Fayette Allard November 30, 2019 Alphabet
The basic ordering of the Latin alphabet (A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z), which is derived from the Northwest Semitic ”Abgad” order, is well established, although languages using this alphabet have different conventions for their treatment of modified letters (such as the French e, a, and o) and of certain combinations of letters (multi graphs). In French, these are not considered to be additional letters for the purposes of collation. However, in Icelandic, the accented letters such as a, i, and o are considered distinct letters representing different vowel sounds from the sounds represented by their unaccented counterparts. In Spanish, n is considered a separate letter, but accented vowels are not. The ll and ch were also considered single letters, but in 1994 the Real Academia Spain changed the collating order so that ll is between lk and lm in the dictionary and ch is between cg and ci, and in 2010 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies changed it so they were no longer letters at all.
The term Early Hebrew is used to distinguish this branch from the later so-called Square Hebrew. The Early Hebrew alphabet had already begun to acquire its distinctive character by the 11th century bce. It was used officially until the 6th century bce and lingered on for several centuries more. In a stylized form it was used on Jewish coins from 135 bce to 132–135 ce.
The word alphabet, from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet—alpha and beta—was first used, in its Latin form, alphabet, by Tertullian (2nd–3rd century ce), a Latin ecclesiastical writer and Church Father, and by St. Jerome. The Classical Greeks customarily used the plural of to grammar (“the letter”); the later form alphabet was probably adopted under Latin influence.
Only very few inscriptions have been found in Phoenicia proper. This rarity of indigenous documents is in contrast to the numbers of Phoenician inscriptions found elsewhere—on Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia, and in Greece, North Africa, Marseille, Spain, and other places.
The number of letters in an alphabet can be quite small. The Book Pahlavi script, an abjured, had only twelve letters at one point, and may have had even fewer later on. Today the Rotokas alphabet has only twelve letters. (The Hawaiian alphabet is sometimes claimed to be as small, but it actually consists of 18 letters, including the ʻokina and five long vowels. However, Hawaiian Braille has only 13 letters.) While Rotokas has a small alphabet because it has few phonemes to represent (just eleven), Book Pahlavi was small because many letters had been conflated—that is, the graphic distinctions had been lost over time, and diacritics were not developed to compensate for this as they were in Arabic, another script that lost many of its distinct letter shapes. For example, a comma-shaped letter represented g, d, y, k, or j. However, such apparent simplifications can perversely make a script more complicated. In later Pahlavi papyri, up to half of the remaining graphic distinctions of these twelve letters were lost, and the script could no longer be read as a sequence of letters at all, but instead each word had to be learned as a whole—that is, they had become logo grams as in Egyptian Demotic.
The evolution of the alphabet involved two important achievements. The first was the step taken by a group of Semitic-speaking people, perhaps the Phoenicians, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean between 1700 and 1500 bce. This was the invention of a consonant writing system known as North Semitic. The second was the invention, by the Greeks, of characters for representing vowels. This step occurred between 800 and 700 bce. While some scholars consider the Semitic writing system an vocalized syllabify and the Greek system the true alphabet, both are treated here as forms of the alphabet.
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