When And Where Did The Alphabet Originate?

The alphabet is a set of letters or characters representing sounds. It is used in writing a language. The word is derived from “alpha” and “beta”, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. The English language uses the twenty-six letter alphabet, called the Roman. It is however interesting to note that the Romans were not the original inventors of the English alphabet; they merely improved upon a system of writing that was already in existence for thousands of years.

The origin of writing
Man’s earliest method of communication was by way of speaking or making gestures. Education was imparted by word of mouth. All important events were memorised. Messages too had to be delivered verbally. This was obviously very inconvenient and people began to look for easier means of communication.  

The earliest forms of writing began with the expression of ideas through pictures that is now studied under a branch called Ideography. This mode of expression enabled people of different origins to communicate with each other. This however soon became inconvenient and time consuming. 

Such impatience led to the development of the next stage of writing, studied under the branch of Logography whereby people exchanged thoughts and ideas through signs that stood for certain words. Instead of drawing a basket of fruits, for example, people now drew only one sign for the basket and another for fruits. 

People then started following a Syllabic system in which a particular sign could be used for any other phonetic combination that sounded like that word. This form of writing is also called Rebus writing.

The Alphabet system was finally invented in which individual signs stood for particular sounds. Most important written languages of the world follow the alphabet system.

History of the alphabet 
How the alphabet developed may briefly be encapsulated in successive stages. 

The earliest was the Egyptian writing, which was a sort of "picture writing". Structurally, it was word and syllabic writing. It was invented around 3000BC. In this system of writing, several hundred signs stood for full words or syllables. They could either represent the whole word by a single sign or with appropriate signs for each sound. These signs did not specify vowels though. 

Phoenician writing comprised of a set of 22 signs, developed about 1000B.C. Structurally similar to the Egyptian style, these signs too only specified consonants in syllables and not vowels. Early Phoenician writing was a mixture of borrowed pictographic forms and invented geometric signs.

The Cypriot style of writing developed by the people of the Cyprus islands was a collection of 56 signs.

The Greek alphabet was invented about 800 B.C. The Greek style was greatly influenced by the Phoenician writing, whose symbols were modified to form the twenty-four letter Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet included more consonants than the Greeks used and as a result, the Greeks introduced more vowel sounds. The Greek alphabet could now be used to spell out any word.

Phoenician names and their signs, in most cases, were adopted by the Greeks for their alphabet. For example, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet called aleph became alpha; the second, beth became beta and so on.

The Etruscan alphabet was influenced by the Greek alphabet and was developed about 1000B.C.

The Roman alphabet was a modification of the Etruscan style, initially consisting of twenty letters, gradually gaining three more.

Sculptors carved the Roman alphabet on a memorial in honour of Emperor Trojan. They developed the thick and thin strokes we use today. They also added serifs (little finishing strokes) at the tops and bottoms of many letters, which added grace to every letter.

The English alphabet developed from a number of early writing systems. The Romans had given most capitals their modern form by A.D.114. But the letters J, U and W were not added to the alphabet until the Middle Ages.  

Linguists today use an almost perfect alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has more than eighty characters because the regular English alphabet today is not suited to writing words in English. That is to say, the regular English alphabet does not have a separate character for every distinctive sound in the language.  

Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit as well as most other Indian scripts developed from the Phoenician system. 

Sans alphabet
Chinese is the only language that does not have an alphabetical system of writing. They mostly make use of pictographic characters. Some Chinese characters can be used in expressing syllables of proper names or foreign words. Japanese is basically copied from Chinese; the only difference being that their characters represent either syllables or words.

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