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Where do the alphabets come from? | ||
Tags: Alphabets | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| urubu Pentaglot Groupie Germany Joined 6606 days ago 49 posts - 72 votes  Speaks: German*, Dutch, Portuguese, Indonesian, English | Message 9 of 14 19 February 2009 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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The first proper alphabet was the Ugaritic one (ca. 1500 BC). The Ugarites took 31
signs from a cuneiform system and used only the initial sound of each sign as its phonetic value (acrophonic principle). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugari tic_alphabet Quite a bit earlier, however, the Egyptians already had a set of one-consonant signs (sometimes called the Egyptian alphabet). These signs were sometimes used as a sort of alphabet (e.g. to write foreign names or phrases). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| joaopferrao Pentaglot Newbie Portugal Joined 5804 days ago 25 posts - 27 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Icelandic | Message 10 of 14 20 February 2009 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Phoenician was not an alphabet: it didn't include vowels. The first alphabet was the greek one, I believe. At least that's what it says in An Introduction to the Languages of the World.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 14 20 February 2009 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Phoenician was not an alphabet: it didn't include vowels"
That is not an valid reason not to accept this writing system as a genuine alphabet. Arabic texts can skip at least unstressed vowels, sometimes all vowels (so I'm told, - I don't speak the language), so if you exclude the Phoenician writing system on that basis then Arabic would sometimes have an alphabet, sometimes not - which is nonsense. Besides consonants and vowels are not the only distinctive traits in a language, - stress can also be a distinctive trait in languages like Russian, and because accents aren't written in Russian (outside dictionaries and didactic works) you can't see where the stress is. So the absence of markers for distinctive elements of a language can't be reason enough to deny its writing system the honour of being an alphabet. Apart from that the Phonician alphabet was directly continued in the Greek and Roman Alphabets, just with some changes in the physical aspect of the signs (including a 90 or 180 degrees turn) plus the addition of sign for vowels. So the Greeks clearly saw the Phoenician system as an alphabet that just needed some improvements. The low number of signs is another indication that it is an alphabet and not a syllabary or - even worse - an ideogrammatic system. The idea that eventually lead to alphabetic systems probably came from the Akkadians, who adopted the Sumerian writing but found that it didn't really suit their language. They then started to use some - but not all - of the Sumerian signs for their phonetical value. And using signs for their phonetical value is of course the basic idea behind any alphabet (or even syllabary). But the correspondance doesn't have to be a strict 1-to-1 correspondance, as evidenced by the arcane writing system of English. But no one has so far suggested that English isn't written with an alphabet. Edited by Iversen on 20 February 2009 at 3:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 12 of 14 21 February 2009 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Someone (on this list?) once took me to task for saying Arabic has an alphabet. They said it has an abyad and this was not a true alphabet. Me, I think this is the hobgoblin of pedantry.
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| Romullo Newbie Brazil Joined 6047 days ago 20 posts - 30 votes Studies: English | Message 13 of 14 22 February 2009 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
But the ugaritic script was rather an abjad than an alphabet proper, although we tend to consider both roughly the same thing, so from this point you're right. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5855 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 14 of 14 08 March 2009 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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One of the most fascinating things is that Indian languages and European Languages uses different alphabets. Where did that come about? Did they have a same alphabet and then they split or the two alphabets are created at different times?
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