn't come across anything from texts or other internet sources that seemed to contradict it.

Of the texts, I found Gnanadesikan (2009) very useful in covering a variety of countries and civilisations in one text. She was also easier to read than some texts that were heavily technical about linguistics.

Apart from that I found Sacks (2003) interesting because in covering individual letters, he gave an understanding of the evolution of the alphabet. I came across two editions of his work, one with colored illustrations and one with none. The stories of individual letters, their inclusion and how their shape changed as writing went from right to left or left to right and shapes were reversed. Or top down or even bottom up, and sometimes how a letter was written might be totally turned around, or became redundant in one spoken language but was picked up for another sound or reclaimed in a later version as with 'g'. It wasn't a sound in Etruscan but was in Latin and seemingly reclaimed as a result of trading contacts with the Greeks and awareness of their written language.



Overall:

It's been fascinating and I'd like to read more. Some of the material is quite technical with links to linguistics and used technical linguistic terms, and as a result was somewhat off putting. But with the more readable material, I was inclined to get involved in reading rather than skimming, and so not researching other possible material out there!

I think I've covered most of the brief to a greater or lesser extent.

Along the way I've become a little familiar with blogs, though I would still like to know how to post videos on the side panel! And I would like to do more with layout, and so want to try another blog space to see if that is possible.



Bibliography:

Ager, S 2010, Ge'ez script, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm
Ager, S 2010, Old English/Anglo-Saxon (Englisc), viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm
Alphabets 1998, viewed 13 April 2010, www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabets.htm
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 7: Old Hebrew to Greek and Aramaic, 17 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 8: The Proto-Sinaitic Alphabet, 19 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
Baron, NS 2001, Alphabet to Email: how written English evolved and where its heading, Routledge, London
Baugh, AC & Cable, T 2002, A History of the English Language, Routledge, London
Benner J 2007, The Ugarit Alphabet, Ancient Hebrew Research Centre, viewed 13 April 2010, http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/22_alphabet.html
Brookfield, K 1993, Writing, Dorling Kindersley Limited, London
Comrie, B, Matthew, S & Polinsky, M 2003, The Atlas of Languages: The origin and development of languages throughout the world, Quarto Inc, London
Crystal, D 1997, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
DjArnousSyr, The first alphabet in history was found in Ugarit, Syria, 27 October 2008, viewed 26 April 2010
eHow, History Question: Who invented the alphabet? 22 May 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
Firmage, RA 1993, The Alphabet Abecedarium: some notes on letters, Bloomsbury, London
Gnanadesikan, A 2009, The Writing Revolution: cuneiform to the internet, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England
Gnomon 2004, The Development of the Western Alphabet, viewed 13 April 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890
Goldwasser, O 2010, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs, Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02 Mar/Apr 2010, viewed 20 April 2010, www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=2&ArticleID=6
In Our Time: The Alphabet 2003, [radio program], BBC Radio 4, 18 December, viewed 13 April 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054950
Jean, G 1987, Writing; The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, New Horizons, London
Lo, L 2010, Ethiopic, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.ancientscripts.com/ethiopic.html
Pryst, J n.d., Phoenicia, viewed 17 April 2010, http://www.ancientopedia.com/phoenicia/
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet, Arrow Books, London
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet, Hutchinson, London
teachertubeWriting, The History of Alphabet, 29 September 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
Sesame Street, Sesame Street: The Alphabet with Elmo, 21 May 2009, viewed 16 May 2010
Ugaritic 2010, viewed 17 April 2010, http://ancientscripts.com/ugaritic.html
Woodard, R 1997, Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer: a linguistic interpretation of the origin of the Greek alphabet and the continuity of Ancient Greek literacy, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Woodard, R (ed) 2008, The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, Cambridge University Press, Leiden

And a review . . .

. . . of what covered to date and where there were still areas I'd planned to explore that I hadn't or hadn't as much as I'd intended.

Areas I wanted to check were Brahmi languages and their development including the order of their alphabet, Ethiopian languages and also written language in England.

I'd also intended to look at some of the texts that David Crystal has authored (the use of 'encyclopedia' in the titles suggested something academic). And wanted to review images and videos, whether there were others that I might use here.

Brahmi language

In reviewing the Brahmi languages I clarified their connection with Aramaic. It seems to be a taken that Aramaic has influenced spoken Brahmi languages but there are different views on its influence on written Brahmi. Gnanadesikan (2005) says the 'writing in India was neither a completely independent discovery or a slavish borrowing of someone else's technology' and goes on to say with 'the presence of the Achaemenid Persian Empire at India's northwest frontier, it is reasonable to assume that Imperial Aramaic played a role in inspiring script development in India'.

Brahmi and the other principal early language in India, Kharosthi, were designed to match phonemes present in Indian Prakrits (the vernacular languages) which were quite different from the Semitic consonants of Aramaic. Anthropologists have a specific phrase for the Brahmi written language situation: stimulus diffusion which means it was different from borrowing outright or close adaptation.

The rounded forms of written Brahmi languages arose because of the tools they used to write them. Writing was usually done on palm leaves or birch bark and metal stylus used. With angular forms, the metal stylus easily tore the surface so the language developed with a more rounded form.

The Japanese kana system has the same order as Brahmi, though the characters are totally different, but this suggests the spread of Brahmi languages with Buddhism may have had an influence on this.

Ge'ez, also called Ethiopic

This is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and is still in use today in that context. Round 900BC, writing using the South Arabian alphabet moved south into Ethiopia. Over time, variants developed into Ge'ez, an Ethio-Semitic script of 26 consonants. Old Ge'ez was an abjad, ie just represented vowels but over time developed into an abugida, where the consonant letters added marks to indicate vowels. As it has evolved over time, there is the suggestion that some of these changes have been influenced by trade routes with India and hence the Brahmi language. Others dispute it as it's order is similar to the South Semitic alphabet (and also Ugaritic!!), rather than Brahmi.

Today Ge'ez, although it has influenced other regional languages such as Amharic, Tigre and Tigrinya, is only found in liturgical writings. Although it was used in the title of a film '500 years later', made in 2005, 500 years after the onset of slavery from Africa. (The film won a number of awards when it was released including one from UNESCO.)

Runic alphabet

The Runic alphabet (with letters called runes) of northern Europe was used to write a variety of Germanic languages. The earliest known evidence of these dates from 150AD. With Christianisation of northern Europe, Latin became the dominant language and runes were used only for specialised purposes after that.

It's believed runes may have developed from an early Italic writing - possibly an adaptation of the Etruscan alphabet - and taken to northern Europe by Germanic mercenaries who worked in the Roman army.

Old English, or Anglo Saxon, was first written in runes (from the mid-5th century) but then later with the arrival of Irish Catholic missionaries, the Latin alphabet was introduced to England. Unusually for Roman-occupied countries, England hadn't been left with a legacy of Latin as a result of the Roman occupation. By about the
9th century AD the Latin alphabet had replaced Anglo Saxon runes. Prior to the introduction of runes, there is no evidence remaining today of written languages in England.

Lowercase vs uppercase

Lowercase vs uppercase is another area I wanted to check. Sacks (2003) says lower case shapes were created in the Middle Ages. However, despite saying this, he also talks of Charlemagne, round 789AD, introducing what was described as Carolingian miniscule. When Charlemagne was rationalising all the versions of written Latin that had developed, he created lowercase letters as part of this rationalisation. These were easier and more economical to write than the uppercase letters, and quickly became popular.


References:

Ager, S 2010, Ge'ez script, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm
Ager, S 2010, Old English/Anglo-Saxon (Englisc), viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm
Baron, NS 2001, Alphabet to Email: how written English evolved and where it's heading, Routledge, London
Baugh, AC & Cable, T 2002, A History of the English Language, Routledge, London
Brookfield, K 1993, Writing, Dorling Kindersley Limited, London
Comrie, B, Matthews, S & Polinsky, M 2003, The Atlas of Languages: the origin and development of languages throughout the world, Quarto Inc, London
Crystal, D 1997, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Firmage, RA 1993, The Alphabet Abecedarium: some notes on letters, Bloomsbury, London
Gnanadesikan, A 2009, The Writing Revolution: cuneiform to the internet, John Wiley & Sons, EBooks Corporation, viewed 28 April, 2010
Lo, L 2010, Ethiopic, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.ancientscripts.com/ethiopic.html
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet, Hutchinson, London
Woodard, R 1997, Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer: a linguistic interpretation of the origin of the Greek alphabet and the continuity of Ancient Greek literacy, Oxford University Press, Oxford

Looking at the further spread of the alphabet

Have been looking at the Brahmi languages of India and their written forms, which are said to have been influenced, to some extent, by Aramaic. One written form was Sanskrit, the language of the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. With the spread of these religions through South Asia, South East Asia and Central Asia, Sanskrit writing spread too and later had an influence on the alphabets of countries throughout this region.

Have also looked at the development of the Greek and Latin alphabets and their influences on written English, and the role of Christianity in the spread of both.

Points noted include:

* The spread of alphabets is very much a history lesson: events at different periods in time influenced written language and written language had an influence on those events.

* Sanskrit spread with religion whereas most other written alphabets spread through military or political conquest.

* The Sanskrit-influenced alphabets of Asia all reflected the phonemes of Sanskrit and were arranged in the same order, ie according to how they were pronouced, from the back of the mouth to the front.

* Many of the Sanskrit-influenced alphabets of South East Asian countries have today been superseded by Roman and Arabic alphabets.

* Although the Indian subcontinent has hundreds of languages, those with written form encode the same phonemes and their letters are listed in the same order.

* For the Greeks, with a different spoken language to the Phoenicians, the Phoenician alphabet wasn't very practical for putting their language in written form. Greek scribes already used a written language based on syllables, so when they looked at the Phoenician alphabet in relation to Greek spoken language, they looked at it systematically, comparing sounds from their language to those represented by the Phoenician alphabet. It turned out there were consonant symbols which were redundant, so these were used to represent some of the Greek vowel sounds. They devised other symbols for the remaining sounds and added these to the end of the alphabet.

* The Greek alphabet became the first alphabetic writing system to represent both consonant and vowel sounds.

* Around 700BC, the Etruscans (from Tuscany in Italy), a civilisation on the way up, adopted the Greek alphabet for their written language. But it didn't quite fit their spoken language - two letters of the Greek alphabet were redundant. So they adapted it and later introduced word division into their writing.

* The Romans, further south in Italy, took up the written language of their more powerful northern neighbours and again as there wasn't a perfect match of phonemes, it was adapted. This early Roman alphabet differed from the Roman alphabet we recognise today.

* In the early Roman alphabet there were 23 letters and no J, U or W. V alternated between being a consonant and a vowel.

* In the transition from Greek to Etruscan to Roman alphabets, the names of the letters changed from their Semitic-derived names of two syllables: aleph, beta, etc to one syllable names.

* Those who came after the end of the Roman Empire found it convenient to use Latin as a written language, except in North Africa and Spain where Arabic replaced Latin.

* Over time Latin evolved into a diversity of forms and it wasn't until the 8th century and Charlemagne, a supporter of learning, that it was standardised. He found the scholars around him all spoke a different Latin. So he made an effort to standardize pronunciation, grammar usage and the written script.

* Pronunciation of languages changes over time and this obviously influences change in written language also.

* The introduction of the printing press resulted in a move to standardise alphabet forms.



References:

Gnanadesakari, A 2009, The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the internet, John Wiley & Sons, EBooks Corporation, viewed 28 April 2010

Youtube and more . . .

Have been looking at Youtube videos round this topic and found some related to the early history of the alphabet, including Hebrew and Ugaritic characters. These were searched from 'History of Alphabet' and 'History of Writing'. I can attach them within the Blog Post but wanted to attach them on the panel on the right hand side. Haven't worked out how to do that yet.

One of those videos is titled 'The History of Alphabet' from http://teachertube.com. (The sound is weak but the overview it gives is useful, even just from images.) See below:




Have also been looking through the Swinburne catalogue and found a couple of relevant items, based on 'The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages' but which looked at individual languages, for example, Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew. These focussed on spoken language but they also covered how the language was written and how that evolved in different parts of the world.

There is a video production on Youtube titled 'The History of Hebrew' which is made up of a number of parts. Parts 7, 8 and 9 are relevant. Parts 8 and 9 are below. In Part 9 it is the first 2 minutes which are most relevant and then the content is more specific to Hebrew.









Part 7 of this production is titled 'Old Hebrew to Greek and Aramaic'. This is interesting for showing the change over time of the first 5 letters of the Old Hebrew alphabet to those of Ancient Greek to Modern Greek and to English today (which is based on the Roman alphabet, which in turn was based on Greek).






Another reference (Gnanadesikan 2009) covered much of the same territory but, in parts, was written in a less technical, more readable style. Gnanadesikan (2009) likened the development of the Proto-Sinaitic script by Semitic mercenaries and labourers living in Egypt to the development of a ''For Dummies' version of writing, pared down to something an illiterate soldier could learn in a few sessions'. She also considered the order almost as useful as the alphabet itself and speculated that it was 'possibly transmitted through a song or rhyme that helped the semi-literate remember', rather like children learn the alphabet today.

Here's a Sesame Street version for learning alphabet order:




Her 'For Dummies' version comment and her speculation about how it might have been learnt, presented a much more human image of it's development compared to some other fairly technical and dry references.

She also refers to the development of the Ugaritic alphabet being like a 'cul de sac' in the development of the alphabet in that it was based on cuneiform symbols, and other civilisations didn't take it on or use it to develop their own alphabet as they did with the Phoenician alphabet.

The following video from YouTube gives examples of writing using the Ugaritic alphabet. These pieces were found at Ugarit in north-western Syria. The video's claim to be the first alphabet is disputed, although it definitely was a very early alphabet. Although Ugaritic writing and Phoenician writing were different, the standard letter order of their alphabets shows strong similarities suggesting they weren't wholly independent inventions.



References:

Gnanadeskikan, A 2009, The Writing Revolution John Wiley & Sons, EBooks Corporation, viewed 26 April 2010
Woodard, R (ed) 2008, The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia Cambridge University Press, EBooks Corporation, viewed 28 April 2010
eHow, History Questions: Who invented the alphabet? 22 May 2009, viewed 26 April 2010,
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 8: The Proto-Sinaitic Alphabet, 19 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010,
DjArnousSyr, The first alphabet in history was found in Ugarit, Syria, 27 October 2008, viewed 26 April 2010,
teachertubeWriting, The History of Alphabet, 29 September 2009, viewed 26 April 2010,
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 7: Old Hebrew to Greek and Aramaic, 17 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010,
Sesame Street, Sesame Street: The Alphabet with Elmo, 21 May 2009, viewed 16 May 2010,

Reviewing and working out 'technicalities'

I've been looking at images, what there is and whether they're protected by copyright or not.

The image on the left (Kwamikagami 2005) is a script termed Proto-Sinaitic. 'Proto' suggests an early version: half way between hieroglyphics and a linear alphabet, and 'Sinaitic', that evidence of it was found in the Sinai. It was found during archaeological work at a former turquoise mine at Serabit, in the high mountains of the Sinai. The letters are pictorial, and represent the first sound of the word for the image. Being pictorial helped users to remember them. (The word is 'Ba'alat', the name of a god.)

I've also been trying other layouts and made a change to this color scheme, heading and organisation. I've inserted some in-text links but so far haven't found a video link I want to insert. One of the BBC references in the second post is an interesting podcast though.

With this post, my 'research' has been more technical in nature - ie getting more of a handle on copying images, checking copyright, inserting links, reviewing Harvard referencing, etc - than subject-based.

Next, I want to check databases and broaden my research. If there's time I'd like to play around with the appearance of the blog and see if I can find some relevant videos, but that may be a bit later.

Reference:

Kwamikagami 2005, viewed 4 April 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad

And a couple of texts . . .

Checked the local library for texts using Writing history as search phrase and found two texts with relevant material. (Tried Alphabets and Alphabet as subject search phrases, but the first book mentioned here did not come up despite having Alphabets in its title! And the second one came up in a search on Alphabet but not Alphabets!)

The first one, Writing; The Story of Alphabets and Scripts discussed influences on the development of scripts and how the purpose it was used for affected its spread. It also discussed how things like writing materials eg reeds in Mesopotamia, and visual tastes, eg like those of the Egyptians, affected the form of the letters in a language’s alphabet.

It had interesting information but there seemed to be gaps in the sequence of the development of alphabets, compared with other material I've read.

The other book, The Alphabet links changes in writing more clearly for me. It makes the point that the strength of the Phoenicians as travellers and traders essentially marketed their alphabet to most of the then known world in a very effective fashion and no doubt lead to its being more readily adopted and adapted by other cultures, to the extent that there is only one major alphabetic script today that cannot be traced back to the Phoenician alphabet. This is actually disputed in more recent writings that I came across in wikipedia. The script referred to is the Korean Hangul system which was invented from scratch in the mid-1400s AD. While that researcher proposes 5 characters are derived from Phoenician, his findings are disputed.


References:

Jean, G 1987, Writing; The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, New Horizons, London
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet, Arrow Books, London