how did the alphabet come to be?

Question

did it start frm Mesapotamia from mark making or well before that?

Answer 1

Our alphabet goes back to speakers of a Semitic language in or near the Sinai Peninsula... not to Mesopotamia. As important as the Mesopotamian system of cuneiform writing (in which each sign stood, ordinarily, for a word or syllable) was to the ancient world, there is no evidence that it was historically connected to the development of the alphabet, though the EGYPTIAN system of hieroglphics may have played a role.

Actually, the very order of our alphabet (the LATIN alphabet) --and even the expression "alphabet" -- gives evidence of its ancient roots. The basic order, with surprisingly few changes goes back through Latin, through Greek to Phoenician and the earliest alphabets invented by speakers of "Northwest Semitic" languages (the group that includes Hebrew).

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Here's the story in more detail

The LATIN letters were derived from a form of the GREEK alphabet, and the term "alphabet" is based on the first two letters of the Greek alphabet --"alpha" and "beta" (so the idea of the word is the same as "a-b-c's").

But these Greek names are rather odd --meaningless, in fact! Why? That's because the Greeks borrowed a number of the NAMES for their letters from the source of the letters themselves, the seafaring traders of Phoenicia. The Phoenicians did not invent this system, but were part of a cluster of related "Semitic" languages centered in the regions later called Syria & Palestine. The letter-names are derived from actual words which BEGAN with the sound that letter is used to represent (e.g., "aleph", meaning "ox", "beth" meaning "house").

We can actually still see much of the original Semitic order of the letters in the Latin alphabet, and even more in the Greek. As Greek (and later languages) needed to represent some diferent sounds they adapted some of the Semitic letters, esp. for marking VOWELS (which the Semitic alphabet did not do). They also sometimes added NEW letters, most often at the end, after "T" (called "tau"), the final letter in the Semitic alphabets.

By the way, the order of the Semitic alphabet can be traced quite far back. Our earliest proven examples of the letters in the basic order used to this day are clay tablets that list the letters in order (perhaps for training scribes?) from the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit (where they spoke a Semitic language scholars call "Ugaritic"). These show us that this order existed by at least 1300 BC. (with some additional letters for sounds that were no longer found in later languages like Phoenician, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic).

As for where these Semitic peoples came up with this whole writing system -- Many believe the inventors of the alphabet were speakers of a Semitic language living in or near Egypt early in the 2nd millenium B.C. So it is possible that the IDEA for an alphabet owed something to a part of the system of Egyptians hieroglyphics that was used for writing foreign words. But unfortunately, all evidence of how this might have happened, is lost to us, including the development of the specific order of the letters (just a memory tool? or did the words used have some special associations?)

(Others argue that, since the Semitic alphabet did not mark vowels, what they invented was really a simplified "syllabary" -- each symbol standing for a consonant PLUS vowel -- not so very different from the syllabary writing system used in Mesopotamia [oldest known writing system] by about 3000 B.C. The Greeks then turned it into a "real alphabet" by using some of the symbols for vowels. In any case, it WAS simple, and was the root of ALL of our alphabets!)

Answer 2

The alphabet is a set of characters of symbols used to communicate in a written form in a specific language. These characters may differ according to each nationality with some adopting similar characters while others are completely different.

The earliest known origin on the alphabet was to be the “North Semetic” during the period 1700 to 1500 BC originating in the Mediterranean. Towards 1000 BC the evolution of 4 other alphabets occurred from the Canaanites, Aramaic, South Semitic and Greeks Aramaic formed the basis of Middle Eastern nations including Arabic, Hebrew and Indian.

From offshoots of the Greek alphabet formed modern Greek, Cyrillic and Etruscan. Cyrillic would then become the script for eastern European nations including Russia, Bulgarian and Serbian. Etruscan would then evolve into Latin, which was used by the Roman Empire. The Roman conquests throughout Europe spread Latin through out its empire. It initially began with 21 letters but after conquests and time it evolved to the modern day 26.

With the alphabet, history could now be recorded rather then memorised and would be fundamental in preserving human knowledge

To put it simply.
However there is an interseting graphic tracing back each letter of the english alphabet. See link

Answer 3

The present day alphabets were derived from Roman letters which were in turn derived from the Greeks. The Greek letters were to a big extent derived from the Phoenician letters

Answer 4

while our alphabet is called the "Roman system," the Romans got those letters from the Greeks. The term "alphabet" is formed from the "a" (alpha) and "b" (beta") of the Greek writing system. However, the Roman alphabet we use in English can be traced back to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Answer 5

The first known alphabet was phoenician and started in the old mediterranean city of Byblos (the book) 6000 bc.
Phoenician merchants needed to have common references reflecting the spoken language , and were first to put letters and not signs (as opposed to Pharaohs), thus creating syllabs (string of pronounced sounds).

Answer 6

The Romans made the alphabet

Answer 7

Started in ancient egypt.
The first ones started to appear around 2000BC.

Answer 8

iT STARTED AS FAR AS IM AWARE IN GREECE AND WAS BROUGHT TO ENGLAND BY THE MONKS WHO UP TILL THE 14 CENTURY ALWAYS WROTE IN LATIN AFTER THE WAR OF THE ROSES EDWARD 2 SUBSCRIBED TO THOMAS CAXTON TO MAKE BOOKS AND THE LANGUAGE MOVED ON FROM THAT POINT.

Answer 9

It starts off with the letter 'A' and then comes to 'B'

I hope this helps.

Answer 10

Complete genealogy
The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing. The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Egypt, as a representation developed by Semitic workers in Egypt of their own language (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), deriving the system from the partly alphabetic principles (besides syllabic and logographic values) of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one development, including the Phoenician alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and the Latin alphabet, or were directly or indirectly inspired by its design.

Contents [hide]
1 The beginnings in Egypt
2 The Semitic alphabet
3 Descendants of the Semitic abjad
3.1 Letter names and sequence
4 Graphically independent alphabets
5 Alphabets in other media
6 See also
7 Further reading



[edit]
The beginnings in Egypt
By 2700 BC the ancient Egyptians had developed a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent the individual consonants of their language, plus a 23rd that seems to have represented word-initial or word-final vowels. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although alphabetic in nature, the system was not used for purely alphabetic writing. The first purely alphabetic script is thought to have been developed around 2000 BC for Semitic workers in central Egypt. Over the next five centuries it spread north, and all subsequent alphabets around the world have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants, with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd century BC adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt.

[edit]
The Semitic alphabet
The Middle Bronze Age scripts of Egypt have yet to be deciphered. However, they appear to be at least partially, and perhaps completely, alphabetic. The oldest examples are found as graffiti from central Egypt and date to around 1800 BC [1]/[2]. This Semitic script did not restrict itself to the existing Egyptian consonantal signs, but incorporated a number of other Egyptian hieroglyphs, for a total of perhaps thirty, and used Semitic names for them. So, for example, the hieroglyph per ("house" in Egyptian) became bayt ("house" in Semitic). It is unclear at this point whether these glyphs, when used to write the Semitic language, were purely alphabetic in nature, representing only the first consonant of their names according to the acrophonic principle, or whether they could also represent sequences of consonants or even words as their hieroglyphic ancestors had. For example, the "house" glyph may have stood only for b (b as in beyt "house"), or it may have stood for both the consonant b and the sequence byt, as it had stood for both p and the sequence pr in Egyptian. However, by the time the script was inherited by the Canaanites, it was purely alphabetic, and the hieroglyph originally representing "house" stood only for b.

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Descendants of the Semitic abjad

Chart showing details of four alphabets' descent from Phoenician abjad, from left to right Latin, Greek, original Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic.See also: Genealogy of scripts derived from Proto-Sinaitic
This Proto-Canaanite alphabet, like its Egyptian prototype, only represented consonants, a system called an abjad. From it can be traced nearly all the alphabets ever used, most of which descend from the younger Phoenician version of the script.

The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC as the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:

The modern Hebrew alphabet started out as a local variant of Aramaic. (The original Hebrew alphabet has been retained by the Samaritans.)
The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabatean alphabet of what is now southern Jordan.
The Syriac alphabet used after the 3rd century AD evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian, into the alphabets of northern Asia, such as Orkhon (probably), Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu.
The Georgian alphabet is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family.
The Aramaic alphabet is also the most likely ancestor of the Brahmic alphabets of India, which spread to Tibet, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia along with the Hindu and Buddhist religions. (China and Japan, while absorbing Buddhism, were already literate and retained their logographic and syllabic scripts.)
The Hangul alphabet was invented in Korea in the 15th century AD. Tradition holds that it was an autonomous invention; however, recent research suggests that it may be based on half a dozen letters derived from Tibetan via the imperial Phagspa alphabet of the Yuan dynasty of China. Uniquely among the world's alphabets, the rest of the letters are derived from this core as a featural system.

Besides Aramaic, the Phoenician alphabet gave rise to the Greek and Berber alphabets. Whereas separate letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Berber, or Semitic, their absence was problematic for Greek, which had a very different morphological structure. However, there was a simple solution. All of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were what the letters represented. However, several of them were rather soft and unpronounceable by the Greeks, and thus several letter names came to be pronounced with initial vowels. By the acrophonic principle that was the basis of the system, the letters now stood for those vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or h, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and he became Greek alpha and e (later renamed e psilon), and stood for the vowels /a/ and /e/ rather than the consonants /ʔ/ and /h/. As this fortunate development only provided for six of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually created digraphs and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o (which became omega), or in some cases simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.

Greek is in turn the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western Greek dialects, where the letter eta remained an h, gave rise to the Old Italic and Roman alphabets. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern variants: Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and perhaps Georgian.

Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia, was also influenced by Korean hangul, which was either independent (the traditional view) or derived from the abugidas of South Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception by Greek. The Greek alphabet, itself ultimately a derivative of hieroglyphs through that first Semitic alphabet, later adopted an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs when it was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree Syllabics (an abugida), which appears to be a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand; the latter may be an independent invention, but likely has its ultimate origins in cursive Latin script.