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Who Invented the Alphabet?
- dave_sid 6y agoElmo
- ncmncm 6y agoI have been led to believe that the Phoenician writing system was a syllabary, and that the Greeks made an alphabet out of it. Are they using "alphabet" in an informal sense, in the article, to include syllabaries? Or am I misinformed? And then, what are the hieroglyphs? Are they just talking about the specific set of letters we call our alphabet, and not the idea of an alphabet, which surely the Egyptians had? Unless that is itself a syllabary, and so doesn't count?
- ogogmad 6y ago> I have been led to believe that the Phoenician writing system was a syllabary, and that the Greeks made an alphabet out of it. My understanding is that it was an abjad, not a syllabary. An abjad has only consonants, not vowels. When a word is written, only its consonants get written, and the vowels are only implied. Hebrew and Arabic are abjads. The Phoenician alphabet was preceded by the Ugaritic "alphabet", which was also an abjad. A syllabary usually has many more symbols than an abjad or alphabet. If n denotes the number of phonemes in a language, then a syllabary has O(n^2) or O(n^3) symbols. In contrast, the Phoenician abjad has fewer symbols than even the English alphabet.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoWikipedia claims that matres lectionis appeared in the Phoenician system only rather late [0], and so I would presume after transmission to the Greeks. Consequently, could the Phoenician system really be called an abjad at the time that the Greeks borrowed it? See also [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Greek-derived https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet#Greek-deri...
- ogogmad 6y agoA pure abjad doesn't have matres lectionis.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoYes, my mistake, and unfortunately your reply came an instant before I could delete my post to avoid wasting everyone’s time here.
- meepmorp 6y agoAbjad, yeah. One story I heard was that Greeks since greeks lacked unvoiced velar/glottal stops as meaningful phonemes, they heard aleph as just a vowel, thus creating an actual alphabet. I've no idea how well that story is supported, but abusing new technology for purposes it was never intended to fill does seem like an eternal human fact.
- adrian_b 6y agoBoth the Ugaritic "alphabet" and the Phoenician "alphabet" must have been derived from an earlier abjad, from which we do not have any preserved example. The earlier, unknown, abjad, must have been used to write the same 27 consonants as in the Ugaritic alphabet, but using graphic signs similar to those used by the 22-sign Phoenician alphabet, which resemble in form the Egyptian signs. There is no doubt that the Egyptian writing system was the inspiration for the first abjad, because both the method of writing only the consonants and the direction of writing were inherited from the Egyptians. In Ugarit, in order to write on earth tablets, like in Mesopotamia, the original graphic signs used for the 27 consonants were replaced with cuneiform signs. On the other hand, the Phoenicians deleted 5 letters, because their language was simplified and the 5 deleted consonants were eventually pronounced identically with other 5 consonants. It is supposed that the Phoenician pronunciation was simplified so much because it was used as a lingua franca for commerce, by many people. This reduction in the number of consonants created later problems for other Semitic people, e.g. Hebrews and Arabs, who still pronounced distinctly some of the consonants that were deleted from the Phoenician alphabet, so they had to invent diacritics to mark the missing consonants (e.g. shin and sin in Hebrew).
- notagoodidea 6y agoPhoenician writing system was an abjad [0], an alphabet where each symbol stands for consonant, vowels being implied or if symbols exist, they are optional. Where alphabet have vowels and consonants. Modern Arab, Hebrew and semitic languages have abjad. Hieroglyph are pictograms/logographic scripts. One word for one logogram to represent one word. They mostly talk about the fact that the Phoenician may have come from illiterate worker in the Canaan mines. Unable to learn hieroglyphs, they may have invented a simplified writing system leading to the Phoenician. The main interest is that the Phoenician abjad is not a construction from savant but by illiterate workers. What do you mean by count? Various writing system exists in parallel, none really prevails on the other. Egyptians did not have an alphabet per se like Mandarin do not really have one either at least not really one that is reflected in the writing system. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet
- ncmncm 6y agoEgyptian hieroglyphs are absolutely not pictograms. It was the belief that they were that prevented decrypting them for so long, until the Rosetta Stone was found. Neither are Chinese characters, BTW. Chinese is a syllabary, but with a lot of redundancy -- 1200 syllables, lots more characters -- and arbitrary, historical rules about which variant for a syllable may be used for each word. Amazingly (at least it amazes me), most Mandarin speakers think that other Chinese "dialects" are just different ways to pronounce Mandarin, where in fact they are as different from Mandarin as various European languages are from Latin. Many even think of the characters as pictograms with complicated rules about sharing with homonyms. People who know more than one Sinitic language know better.
- Koshkin 6y agoIndeed. In general, you don’t need to know how the language sounds in order to read; pictographic scripts make this even easier in a way. I can imagine (not necessarily true) that a text in Chinese could be read as if it was in English.
- knolax 6y agoAnother crackpot theory by a non-native speaker. Chinese is logographic. You can't simultaneously claim that different dialects are seperate languages and also claim that they were secretly writing phonetically all this time. They wouldn't be mutually intelligible even in writing. Hand-waiving away a logographic system as a "syllabry with redundancy" is exactly the type of dumb semantic game I would expect from HackerNews. I guess you think a car is just a bicycle with more wheels and an engine too.
- sparkplug94 6y agoThere is a lot of not-quite-correct information about Egyptian hieroglyphs in the replies to this comment. Hieroglyphs are actually a hybrid system, incorporating uniliteral glyphs (representing a single consonant sound), bi- and triliteral glyphs (representing two or three consonants), and logograms, representing a full word or concept. They also include "determinatives," which are basically helpful pictures at the end of a word that tells you something about the category of the word. Sometimes, a word incorporates all three types of symbol. For example, the word "Ra," if it refers to the sun god, might have the two consonants r and ' (which is close to a), followed by a picture of the sun, followed by the seated god determinative. So I guess the real answer here is that the Egyptian writing system incorporates elements of alphabets and logographs, used together. Vowels were (mostly) not marked, though some "consonants" are treated as vowels in transliteration. I'm not entirely sure what the distinction is there.
- austincheney 6y agoIn history class the mentioned inventor was the city state of Ugarit on the coast. About 40 years later they were conquered by the Jews as a pagan city of the Canaanites. The writing system was adopted immediately and became the original writing system of the Hebrew language. Some time later it was adapted by the Greeks and the early Latins adapted it from the Greeks. Some few pre-Hebrew writing samples have survived to modern time but there aren’t many since its was wasn’t widespread and was present for only a small slice of time.
- tachion 6y agoThis is so obviously fake news. Latest research backed by carbon based spectrum analysis proves that it was "invented" by a tribe Alphabetians (or Aphapet-es as they called themselves). I'm saying "invented" because it was passed to them by the Giant Lizards From Space in visions inducted with direct brain 5G transmissions. Turn on your thinking and do your own research.
- wl 6y agoYes, an alphabet was used in Ugarit that may have been invented first. It arose from cuneiform and its ancestors died out long ago. The "Phoenician" alphabet used for archaic Hebrew and which later developed into the Greek and Latin scripts is what's being discussed here.
- bolangi 6y agoHistorical authority Rudyard Kipling describes it well in his "Just So" stories, "The First Letter" and "How the Alphabet was Made".
- cbozeman 6y agoAfter listening to Dr. Robert M. Schoch on various podcasts, I'm starting to wonder if there could be, or have been, long-dead civilizations for which we have little-to-no evidence. This guy isn't a crackpot from some backwater university, this is a Yale-trained Ph.D.. His hypothesis that the Sphinx is actually 12,000 years old would imply that there have been much older civilizations which have died out. Can you build something like the Sphinx without any form of written system at all? I don't honestly know, but my educated guess would be a resounding "no". If that's the case, it throws everything we know about "the Alphabet" up in the air. What if our writing system is actually far, far older than we believe? I don't think its really "important", but its definitely fun to ponder.
- varenc 6y agoHe may be a PhD, but his theories are fringe and widely disputed. His dating of the Sphinx seems solely based on certain erosion patterns and are not supported by other evidence. If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. So it’s more plausible to me that if there’s unknown civilizations, then they lacked meaningful use of writing.
- seebetter 6y agoWish I had time to refute your comment.
- cbozeman 6y ago> If an unknown long-dead civilization existed, I would think that their writing system and it’s influence would be one of the easiest ways to recognize them. Writing tends to be our best source of information on ancient civilizations. This only works if you actually find the things they wrote. If those works are still trapped in ice or ground somewhere, potentially thousands of feet or more underground, we may never find them. That's even assuming they used writing materials that would be preserved.
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- duxup 6y agoThe PBS series NOVA had a great show on the alphabet and more generally went over how such things develop. I think it was this episode: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabe... One of the things that was striking was that the process for coming up for an alphabet or pieces of it seem like they easily could have developed in multiple places at once, or come and gone here or there.
- lovecg 6y agoI enjoyed this visualization https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/ https://starkeycomics.com/2018/12/11/the-abcd-family-tree/ Not all connections are super well established, but a lot of them are. It really drives home the point that writing was invented independently only a handful of times. The letters you’re currently reading are direct descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- breck 6y agoRelatedly, I made a little interactive vis a while back about the symbols on our keyboards: https://breckyunits.com/files/keyboard/ https://breckyunits.com/files/keyboard/ It's amazing to me that there are distinct, concentric rings on all of our keyboards that are very analogous to the concentric rings you find in trees revealing their age. The oldest keys are in the center, newest are along the edge. (I count about 5 rings: https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html https://breckyunits.com/how-old-are-these-keys.html) (Maybe someone could take this idea and make a nice tree ring visual of the keyboard?)
- GuB-42 6y agoYou can even extend the outer rings with keyboard that add stuff. For example, modern gaming keyboard often have macro keys on the side and multimedia buttons on top. And there is also this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard The macro and over-the-top keys of the space cadet keyboard are essentially just an extension of the other "computer" key but media keys can be considered an extra ring, one that goes beyond text.
- saberdancer 6y agoWhat was the cause of the increasing complexity of characters when crossing from Aramaic into the eastern group of scripts? To my untrained eye, characters in the green group are all more complex and hard to write than red (western) scripts. Did materials influence the style of script? If you need to write things in stone, you will struggle to do wavy characters.
- VikingCoder 6y agoStephen Wright: "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?"
- Koshkin 6y agoYes (and also because in the past letters were used as numbers).
- FigmentEngine 6y agorelated book on the alphabet by rosen https://www.npr.org/2015/02/07/384108640/alphabetical-tells-the-story-behind-every-letter-a-to-z https://www.npr.org/2015/02/07/384108640/alphabetical-tells-...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hnburnsy 6y agoNova recently had a two part series on this, 'A to Z: The First Alphabet', it does a much better job of answering the question than this article... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabe... My favorite part was this... "IRVING FINKEL: This [Sumerian] material goes from near the beginning of writing, so this is what we call a “pictographic” tablet from 3000 B.C. It’s very slim, and it’s ruled into columns with boxes of information that go together. These round and semi-round elements are numerals. And in each of the boxes, they have these things, which are added up at the end. NARRATOR: This clay tablet is the distant ancestor of today’s spreadsheet: a grid of boxes with symbols that represent numbers and pictures that represent commodities."
- irrational 6y agoWhat surprises me is that the Egyptians didn't invent an alphabet. They had 24 hieroglyphs (uniliteral hieroglyphs) that each represented a single phoneme. They were this close to inventing the alphabet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egyptian#Uniliteral_signs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration_of_Ancient_Egy...
- ljf 6y agoI wonder how much of that was about firmly keeping the ownership of 'writing' in the hands of the elite? Writing in that way would have been extremely costly, and so is another use of wealth in a vastly wealthy country?
- samatman 6y agoPossible, the scribes of Egypt were reasonably powerful and powerful classes do like to protect their own interests. But not necessary. Japanese invented syllabaries twice, and has added them to the writing system, rather than ditching the logographic system they learned from the Chinese. The Hangul were rejected for a few hundred years before Korea settled on actually using them. Writing is sticky.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MrsPeaches 6y agoHighly recommend Thoth’s Pill [1] for a fun video on the subject. Goes deep but keeps it relatively light. Has the added bonus of going into Mesoamerican writing systems which are often underrepresented in these analyses. [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=PdO3IP0Pro8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=PdO3IP0Pro8
- bitwize 6y agoIt was Tegumai Bopsulai and his daughter, Taffimai Metallumai, as I recall.
- ExcavateGrandMa 6y agoABSOLUTLY WTH! :D I was experimenting things like 2 hours ago... with a, b, c, d... things I usually don't do often... Oh god, aliens are listening at me!
- FabHK 6y agoMy understanding is that writing was invented several times independently (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Americas, maybe Indus valley, maybe Easter island...). It seems fully alphabetic writing was only invented once, and can be traced back the Mesopotamian one, which in turn might have been inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs as described in the article?
- wl 6y agoThe only "alphabets" (quotes because Ugaritic is an abjad) that can be traced back to Mesopotamia are the Ugaritic and old Persian alphabets. Both are independent simplifications of the syllabic cuneiform script into "alphabets." Both are linguistic dead ends, with no subsequent scripts arising from them. The Phoencian "alphabet" is unrelated to Mesopotamian cuneiform. It likely represents another independent invention, but this time deriving from Egyptian hieroglyphs rather than cuneiform.
- FabHK 6y agoWow, thanks for that insight/correction.
- akdor1154 6y agoSurely Korean Hangul is a counterexample? And I'm not even a linguist, there are probably more.
- bodhiandphysics 6y agoHangul and Indian scripts are both independent of Aramaic in that they don’t share letters, but presumably Indian scripts were influenced by the idea of alphabets (since the Aramaic karoshti script also was used in India) and Hangul was influenced by how Indic scripts work (though the letter forms are different)
- WalterBright 6y agoWhat I find interesting is the evolution of written languages: 1. pictures 2. hieroglyphs 3. hieroglyphs with phonetic sounds 4. alphabets 5. start over with step 1
- umeshunni 6y agoWhat's an example of #2? Aren't egyptian hieroglyphics also with phonetic sounds?
- WalterBright 6y agoThe hieroglyphics started out as pictures, and later evolved into being both pictures and sounds. Same with the Mayan script.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI recall reading that in the 300s AD, the Romans were using cartoons to give instructions to army troops, because they had too many barbarian troops who couldn't read. (Thus going back to step 1...)
- WalterBright 6y agoJust like the Mac :-)
- Koshkin 6y agoI see an icon!
- WalterBright 6y ago¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- angrais 6y agoSi Mario, so when the enemy gets close you unleash an uppercut like this: << stick man drawing >>
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThis is a great video that I highly recommend: Thoth's pill - Animated history of writing https://youtu.be/PdO3IP0Pro8 https://youtu.be/PdO3IP0Pro8
- martin1975 6y agoI'm more interested in finding out how we know certain combinations of letters (e.g. words) means] specific things. Who conveyed this info to the first person or persons who invented the alphabet?
- ggm 6y ago"the" alphabet being a western construct. Alphabets sui generis, were invented in lots of places to fill a need. I don't think the precolombian American or Asiatic cultures were waiting for ISO-LATIN1 to come down the pipe. There is a very odd theory about speech and writing and intelligence which I can't quite capture, but its something around the idea that pre-literate people cannot be proven to have had any abstract concept of communication. It gets shot down in flames pretty rapidly by burial remains which clearly indicate an organising principle (to bury) and belief in the afterlife: belief pre-supposes communication to shared belief. Neanderthal buried people with significant artifacts. Even the artifacts presuppose communication, you'd have to be able to communicate a desire for pretty-necklace-of-teeth-on-hair to somebody, for it to become widespread. Or the Venus of Wuttenburg. It presupposes communication.
- evnix 6y agoBrahmi is likely not from Aramaic, The Indus script is much older and is a lot more similar to Brahmi and is from the same region unlike Aramaic which is from a region 5000Kms away separated by massive deserts. it could also be other way around as Indus people were sea faring and their coins and stamps are found in Egypt and Mesopotamia The other thing is that Brahmi is an abugida and not an aramaic abjad(alphabets with no vowels) so even influence seems unlikely. for people interested, abugida is like a mini algorithm where you can derive infinite symbols from a given set of symbols, you basically decode it back like an MP3 decoder while reading it. due to this nature, you don't need to learn spellings and there are no two ways of reading the same set of symbols, this also means that any text written in abugida 2000 years will be pronounced the same today, so unlike English which changes pronunciation every 100 or so years, An abugida reader can pronounce texts that were written 2000 years ago and know this is exactly how they were pronounced. This is a major reason why Indian youtube isn't filled with "how this was pronounced 200 years ago", would have been fun but unfortunately we are stuck with words and pronunciations from 2k years ago or more and they likely won't change for another 2000 years.