Who invented the alphabets?

Answer 1

The very NAME "alphabet" an important clue about its own origins.

The LATIN letters we know were derived from a form of the GREEK alphabet. Even 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? Bsecause 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 themselves, but were part of a cluster of related "Semitic" languages spoken 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 even still see much of the original Semitic ORDER of the letters in the Latin alphabet, and even more in the Greek. The original letters were at times used to represent a different sound from the original letter, esp when the original letter represented a sound unlike any in the language doing the borrowing. (This is how the Greeks came up with the first set of VOWELS, which were not part of the original Semitic alphabet.) The major changes/differences in ORDER were caused when the borrowing language dropped a letter it could not use... and more often by adding letters needed in the borrower's language. These new letters were most often added at the end, after "T", the final letter in the Semitic alphabets. Later, after the early Latin alphabet was well-established, some letters"split" into variants, which were listed next to their "parent" letter. Thus "I" and "J" come from one letter, "U" "V" and "W" were from one letter.

So when was did the SEMITIC order of the alphabet come about, and why? Our earliest proven examples of the letters in the basic order used to this day are clay tablets the list the letters in order (perhaps for training scribes?) from the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit (the language, re-discovered in the 1920s is called "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).

Overview of the history of the alphabet:
http://www.ancientscripts.com/alphabet.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/latin_alphabet

Explanation of the Semitic letters and their Greek and Latin adaptations:
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/alphabet.html

Answer 2

Nearly all modern alphabets are descended from an alphabet invented 4000 years ago, probably by a group of people related to the ancient Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Canaanites. They got the idea from the Egyptians, but used their own simplified pictures to represented consonant sounds. The Phoenicians and others of the region simplified the pictures further

All the letters were for consonants, it was the greeks who created the vowels, and changed the writing into the left-right direction we use today

Answer 3

The one we use is the Latin alphabet. It was invented by the Romans. It was based upon the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet was based upon the Phoenician alphabet.
There was an older Greek alphabet called Linear B, this was partly based upon the Cretan alphabet Linear A.
The first alphabet was that of the Sumerian empire.
There are other alphabets such as rune script, ogham, Cyrillic, Russian, Japanese... these were all local cultural inventions or brought about through trade with other literate nations.

Answer 4

Alphabets


Alphabets, or phonemic alphabets, are sets of letters, usually arranged in a fixed order, each of which represents one or more phonemes, both consonants and vowels, in the language they are used to write. In some case combinations of letters are used to represent single phonemes, as in the English sh, ch and th.

The Greeks were the first people to create a phonemic alphabet when they adapted the Phoenican alphabet to write their language. They used a number of Phoenician letter that represented sounds with no equivalent in Greek to write Greek vowels.

The word alphabet comes, via Latin Latin alphabētum, from the Greek word αλφάβητος (alphabētos), which itself comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, α (άλφα/alpha) and β (βήτα/beta).

The best-known and most widely-used alphabets are the Latin or Roman alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet, which have been adapted to write numerous languages. Most other alphabets are used for a single language or just a few languages.

Alphabets currently in use

Armenian
Bassa (Vah)
Cyrillic

Fraser
Georgian (Mkhedruli)
Greek

Korean (hangŭl) Latin/Roman
Manchu

Mongolian
N'Ko
Oirat Clear Script

Pollard Miao
Sutton SignWriting
Tai Lue

Thaana
Tifinagh

Alphabets used mainly for decorative, ceremonial or religious purposes

Coptic
Old Church Slavonic
Runic


Alphabets that are no longer used

Avestan
Beitha Kukju
Elbasan

Etruscan
Georgian (Asomtavruli)
Georgian (Nuskha-khucuri)

Glagolitic
Gothic
Hungarian Runes

Meroïtic
Ogham
Old Italic

Old Permic (Abur)
Orkhon (Turkic runes)

Answer 5

How many alphabets are you talking about? The word alphabet comes from alpha beta, the first two letters of the greek alphabet so it was probably them. As it is, we use the roman alphabet and arabic numerals.

Answer 6

Apart from the writing systems being in use in the West today, i. e. The Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, which all of the previous people answering this question commented on, we should not forget the other "alphabets" being used today. The Devanagari script which was used to write Sanskrit is nowadays employed to write Hindi. Devanagari also gave birth to several other systems of writing, namely Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Bengali in India; Khmer, Lao and Thai in South East Asia.

Answer 7

It depends on which alphabet you are inquiring about.

If you are speaking about modern english, it is a derivitave of the Latin Alphabet. However, during Charlemagne's empire (Charles the Great), it basically created the Capital (Latin) and Small letters we use today.

Below are the Wikipedia links for both Alphabet and Carolingian Minisule.

Hope that helps

Answer 8

The alphabet was not invented all at once, but rather developed over several centuries from earlier forms of writing. As cave paintings show, humans' ability to draw pictures goes back many thousands of years. The idea of using visually contrasting symbols to stand for the contrasting members of sets, such as words and numbers, seems to have been hit upon independently in Central America (about 2500 years ago), China (over 3000 years ago), and the Middle East (over 5000 years ago).

In its beginnings, writing was often used for special purposes (such as accounting), and to express a limited vocabulary. Single symbols stood for relatively large units, such as entire words. Over the course of many decades and centuries, in both America, Asia, and the Middle East, people discovered that it was possible to use a relatively small set of symbols to visually represent all the words in a spoken language, by having one symbol stand either for each possible syllable or for each single sound in that language. These sets of symbols are called syllabaries and alphabets respectively.
Many different alphabets have been used in the world. Often, alphabets originally used for one language have been taken over and modified for use with another language. The roots of our Roman alphabet can be traced through Greek to the Phoenician alphabet used in the ancient Middle East. In turn, certain aspects of the Phoenician alphabet were influenced by cuneiform from Ugarit and by Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Professional scribes and type designers have played a major role in shaping the varying look of our alphabet through the ages. In the past few decades, the major event in the history of the alphabet has been the standardization of its computer representation, so that a distinct sequence of 0s and 1s can reliably be assumed to stand for a particular letter of our alphabet (or any other writing system). Only with such a standard can we exchange information via computer – for example, by electronic mail. Since the 1990s, the Unicode standard (www.unicode.org) has emerged as the leading worldwide standard for encoding the elements of writing systems.

Answer 9

The alphabet that most of the west used today is based on one used by the Phoenicians.

Answer 10

The first known form of writing was cuneiform, used by the ancient Sumerians. After that, it was the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians, although there has been some speculation that hieroglyphs may actually have pre-dated cuneiform. The most prevalent view, however, is that the Sumerians were the first to use written language.
For more info on cuneiform writing, see wikipedia.com