The Alphabet

It's called the Latin alphabet or the Roman alphabet. It was invented by the Romans for writing Latin, although they derived it from the Greek alphabet.

For the most part they are the languages of people who were converted to Christianity by Roman monks in the Imperial days, or conquered by the Christian armies of western Europe in more recent times. In general they were people who had not yet developed the technology of writing so the Romans used their own alphabet to write the sounds of the new languages. This is exactly what the Buddhist monks from China did in places like Japan, Korea and Vietnam, when they got there and found no written language.

The Greeks did something similar but not identical when the Eastern Orthodox monks went out among the Slavs. St. Cyril expanded the Greek alphabet by adding new letters and modifying existing ones, to create an alphabet suitable for Old Slavonic. We call his invention the Cyrillic alphabet in his honor. Russian, Ukranian, and the unrelated languages of the peoples conquered by the Soviets, such as Uzbek, are written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Well yes, we call it the Latin alphabet because the first language it was used for was the language it was invented for: Latin. But as I said, the Latin alphabet is just a spinoff of the Greek alphabet, in the same way the Cyrillic alphabet is. And the Greek alphabet was not made up out of thin air, they borrowed the letters of the Phoenician alphabet, an older civilization they traded with that already had writing. I'm a little weak on the ancient stuff, but the Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are all derived from the same source.

The names of the Greek letters were obviously taken from Hebrew or at least there's a common source or an intermediary: alpha/aleph, beta/beth, gamma/gimel, delta/daleth, etc. Same names, same sequence.

If you mean what did it look like, it was originally all capital letters that looked just about the same as ours. There was no U, both the vowel U and the semivowel W were written V, since there was no fricative to claim that letter. And there was no J either, both the vowel I and the semivowel Y were written as I. There was no W or Y, so it only had 22 letters, but they added Y when they started borrowing Greek words, to transcribe the sound of ypsilon, which was an umlauted U.

The fonts we call "Roman" are in fact Roman printing. The serifs are there because when you're carving letters in stone you need to do something to make the ends of your long strokes uniform and classy. Look at the inscriptions on the ancient buildings in Rome, and those are your earliest examples of our alphabet. It hasn't really changed at all. We added a few letters, developed lower case, cursive and sans-serif fonts, and invented punctuation, but the printed capital letters in a newspaper are the identical symbols the Romans used.

If you want to go back beyond that you have to look at Greek.

Other languages have developed their own alphabets using the Roman as a model, somewhat in the spirit of St. Cyril. But they get a little more fanciful. The Armenian alphabet looks like it was borne out of Western civilization (unlike, say, the Thai and Hindi alphabets), with the same overall shape and strokes, but the letters are very different from ours.

Chief Sequoia really got creative when he invented the Cherokee alphabet. Actually it's a syllabary like Japanese kana, not an alphabet, because each letter stands for a whole syllable. He took some of our letters but gave them different sounds, and then I guess he went and smoked some peyote and invented a whole bunch of crazy-looking new ones to go with them.

The Korean alphabet was invented carefully and logically by scholars, and it's incredibly easy to learn because it's so consistent. Well... except for the fact that they arrange the letters around a square instead of laying them out in a row.

 

No. I play bass guitar and not as good as them. Well maybe, since they're dead.

It's easy to learn about stuff if you're interested. It's easier now with the internet, but we had books.

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Encyclopedias were pretty useful. I hang out with people from foreign countries so they tell me all about their languages.

 

I think the Mesopotamian alphabet was developed independently. The letters were originally stylized drawings of objects whose names started with those letters. A beth looked like a house, and it's the Hebrew word for "house," derived from an older Semitic word and ultimately becoming Greek beta. Likewise a gimel looked like a camel, and Greek got both the word and the letter gamma, presumably via two slightly different routes judging from the phonetic variance.

"Hieratic" and "demotic" are Greek words for "of the priests" and "of the people." Hieratic Egyptian was a more cursive form of the hieroglyphics. Google is getting pretty good at unraveling misspellings.

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How interesting. Generations of students have rolled their eyes at the explanation that the earliest form of the letter beth looks like a house and gimel looks like a camel, since no one could actually see the resemblance. So finally there is a better story about their origin!

Now I'll be more skeptical of the fanciful animated presentations showing the alleged pictorial origins of Chinese characters.

 

The origin of Brahmi writing is murky. Some see a connection to Aramaic, and therefore to Egyptian. But even by the standards of linguistics, one of the "softest" of the sciences, that hypothesis does not have enough evidence to become an established theory. So that leaves the Sanskrit-Egyptian connection in doubt, with the myriad Sanskrit-derived alphabets of south Asia.

The same goes for the Korean alphabet. It's generally said to have been invented out of thin air, pure logic and representations of vocal anatomy, but some see a connection to the Mongolian writing system that was invented under the regime of Kublai Khan... which was derived from Brahmi. Again, this is only a hypothesis for which we may never turn up enough evidence to rule on, so the Korean-Egyptian connection is left with its basis in two weak hypotheses.

The strict definition of an alphabet is one symbol per phoneme, and this clearly disqualifies Chinese hanzi which have almost no phonetic content. It also disqualifies the two Japanese kana series, which are syllabaries: one symbol for every possible syllable in this phonetically impoverished language. Even the Cherokee "alphabet" invented by Chief Sequoia is a syllabary of 85 symbols that more or less cover all possibilities. I have never encountered any other American Indian (the term the Indians I know prefer, since, as they point out, I'm a "native American" because I was born in Illinois) writing systems so I can't say anything about them. (A syllabary would not work in English, with the hundreds or possibly thousands of syllables that its rich phonetic structure makes possible.)

The purists even go so far as to disqualify Hebrew, Arabic and the other Semitic scripts--because they don't have letters for vowels.

I can see their point of view. As linguists we want to see a phonetic transcription of an entire word, because it helps us trace the relationships within a language family, and also because it just seems nicer and after all we define our terminology. Yet vowels are not--or almost not--phonemic in the Semitic languages, so writing them down would not serve the basic purpose of identifying the word for a native speaker.

In English, we can't write BTH because it could be bath, both or booth. In Hebrew you can write BTH and everyone knows it's beth, "house," because no other word is made up of those two consonants.

Every writing system has its weaknesses. It's hard to call the Latin alphabet as it's used in English "phonetic," since the correspondence between letters and phonemes is so capricious. French is just as bad, or possibly worse. To me that violates the strict definition of "alphabet." So if you're going to disqualify Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, etc., I think you also have to disqualify English and French, to be fair.

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It's reasonable to call kana and the Cherokee system "syllabaries" because it precisely distinguishes them from "true" alphabets without demeaning them. But just what are we supposed to call the vowel-free Semitic scripts? And who wants to be the one to break the news to the Jews and Arabs when we make it official that they don't have alphabets?

 

Wikipedia refers to it as the Phagspa script, named after the Tibetan monk who invented it. According to the article, Kublai Khan wanted a uniform writing system for all of his occupied territories. The Uighur-based script you refer to was clearly not it because apparently it's not really all that great a fit even for Mongolian, and would have been hopeless for Chinese. The article on Phagspa asserts that the monk derived it from his own Tibetan alphabet, which is of Indic origin and therefore goes back to Brahmi, whose connection to Aramaic and therefore to Egyptian is not proven.

That's a "Mesopotamiocentric" perspective. You've just opened the field up to Chinese hanzi (or kanji), which are used for writing all of the Chinese languages, and in fact have been a powerful force for the Chinese identifying themselves as a single people despite their mutually incomprehensible languages. (Which foolish Westerners dismiss as "dialects.") Moreover they're an integral component of the Japanese writing system, play a major role in Korean (the Southern version anyway) and until recently were also used for Vietnamese and probably other Asian tongues as well.

But notwithstanding that, the issue of the Indic alphabets won't go away. From what I've read, the hypothesis that Brahmi is based on Egyptian has not been proven "true beyond a reasonable doubt," to use my own version of scientific terminology instead of the usual layman's misleading term "fact." There are a lot of alphabets in south Asia and if we can't say for sure that they're offshoots of Egyptian, then Egyptian can't be called "the mother of almost all modern writing systems," even if we make the astounding decision to ignore Chinese. (It may be only one writing system but it's used by one-fifth of the human race.)

 

Writing is a technology that societies don't seem to invent until they enter the Bronze Age. Neolithic (late Stone Age) civilizations and their precursors, Neolithic village societies, don't write things down for a variety of reasons. I suspect the main reason is that the impetus for writing--like so many other important technologies--seems to always come from business transactions, i.e., keeping track of orders, exchanges, inventories and obligations. Business in the Stone Age is not complicated enough to inspire the invention of record-keeping.

As for the American Indians, of course there were two civilizations in the New World which had barely entered the Bronze Age before being obliterated by Christian armies. The Incas had not yet invented writing. The Aztecs had a pictographic writing system which they inherited from the Mayas, the previous gatekeepers of Olmec civilization. That adds to the number of writing systems that were not derived from Egyptian.

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But north of the Rio Grande where the Indians were on the Mesolithic (hunter-gatherer)/Neolithic (agriculture) cusp and had not yet invented civilization (literally "the building of cities"), there was no writing.

 

Judging by Google hits LePlongeon seems to have been moderately well-known during his lifetime, but his work appears not to have earned any lasting respect. According to various articles on this scholarly website, the Cascajal Block from 650BCE was unearthed in 2002. If it is indeed an artifact of very early Olmec writing, its origin appears to be images drawn from Olmec art, and the Egyptian connection hypothesis will be put to rest.

Yes. The armies of Abraham are quite thorough when they discover an entire civilization that has managed to thrive without "the book." Egypt suffered a very similar fate at the hands of the Muslims.