How the Alphabet Was Born

I knew that all phonetic alphabets and abjads (alphabets with no vowels, suitable for the Afro-Asiatic language family in which vowels are not phonemic) were descended from Egyptian--with a few exceptions like Korean, a very recent invention. But I did not know the precise path by which Egyptian hieroglyphics evolved from pictographs to phonetic symbols. I had made the simple assumption that the Egyptians themselves did it. It's amusing to learn that it was actually done by their guest workers.

At least it was kept in the family. Egyptian and Semitic are both branches of the Afro-Asiatic family, which also includes the Amharic, Berber, Chadic and Cushitic branches.

This hypothesis seems to be respected and accepted. It is summarized in the Wikipedia article on Egyptian hieroglyphics.

This Proto-Canaanite script was an abjad and was eventually standardized into the Phoenician abjad, the forerunner of the Hebrew, Arabic and other Semitic writing systems in which vowels were unnecessary. However, when the Greeks adopted it they turned some of the letters into vowels. The Greek alphabet's major descendants, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, continue this tradition, and in fact preserve four of the Greek vowels in their original form, A E I O. (Russian does not use I but Ukrainian and other Slavic languages written in Cyrillic do.)

Another phonetic alphabet arose earlier, the Ugaritic, using cuneiform strokes. But it did not survive the downfall of Ugarit and left no descendants.

A third type of alphabet is the abugida. Each character represents a syllable of the form consonant-vowel, in which the basic symbol for the consonant is modified by a diacritical mark representing the vowel. Some of these combinations become stylized but the original form is still recognizable. Kurdish, an Indo-European language in which vowels are phonemic, is written in the Arabic abjad, but since vowels are mandatory it adds the diacritical marks used in teaching Arabic, becoming an abugida. Yiddish, also an Indo-European language, uses the Hebrew abjad, but it has converted a couple of now-silent letters and a few letters with diacritical marks into free-standing vowels, becoming a true alphabet. Many of the languages of south Asia are written in abugidas derived ultimately from Egyptian.

Phonetic writing systems exist in which each symbol stands for a syllable, but there is no design relationship among them as in an abugida, e.g., the symbol for ke has no relationship to the symbol for ku. These are called syllabaries, of which Japanese hiragana and katakana are the best known. They were derived from stylized Chinese characters. Chief Sequoia devised a syllabary for Cherokee in the 19th century. Most of its symbols are his own fanciful inventions. A few were taken from existing alphabets but do not retain the same sounds.

Logograms are symbols, like Chinese characters and the original Egyptian hieroglyphics, that represent the words in a language. They may contain a clue to pronunciation, as in both of these systems, but each word has a separate symbol.

Pictograms are symbols that represent objects. They purposely transcend language. The common road signs for "airport," "falling rocks," "children crossing," etc., as well as indoor signs like "bathroom" and "telephone" are pictograms understandable to a person from any industrial country.

Ideograms are a broader set of symbols that represent ideas rather than objects. Although ideograms go back thousands of years, there are many modern examples. Traffic signs indicating directions for turning and merging are ideograms, as are numerals, mathematical symbols and emoticons.