History of the alphabet facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

The history of the alphabet is a fascinating journey that shows how people learned to write down sounds. Almost all the alphabets we use today, like the one you're reading, came from an ancient writing system used in a place called the Levant (near modern-day Israel and Lebanon) around 3,500 years ago.

The very first ideas for this alphabet came from Ancient Egypt. Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt needed a way to write their own language. The Egyptian writing system, called hieroglyphs, was very complicated, with thousands of pictures. These workers weren't experts in hieroglyphs. So, they picked a small number of pictures they saw every day and used them to represent sounds in their own Canaanite language. This idea of using a picture for the *first sound* of its name is called the acrophonic principle. For example, a picture of an ox (which was called ʾalp in their language) might represent the "a" sound. This early script was also a bit influenced by hieratic, a simpler, cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This early Semitic alphabet became the grandparent of many writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Africa and Asia. Important descendants include the Phoenician, Aramaic, and later the Arabic alphabet.

Some experts call these early alphabets "consonantal alphabets" or abjads because they only had letters for consonants, not vowels. The first "true alphabet," with letters for both consonants and vowels, was the Greek alphabet. It was created by adapting the Phoenician alphabet. The Latin alphabet, which is the most widely used alphabet today, came from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, which in turn came from Phoenician.

Early Writing Systems
Alphabets with Only Consonants
- The First Semitic Alphabet
- Descendants of the Aramaic Alphabet
Alphabets with Vowels
- The Greek Alphabet
  - How it was Adopted
  - Its Descendants
- The Latin Alphabet
Letter Names and Order
Alphabets Created Independently
Alphabets in Other Forms
Images for kids
See also

Early Writing Systems

Before the alphabet, people used other ways to write. Two very old systems, from over 5,000 years ago, were Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Egyptian hieroglyphs used pictures in different ways. Some pictures represented whole words (like a picture of a sun meaning "sun"). Others represented sounds, and some were "determinatives" that gave clues about the meaning of a word without writing sounds directly. Since Egyptian writing usually didn't write vowels, the hieroglyphs that stood for a single consonant could have been used like a consonantal alphabet. While Egyptians didn't use them this way for their own language, this idea seems to have inspired the creation of the very first alphabet for a Semitic language.

Almost all alphabets around the world today either came directly from this first Semitic alphabet or were inspired by one of its descendants. One possible exception is the Meroitic alphabet from ancient Nubia, which adapted hieroglyphs in a different way. The Rongorongo script from Easter Island might also be a completely separate invention, but we don't know enough about it to be sure.

Alphabets with Only Consonants

The First Semitic Alphabet

The Proto-Sinaitic script from Egypt is still a bit of a mystery, but it's believed to be the first alphabetic system and likely recorded the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are drawings found in a place called Wadi el-Hol, dating back to around 1850 BCE.

This Semitic script took Egyptian hieroglyphs and used them to write consonant sounds. It worked by using the "acrophonic principle." This means the picture stood for the *first sound* of the Semitic name for that object. For example, the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (called per) was used to write the "b" sound in Semitic, because the Semitic word for "house" was bayt, which starts with "b."

Not much of this early Canaanite script has survived. But what we have suggests it kept its picture-like look for about 500 years. Then, it was adopted by the Phoenician city-states for official use. Because the Phoenician cities were great traders and sailed all over the Mediterranean Sea, their alphabet, called the Phoenician alphabet, spread far and wide. Two versions of the Phoenician alphabet had a huge impact on writing history: the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet.

Descendants of the Aramaic Alphabet

The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian ancestor, only had letters for consonants. This type of writing system is called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet developed from Phoenician around the 7th century BCE and became the official writing system of the Persian Empire. It is the ancestor of almost all modern alphabets in Asia, except for those in India.

The Arabic alphabet came from Aramaic through the Nabataean alphabet (used in what is now southern Jordan). It's the second most used alphabet in the world (after Latin) and the most used abjad system.
The modern Hebrew alphabet started as a local version of the Imperial Aramaic script. The original Hebrew alphabet is still used by the Samaritans.
The Syriac alphabet, which developed after the 3rd century CE, eventually led to alphabets in North Asia like the Old Turkic alphabet, Mongolian writing systems, and the Manchu alphabet.
The Georgian scripts are a bit of a mystery, but they seem to be related to either the Persian-Aramaic or Greek families.

Alphabets with Vowels

The Greek Alphabet

How it was Adopted

Around the 8th century BCE, the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet. They changed it to fit their own language, creating the first "true" alphabet that had separate letters for both consonants and vowels. According to ancient Greek stories, the hero Cadmus brought the alphabet from Phoenicia to Greece.

The letters in the Greek alphabet were similar to those in the Phoenician alphabet, and they were even in the same order. However, Greek needed vowels because they were very important in their language. The Greeks cleverly used some Phoenician letters that represented sounds not found in Greek speech to stand for vowels. For example, the Phoenician letters ’alep and `ayin (which were consonants) became the Greek alpha and o (later called omicron), representing the vowel sounds "a" and "o."

Different versions of the Greek alphabet developed. One, called the Cumae alphabet, was used in western Greece and southern Italy. Another, called Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor. Around 400 BCE, the Athenians adopted the Eastern Greek version, and eventually, the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. The Greeks also changed their writing direction from right-to-left (like the Phoenicians) to left-to-right. This change in direction is why many Greek letters look like reversed or changed versions of their Phoenician ancestors.

Its Descendants

Greek is the source of all modern alphabets in Europe. The early western Greek alphabets led to the Old Italic alphabet, which then developed into the Old Roman alphabet. In eastern Greek dialects, the letter eta became a vowel sound, and it remains a vowel in modern Greek and other alphabets that came from eastern Greek, such as Cyrillic, Armenian, and Gothic.

It's important to remember that the history of alphabets isn't always a simple straight line. For example, the Georgian scripts came from the Semitic family but were also heavily influenced by Greek. A changed version of the Greek alphabet, using some extra Egyptian hieroglyphs, was used to write Coptic Egyptian.

The Latin Alphabet

The Latins, who later became the Romans, lived in the Italian peninsula, just like the Western Greeks. Around the 7th century BCE, the Latins learned to write from the Etruscans (a tribe in central Italy) and the Western Greeks.

When they adopted writing, the Latins removed four letters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also changed the Etruscan letter F (which sounded like "w") to make the "f" sound, and the zigzag Etruscan S became the curved modern S. To represent the "g" sound (from Greek) and the "k" sound (from Etruscan), they used the letter gamma. These changes created the early Latin alphabet, which was missing letters like G, J, U, W, Y, and Z that we have today.

In the Roman alphabet, C, K, and Q could all be used for the "k" sound. The Romans soon changed the letter C to create G and put it in the seventh spot, where Z used to be. A few centuries after Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean, the Romans started borrowing Greek words. This meant they had to change their alphabet again to write these new words. They borrowed Y and Z from the Eastern Greek alphabet and added them to the very end of their alphabet, as they were only used for Greek words.

When the Anglo-Saxons in Britain became Christians in the 6th century, they started using Roman letters to write Old English. The old Runic letter wen, which looked like a narrow "p" and was used for the "w" sound, was often confused with the letter "p." So, the "w" sound began to be written using a double "u." Since the letter "u" at the time looked like a "v," the double "u" looked like two "v"s. This is why W was placed after V in the alphabet.

The letter U developed when people started using a rounded shape for the vowel "u" and a pointed shape for the consonant "v." The letter J started as a variation of I. A long tail was added to the final "I" when there were several "I"s in a row. By the 15th century, people began using J for the consonant sound and I for the vowel sound, and this became fully accepted in the mid-17th century.

Letter Names and Order

The order of the letters in the alphabet has been known since the 14th century BCE. This was discovered in the ancient city of Ugarit on Syria's northern coast. Tablets found there had over a thousand cuneiform signs, but about twelve of them showed only thirty different characters arranged in an alphabetic order. Two main orders were found: one is almost the same as the order used for Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and the other is similar to the order used for Ethiopian.

We don't know how many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had or what their exact order was. Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet had 22. These scripts were arranged in two main orders, and both of these sequences remained very stable in the alphabets that came from them.

The names of the letters also stayed very similar among the many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, these names were mostly dropped in Tifinagh, Latin, and Cyrillic. The letter order continued mostly unchanged into Latin, Armenian, Gothic, and Cyrillic.

Alphabets Created Independently

Most modern national alphabets can be traced back to the Canaanite alphabet. However, a few were created independently. The Maldivian script is unique because, even though it was inspired by Arabic and other alphabets, its letter shapes come from numbers! Another example is the Korean Hangul, which was created completely independently in 1443. The Osmanya alphabet was made for the Somali language in the 1920s, and its consonant shapes seem to be entirely new inventions.

Among older alphabets not used today, some also have unique letter forms. The bopomofo phonetic alphabet, for example, gets its shapes from Chinese characters. The Santali alphabet from eastern India seems to be based on traditional symbols and new pictures invented by its creator.

In early medieval Ireland, Ogham writing used tally marks (like lines carved into stone). The monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian Empire were written in a cuneiform script that was essentially alphabetic, and its letter forms seem to have been created just for that purpose.

Alphabets in Other Forms

Sometimes, when writing moves to a new material or method, the shapes of the letters can change a lot, making it hard to see their original connection. For example, it's not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet came from a Semitic abjad, even though it seems to have.

While manual alphabets (like those used in sign language) are direct copies of the local written alphabet, other systems are more abstract. Braille (for the blind), semaphore (using flags), maritime signal flags, and Morse code use shapes or signals that don't look like the letters themselves. Most modern forms of shorthand (fast writing) also don't look like the alphabet; they usually write down sounds instead of individual letters.