Why is it called the "Alphabet"?

Answer 1

alpha and beta are the first two letters in the greek alphabet, which we borrow heavily from.

Answer 2

You have already got an answer, but to set some things clear. Indeed the word alphabet comes from the greek, alphabeton, from alpha =A and beta=B. The Arabs were a much later people (by a millennium or so). However, the words alef etc are not greek, because the Greeks borrowed them from the Phoenicians. As for the "latin" alphabet, the one you use, it is not borrowing letteres from the Greek alphabet, but it is indeed a variation of the Greek alphabet used by the ancient Greeks in another city (Chalkis) and not Athens. Greeks simply kept the Athenian form, whereas the Romans adopted the Chalkidic form - the same letters, just some of them were pronounced differently than the Greeks pronounced them -, they didn't form another alphabet inspired by the Greek letters. That was the case for the cyrillic alphabet (Russian), which is based on the greek, but it is a new alphabet, it is not a greek alphabet used by the greeks as it is.

Answer 3

alphabet [Gr. alpha-beta, like Eng. ABC], system of writing, theoretically having a one-for-one relation between character (or letter) and phoneme (see phonetics). Few alphabets have achieved the ideal exactness. A system of writing is called a syllabary when one character represents a syllable rather than a phoneme; such is the kana, used in Japanese to supplement the originally Chinese characters normally used. The precursors of the alphabet were the iconographic and ideographic writing of ancient man, such as wall paintings, cuneiform, and the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians. The alphabet of modern Western Europe is the Roman alphabet, the base of most alphabets used for the newly written languages of Africa and America, as well as for scientific alphabets. Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, and many languages of the former Soviet Union are written in the Cyrillic alphabet, an augmented Greek alphabet. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all have their own alphabets. The most important writing of India is the Devanagari, an alphabet with syllabic features; this, invented probably for Sanskrit, is the source of a number of Asian scripts. The Roman is derived from the Greek, perhaps by way of Etruria, and the Greeks had imitated the Phoenician alphabet. The exact steps are unknown, but the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, and Devanagari systems are based ultimately on signs of the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. This writing was not alphabetic, but in the phonogram it bore the germ of phonemic writing; thus the sign “bear” might (to use an English analogy) mean also the sound b, and “dog” d. A similar development created the Persian cuneiform syllabary. Two European alphabets of the late Roman era were the runes and the ogham. An exotic modern system is the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah, suggested by, but not based on, the Roman alphabet. Another was the short-lived Mormon Deseret alphabet.

Answer 4

The term "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, which are "alpha" and "beta." Probably, it started just like we say ABC and the trend went on. Moreover, "alphabet" sounds better than simply AB so no one bothered to change the trend.

Answer 5

Well, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet are "Alpha" and "Beta." I'll bet it has something to do with that!

Joybelle is wrong: "Beta" is the SECOND letter; the LAST letter is "Omega." That is why the Bible refers to Jesus as "The Alpha and The Omega, The Beginning and The End..."

Answer 6

The original letters were alpha , beta, gama etc and they were called by the first two letters i.e alpha+beta and the last a was somehow got removed and alphabet remained.

Answer 7

The term "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, which are "alpha" and "beta." Those in turn come from Hebrew ("aleph" and "bet") and Arabic ("aleph" and "ba"), which have common roots.

Answer 8

In the Greek alphabet 'alpha' is the first letter and 'beta' is the last letter.

Answer 9

the name is based on the first two letters which in greek are known as alpha and beta. A and B

Answer 10

it comes from arabic language in which words begin with:
1- alef
2- ba
3- ta
...
they call their alphabetic system: (alefba)
which has been changed in english to:
Alphabet

good luck