More about the alphabet.

An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which each character represents a syllable. Alphabets are classified according to how they indicate vowels:

• the same way as consonants, as in Greek (true alphabet)
• abbreviation of consonants, as in Hindi (abugida)
• not at all, as in Phoenician (abjad)

The word "alphabet" came into Middle English from the Late Latin word Alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Ancient Greek Αλφάβητος Alphabetos, from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.[1] Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and meant ox and house respectively. There are dozens of alphabets in use today. Most of them are composed of lines (linear writing); notable exceptions are Braille, fingerspelling, and Morse code.

The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs[3] to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.[4]

However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech.[5] In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BC for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.[6] Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.[6]

This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, which in turn was refined into the Phoenician alphabet.[7] It also developed into the South Arabian alphabet, from which the Ge'ez alphabet (an abugida) is descended. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. These early vowelless alphabets are called abjads, and still exist in scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac.

Phoenician was the first major phonemic script.[8][9] In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, each of which contained thousands of different characters, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Another advantage to Phoenician was that it could be used to write down many different languages, since it recorded words phonemically.

The script was spread by the Phoenicians, whose Thalassocracy allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean.[8] In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with the presence of both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it.