34 ms·

Who invented the alphabet?

114 points by diodorus 3y ago

hilbert42 3y ago
A fascinating subject, and there's an extension of it about which I've been curious for years, it's why English doesn't use diacritics or accents on alphabetical characters as do many European languages—French, German, etc. For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation. So why doesn't English use them? It's clear the language needs them with words such as through, thorough and thought which are confusing enough for native speakers let alone those learning English as a second language. And how about inconsistencies such as the verb to lead and the metal Pb lead, or other strange 'gh' words such as cough? Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks. I've never considered myself a particularly good speller and I reckon I would have benefited from diacritics had English used them.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  I wonder if the dot above 'i's and 'j's are in some sense a diacritic or like "1/2 of one"
- NeoTar 3y ago
  It’s a fascinating subject. I think a lot of the English peculiarities with spelling come from it adopting other vocabulary without enforcing a change to English orthography onto it, so we end up with a crazy mix of Germanic, French, Latin, Greek and other language spelling conventions. Also English speakers were perhaps more willing to coin Latin/Greek terms for new objects than other languages - contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English, with Fernseher (literally far-looker) in German. With respect to dialectical marks, I’m not sure why English in general doesn’t use them (although some might argue we do if we spell words café or naïve), but they don’t seem to be ‘fashionable’ in related languages - Dutch doesn’t seem to use them either, and in German they feel somewhat optional - ä, ö and ü can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively (e.g. where the accented forms aren’t available) and ß can be replaced with ss. Indeed correct alphabetical sorting of German demands this.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    > contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English I recall reading somewhere that back in the day, there were complaints that this new word coinage "television" would never catch on specifically because it mixed Greek and Latin.
  - jl6 3y ago
    > dialectical marks Of course dialectical Marx is something else entirely.
    - wahern 3y ago
      I wonder how personalized are autocompletions on Android and iPhone. How strongly could we infer, if at all, that someone had used the term dialectical before? Are autocompletions personalized enough that they might suggest dialectical over diacritic because someone had used (or received!) words like Hegel or capitalism? (Or maybe we could merely only infer someone's phone is using a European English word probability database as in European discourse dialectics might be even more common than diacritics. ;)
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    > naïve There are actually a good number of words that historically used a diaeresis in English, especially up until about a century ago: noël, reëlect, reënter, Chloë, Zoë, noöne, preëmpt, daïs, coöperate, coöpt, coördinate, zoölogy... The idea was to ensure that the second vowel would be seen as its own syllable.
    - satiric 3y ago
      I'll give the obligatory comment about the New Yorker magazine, which still uses these diaereses... for some reason.
      - adastra22 3y ago
        Because the spelling would otherwise be ambiguous.
- lainga 3y ago
  Don't quote me on this, but I vaguely recall an explanation years ago, that the one-two punch of Norman French and the Great Vowel Shift arriving were enough for spelling and pronounciation to permanently decouple in English speakers' minds
  - housecarpenter 3y ago
    What I've heard is that it was Johnson's dictionary.
- nh23423fefe 3y ago
  But people don't read letter by letter to recognize a word. The vast majority of readers are fluent and are seeing a word for the 1000th time. Optimizing for foreign learners instead of native adults seems wrong. Words vary in pronunciation across time and across regions and dialects. I would assume those words "used to" (which doesn't sound like it has a 'd') sound like they were written. So what would you do, rewrite the dictionary every couple centuries for zero gain?
  - bojan 3y ago
    Maybe one of the reasons the pronunciation varies across time and regions is exactly because the pronunciation rules aren't really standardized, so people can get creative. I wonder if the languages with strict pronunciation rules tend to change less. In my native language we tend to get new words of course, but if I read a text from 100 years ago I will be able to pronounce every word correctly, even if the word is now archaic and fallen out of use. I might get the accent wrong, and indeed accents do vary across regions, and sometimes even between neighboring towns.
    - nh23423fefe 3y ago
      That reason doesn't make sense, because pronunciation has always varied across time and most people were illiterate in the past. the written word, is not the normative form of a language. words aren't made of letters, and letters aren't made of sounds.
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  It's hard to know for absolutely certain, but a lot of it might be because diacritics would just make English even harder to read/write. By the invention of printing, English was a very confusing mess of the germanic and romantic languages and there was no absolute agreement on pronunciation. Plus, we were in the middle of the great vowel shift, so slapping diacritics on letters would have been a fools errand since they wouldn't sound like that diacritic says they do. English's lax pronunciation, linguistic changes during the middle ages, and strong romantic language influence, would make it even more confusing to create solid rules on diacritic usage, especially as many people would still be illiterate, and English was an "easier" language than the very complex Latin.
- idoubtit 3y ago
  I don't have a definite answer on why some writing systems decide to use diacritics why other don't. I'm not sure there is a single reason for English. But I think a bit of historical context would help. Many European languages derive from Latin, and most other were influenced and borrowed its alphabet. Latin didn't have diacritics, despite having pronunciation accents. E.g. "mania" could mean "mănia" (madness) or "mānia" (a kind of spirit). With time, many short vowels disappeared or changed, e.g. "orphănus" became "orphenin" then "orphelin" in French. I suppose that, for languages that are mostly an evolution of Latin, introducing diacritics was a way to mark words that were different from Latin words. It was even more useful because Latin was the written standard (a moving standard across centuries). By the way, French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. Some studies have shown that other languages are much more efficient to read and write. For instance, Spanish readers barely slow down when reading a text that contains rare words, while English readers stumble. I remember stumbling when I first encountered "antienne" in my native language, or "recipe" and "gaol" in English.
  - seszett 3y ago
    > French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. English yes of course, but French pronunciation is very regular and only a few loanwords don't follow the rules. "Antienne" is regular and pronounced the same way all other -tienne words are as far as I know (like, say, Étienne). The most difficult rules to master though are those that take into account the origin of a word (Latin, Greek or a Germanic language), especially for how to pronounce "ch", but these are essentially loanwords. The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation.
    - wongarsu 3y ago
      > The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation. For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. French tries really hard to embed everything required for pronunciation in the spelling, but because of dialects and phonetic drift that leads to some pronunciations having multiple viable spellings. German seems more concerned with the other direction: for each pronunciation (in high German) there is one obvious way to spell it (barring some baggage around c/k/ck and s/ss/ß, but even that has rules that can be applied to mostly clear it up). The other direction also mostly works, the spelling-pronunciation mapping is fairly obvious even if you don't know the word, but it is more ambiguous than French (no way to differentiate e è é or ê; and ë is mostly inferred). English somehow seems to neither try to maintain a consistent spelling-pronunciation mapping nor a pronunciation-spelling mapping, nor a tradeoff between the two. At least unless you know the origin of the word and are aware of pertinent linguistic history of the last ~200 years, or develop a good heuristic understanding for those. Probably because of the amount of coordination required to maintain a decent mapping in either direction. Both France and Germany have influential central control on spelling.
- Merrill 3y ago
  It would be nice if word processors had a feature to translate documents to International Phonetic Alphabet. Your second paragraph would be: səʊ waɪ dʌznt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ juːz ðɛm? ɪts klɪə ðə ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ niːdz ðɛm wɪð wɜːdz sʌʧ æz θruː, ˈθʌrə ænd θɔːt wɪʧ ɑː kənˈfjuːzɪŋ ɪˈnʌf fɔː ˈneɪtɪv ˈspiːkəz lɛt əˈləʊn ðəʊz ˈlɜːnɪŋ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ æz ə ˈsɛkənd ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ. ænd haʊ əˈbaʊt ˌɪnkənˈsɪstᵊnsiz sʌʧ æz ðə vɜːb tuː liːd ænd ðə ˈmɛtᵊl Pb liːd, ɔːr ˈʌðə streɪnʤ 'gh' wɜːdz sʌʧ æz kɒf?
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    I think I can speak for many many people who casually read Wikipedia articles by asking: how does one go about practically learning the IPA, so as to be able to read (not even write) something like that? every time I come across a Wikipedia article that uses IPA to explain pronunciation, it's wholly inscrutable gibberish, completely useless if there isn't a listen-to-someone-saying-it button.
    - akavi 3y ago
      Just like you learn anything else. Flash cards, pure repeated exposure, reading about the symbols long enough that you have a framework to fit them into, etc.
      - meepmorp 3y ago
        Transcription practice really helped me associate IPA with speech sounds.
    - RandallBrown 3y ago
      Usually those pronunciations are also links to the IPA helper page. I've used it to figure out pronunciations in the past.
    - hunter2_ 3y ago
      https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/ https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/
    - 3y ago
- jcranmer 3y ago
  English spelling becomes a lot more rational [1] when you understand that you are spelling words largely according to Middle English. Sound changes that occur after that are largely not reflected in English spelling. As for why English doesn't use diacritics, well, my hypothesis is that Middle English just didn't need them. Per the Wikipedia article on Middle English phonology, there's 5 short vowels + unstressed vowel + 7 long vowels + diphthonging with /j/ or /w/. With just 5 short vowels, it's possible to write every one with the 5 basic vowels of Latin script, and the long vowels and diphthongs can be written with paired vowels, using different vowels for the extra long vowel sounds (cf. ee versus ea)--no need for diacritics, even if it is a little clumsy. The Great Vowel Shift came along and fucked up all the long vowels, and separate changes caused "a" to break into 2-3 sounds (crowding into the "o" sound, as well), leaving us with clearly multiple sounds for the same short "a" and "long" vowel spellings that bare little to no resemblance to their corresponding pronunciations. Some of the sounds (in particular, ee and ea) merged into one sound as part of the Great Vowel Shift, too. [1] The other thing that ruins English spelling is a proclivity to borrow foreign words with foreign pronunciation and foreign spellings (even if it's not written in Latin script!), so to some extent, you have to play a guessing game as to etymology to work out spelling. But ignoring those cases, you can actually pretty reliably work out the pronunciation of most English words by effectively applying the (mostly regular) phonological changes from Middle English.
  - marktani 3y ago
    very interesting! can you share a couple examples of words borrowed with foreign, non-Latin script? I'm having trouble imagining how this could look like
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      Words like 'manga' or 'anime' come from Japanese (written in kanji) or Greek words like onomatopoeia (Greek is a different alphabet from Latin) are ones that come to mind.
      - P-Nuts 3y ago
- gumby 3y ago
  If you think of english spelling as highly conservative (it is) and only casually connected to pronunciation (an overstatement, but true) the spelling isn't so bad. The conservatism preserves meaning which is lost in languages like German where spelling is periodically "reformed", severing spelling from a word's historical semantics. You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation.
  - saithound 3y ago
    > You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation. Back in the day, I spent a couple of years teaching in a high school, which exposed me to a fairly large group of Australians of Japanese descent who were learning Japanese as a second language. They did complain about it, and quite fiercely, especially the ones learning it due of family pressure, and not innate interest. If most people don't complain, I guess it's because a.) they have no exposure to kanji in the first place, b.) they grew up with it, or c.) because their environment regards it as culturally insensitive to complain about foreign writing systems. If none of these apply, you do seem to get plenty of complaints. None of these factors hold for English, so it makes sense that people complain about the spelling.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  IIRC Benjamin Franklin tried to make use of diacritics in his (U.S.) newspaper, and it didn't fly. English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen -- it's too late and there's too much inertia in the current way of doing things. Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen Sure it is, continuously and gradually. > Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French. IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes.
    - cryptonector 3y ago
      > Sure it is, continuously and gradually. There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on using umlauts? :) I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than the rest of the language. > IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes. Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I would pronounce château and chateau substantially the same. I would pronounce fantôme slightly differently from fantome. Être and etre, on the other hand, would have substantially different pronunciations.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  German is frustrating for its underuse of diacritics - e.g. tetragraph "tsch" representing a single sound, similar for "sch". In Czech, these are č and š respectively. Polish has similar issues, resulting in the infamous "spilled letters" orthography.
  - gsich 3y ago
    'Q' could be used for that in German. Rename all other words.
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      Q has a different pronunciation - e. g. quasi, Quatsch...
      - gsich 3y ago
        Yes. Can be changed to make space for a sch-letter. kwasi, kwatsch.
        The_Colonel 3y ago
        Changing the pronunciation of an existing letter seems ... unnecessary. German already has diacritics, it can simply adopt more of them.
        gsich 3y ago
        It has been done before. Diacritics suck, German does not use them thankfully.
- 6510 3y ago
  My theory is that one needs a good reason to cross the ocean. Life has to be better on the other side. It is a selection process. You get people who's hands and feet tend to follow their thoughts as opposed to writing them down.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  English's lack of them greatly assisted alphabets like RADIX-50 for earlier computers. Typewriters, too.
  - satiric 3y ago
    Apparently this was one of the major barriers to achieving widespread adoption of computers in China. The sheer complexity of the Chinese written language meant that it was much harder to display Chinese characters on an old 80s monitor. (I assume that Japanese, Korean, etc had the same problem, but the article I remember reading was about Chinese.)
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      I read once that the Japanese invented the fax machine as a workaround for difficulties transmitting the character set.
- laserDinosaur 3y ago
  My personal pet peeve with the English language is the placement of symbols at the end of a sentence which change the inflection of the sentence? Oh that was a question, I guess you didn't know until you got to the very end of the sentence! Yes I was shouting that whole time, I guess you didn't know. I find oh so irritating when reading books and not knowing the inflection of the characters speech until the END of the sentence. I much prefer how other languages put a symbol at the start and end of the sentence. Grumble grumble.
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  Economy of printing press blocks, and diacritics wouldn't be enough to cover the wide variety of pronunciations, which is inconsistent in English, as highlighted by Wycombe and Warwick. Diacritics wouldn't save those names.
- nick__m 3y ago
  A little nitpick,there are 5 "forms" for 'e' in French, you forgot ë it is used in words like Noël and België
- atkailash 3y ago
  [dead]
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation. The circumflex is not related to pronunciation; it tells you that in the historical form of the word an S followed the vowel. The other three are just three different French vowels. It's an odd conflation of concerns. > Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks. Same problem; diacritical marks aren't what you want there. What's happening is that the spelling has changed more slowly than the pronunciation. You don't want to disambiguate the pronunciation of Warwick (between what and what?), what you want is to realize that the spelling isn't trying to tell you how it's pronounced. It's telling you how it used to be pronounced. (Though, in that case, it's not at all difficult to predict the modern pronunciation.)
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Sometimes there are cercumflexed vowels that change pronunciation. My assumption is that these vowels were accented, but you could only have one diacritic.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      Wikipedia says this about modern French spelling: > An acute accent over ⟨e⟩ represents /e/ > A grave accent over ⟨e⟩ indicates /ɛ/ in positions where a plain ⟨e⟩ would be pronounced /ə/ (schwa). > A circumflex over ⟨a, e, o⟩ indicates /ɑ, ɛ, o/, respectively, but the distinction between ⟨a⟩ /a/ vs. ⟨â⟩ /ɑ/ is being lost in Parisian French, merging them as [a]. In Belgian French, ⟨ê⟩ is pronounced [ɛː]. Most often, it indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter (usually ⟨s⟩ or a vowel): château < castel, fête < feste, sûr < seur, dîner < disner (in medieval manuscripts many letters were often written as diacritical marks, e.g. the circumflex for ⟨/s/⟩ and the tilde for ⟨/n/⟩). What I can take from that (lacking detailed knowledge of French) is that ê always refers to the same vowel as è (with a length distinction in Belgian French), and sometimes, in contexts which defy simple description†, e refers to the same vowel. (The vowel in question is similar to that in the English word DRESS.) è is used to avoid the suggestion that a plain e might be read in the default way, as /ə/, and ê is used to remind you that the word used to contain an s. It does not appear that a circumflex will generically clobber other accent information; the verb "listen" was formerly escouter and now, pronounced with /e/ and not /ɛ/, is spelled écouter according to the pronunciation rather than êcouter according to the etymology. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography ) If you have a particular example in mind that the treatment of modern French doesn't seem to work for, Wikipedia also has a lot of material on sound changes between Latin and French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French † The page has a table of how to predict the pronunciation of unaccented "e". These are the listed exceptions to the default reading: (a) "e" appears before multiple consonants, or before a double consonant, or before a silent consonant that is followed by t. (b) "e" appears before a silent consonant that is not t and is not followed by t. (c) "e" appears at the end of a word, except for some (but not all) one-syllable words. In some contexts, those non-exceptional one-syllable words will also be exceptions. (d) "e" as it appears in the words et, femme (first position), solennel (first position), or any word ending in the suffix -emment (first position). A context that doesn't match any of these exceptions, including the unspecified exceptions, calls for a grave accent over the e when the vowel is /ɛ/. Otherwise, you're good to just use e. All this leaves me unenthusiastic about the concept of "make it easier to pronounce unfamiliar words by making your spelling more like French".
orionblastar 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
- OnlyMortal 3y ago
  I was about to write that I was under the impression it came from ancient Egypt, via the Near East and into Greece.
  - continuitylimit 3y ago
    OP’s author is a prof. of religious studies and has a book on Hebrews so possibly his point of view requires the preeminence of Hebrew alphabet. I also found some of the reasoning questionable. The reason Latin teaching was the job of Greek slaves was precisely because they were Greeks and Roman nouveau rich were adorning the education of their children. Who teaches the children of elite today? Millionaires or smart poor people? The second questionable idea of his is that “sex” and stuff like that are not of interest to “elite”. This confused thinking disregarding content for medium also was a rather weak argument. Maybe the elite were using writing as a private very exclusive chat app and sending textual selfies. Hebrew must be first if you are a religious person who believes in God speaking Hebrew letters and creating the world. It just doesn’t work if it turns out the Egyptians created the alphabet.
    - OnlyMortal 3y ago
      Well, a whole load of them did come from ancient Egypt and Babylon. Given the Moses of Exodus came from Egypt, it’s highly unlikely he created a new script when wandering the desert. I’d imagine he had more critical issues. Also, he was brought up as an Egyptian royal and would have been taught how to write. It is plausible that the folks from Babylon brought their script too. Perhaps it has origins in both.
- nemo 3y ago
  The Rosetta Stone is from c. 200 BCE, issued by the Ptolemies in Egypt, ruling after Alexander had conquered Egypt. The first examples of writing in an ancient ancestor of our alphabet writing in Western Semitic are from c. ~1500 BCE where they were using Egyptian hieroglyphs as a model. People were writing in descendants of that alphabet for more than a thousand years when the Rosetta Stone was carved, the Greek script derived from Phoenician which evolved from West Semitic, while the hieroglyphs on the same stone were the model for West Semitic writing a thousand years before.
olah_1 3y ago
I know it is not a popular opinion, but I think Hebrew came before Phoenician. As far as I can tell, the data could point in either direction.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  Why do you think that?
- adrian_b 3y ago
  That seems completely impossible, regardless of the ages of any surviving inscriptions. The reason is that the initial North-West Semitic alphabet had 27 consonants, whose order is known from the Ugaritic alphabet derived from it. The Phoenicians have merged 5 pairs of consonants (KHA with HOTA, SHIN with THANNA, DHAL with ZETA, ZU with SADE and AIN with GHAIN), and they have kept only one letter from each pair, the result being a simplified alphabet with only 22 consonants. There is no doubt that all the other later North-West Semitic alphabets have been derived from the Phoenician alphabet and not from any earlier Semitic alphabet, because all of them have started only with the restricted set of 22 letters, even if their languages had more consonants than 22, so the Phoenician letters were too few for writing all the sounds of those languages. Because of this mismatch between the Phoenician alphabet and the sound inventory of the languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic have been forced initially to use a single letter for multiple sounds, which has been corrected later by inventing various diacritic signs to distinguish the multiple meanings of a letter, like in the Hebrew SHIN and SIN (which are distinguished by adding a dot to the letter, in different positions). If the Hebrew alphabet had been older than the Phoenician, it would have included more than 22 letters, e.g. by having distinct letters for SHIN and SIN (whose pronunciations were different from the modern pronunciations, which have merged SIN with SAMEKH).
  - olah_1 3y ago
    I am struggling to find information on this initial northwest Semitic alphabet that you mention. Your logic is sound, but I’m just not finding any info that backs up what you’re saying.
dmbaggett 3y ago
An authoritative source on this Inventing the Alphabet by Johnanna Drucker. She covers not only the modern evidence but also attempts to classify alphabets throughout history, with particular focus on the Middle Ages. The first half is a bit dry -- how much do we really care what various scholars in the 16th Century made up about the history of the alphabet? -- (a lot was made up), but the second half looks at the modern archaeological contribution to the study of alphabetic origins and is very interesting. There are also lots of scans of really interesting Medieval manuscripts cataloging alphabets in the book.
- acqq 3y ago
  Thanks! https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo141943649.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo141943... From the book's "Chapter 7. Modern Archaeology -- Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place" "We can now describe the origin of the alphabet chronologically and geographically with some degree of reliability. The basic outlines are these: The alphabet was formed in the context of cultural exchanges between Semitic-speaking people from the Levant and communities in Egypt after or around 1800 BCE. The earliest evidence is dated to Wadi el- Hol, a site in Egypt just west of the Nile, north of Luxor. Later inscriptions in the Sinai and throughout the Fertile Crescent show the gradual distribution and evolution of alphabetic writing, with most evidence dating from the fourteenth century BCE and after." Regarding "how much do we really care what various scholars in the 16th Century made up about the history of the alphabet?" we should, if we're interested in knowing the context in which various claims, which pop up even today, appeared for the first time. The context often explains the motivation which resulted in specific "made up" narrations, some still (often unfortunately) influencing our lives.
meatmanek 3y ago
If you're interested in fascinating deep dives into the history of a few odd letters, the jan Misali channel on Youtube has a video on the letter W (which, along the way, covers F and Y) and another one on the letter C. w: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y c: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chpT0TzietQ
meepmorp 3y ago
The Greeks. They're the first known group to explicitly represent vowels, unlike the older Egyptian derived systems which only represented consonants and thus were abjads rather than alphabets.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  While the Greeks have invented the most significant improvement of the writing system, after that when some Semitic people have simplified the Egyptian writing system by eliminating all the multi-consonant signs, any discussion about the Greek alphabet cannot omit the fact that they did not invent the alphabet, but they have only improved the Phoenician alphabet, by reusing signs corresponding to consonants not used in Greek to write the Greek vowels. This was a huge advance, but it cannot be named as "inventing the alphabet".
  - DonaldFisk 3y ago
    It depends what you mean by alphabet. In the narrow sense (consonants AND vowels) Greek was the first language to have one - Phoenician had an abjad (consonants only), probably because most words had 3 consonant roots, with vowels varying with their grammatical role.
    - Archelaos 3y ago
      To elaborate on this a bit more: When discussing the history of writing systems, the term "alphabet" can be used in two different senses. In a broader sense the term refers to the set of symbols, typically in a specific order, that are based on representing phonetic elements with signs (in contrast to logographic systems). In a narrower sense, the term refers to the Greek alphabet and its derivatives, to distinguish them from their syllabic or consonant-only predecessors. It should be noted in this context, that Semitic languages can be written with comparatively less disambiguity with a consonant-only set of symbols, as the correct vowels can be inferred with relatively good accuracy from the consonants and the context. For Indo-European languages, such as Greek, this is not the case. However, even for Semitic languages a consonant-only writing-system was far from ideal. Thus, various strategies have been developed to reduce ambiguity, such as the use of plene scriptum[1] or punctation[2] in Hebrew. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plene_scriptum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plene_scriptum [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_punctuation
codeulike 3y ago
Who Put the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRDY30tiD98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRDY30tiD98 A song for children by They Might Be Giants
- havblue 3y ago
  “Remember how easy it was to learn your ABC's? Thank the Phoenicians – they invented them.” -Dame Judi Dench, Spaceship Earth
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  Nova documentaries: * The First Alphabet * How Writing Changed the World
narag 3y ago
The article makes a difference between "learned scribes" and "creative people at the margins" forgeting a third possibility: learned scribes working not for the religious or secular bureaucracies, but for the merchants. A parallelism: programmers have different styles working for an established corporation and for a startup. The bureaucracy tends to stand for the old practices, resisting change. The dynamic environment favours starting from scratch and simplicity.
- Merrill 3y ago
  >>Remarkably, two recent discoveries from around 1500 BCE do show scribes using the alphabet. But these exceptions prove the rule, because these scribes used alphabetic writing just as sloppily or playfully as its other users did. In an obscure ostrakon from Thebes and a handful of looted cuneiform tablets we find surprising confirmation that even professional writers used it unprofessionally. Perhaps they were early physicians?
- hinkley 3y ago
  It's interesting how people in this space study twins, and I wonder sometimes if that isn't more on the nose than we give it credit for. Twins likely created the first languages - who does the first person genetically capable of speech talk to, except someone genetically and environmentally identical? Likely had the first verbal families, and then verbal tribes. Written secret codes might have started the same way, and ended up either being tribal or trade secrets. Success leads to imitation. Partial success leads to theft, or acquisition.
User23 3y ago
Funny how the images of early manuscripts look suspiciously like capchas.
lherron 3y ago
Came here looking for “Sergey and Larry”. Guess I’m the only one feeling a little silly on a Friday afternoon.
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atleastoptimal 3y ago
Another semi related thing I've thought about is how the invention of words comes about. I know most words today have an origin that can be traced back through text over hundreds of years, but what about the time way way back, Indo-European era, was there anything to trace back to? Was it just one or a few people who realized there as no grunt sound that meant "cold" or "elbow" so decided one day that that was the grunt sound they were gonna use and it spread naturally?
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- aragonite 3y ago
  There's a theory that the original words arose via a mechanism essentially analogous to onomatopoeia. But unlike literal onomatopoeia as in "cuckoo", it's a lot harder (and required a genius according to some philosophers like Otto Weininger [1]) to come up with just the sound that when uttered in the presence of other cavemen will correctly evoke such abstract ideas as bigness, smallness, heaviness, lightness, etc. The idea that there's something about (say) the sound "big" that makes it especially suitable for expressing the idea of bigness seems pretty plausible to me. I tried this experiment on my friend. I spoke out loud the Chinese words for big and small in a random order and ask him to guess which means big and which means small. He immediately guessed correctly. I'm pretty sure that if you can find a Chinese person who's never learnt English and try a similar experiment on them with (the sounds of the English words) "big" and "small" the result will be similar. [1] "Cannot the whole of human history (naturally in the sense of the history of the mind and not, for example, the history of wars) best be understood through the appearance of a genius, the inspirations emanating from him, and the imitation of what a genius has done by more pithecoid creatures? Take house-building, agriculture, and above all language! Every word was first created by one individual, by an individual above the average, and the same is still the case today (with the sole exception of the names for new technical inventions, which must be ignored in this context). How else should it have been created? The primal words were “onomatopoeic” and they incorporated without the will of the speaker, through the sheer intensity of the specific excitement, something similar to the cause of the excitement, while all the other words were originally tropes, as it were, second-order onomatopoeias, metaphors, similes: all prose was once poetry. Thus most geniuses have remained unknown."
natroniks 3y ago
Adding to other resources shared here, archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat has written about the evolution of writing (not strictly the alphabet), and much is available online: https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/ https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing... The roots of writing seems to be in counting/tallying marks, i.e. accounting. Another great book, "Against the Grain" by James Scott, describes how both tallying and writing developed hand-in-hand with the state.
mistrial9 3y ago
oh definitely - that must explain why I saw a guy with a white shawl and a black box filled with written prayer, tied to his forehead today.. counting grains, no doubt! to be very clear - the ways of sacred writing are very old, and not the same as counting grains.
- adamlgerber 3y ago
  odd thing to be snarky about. organized religious practices coevolved with agricultural societies. I don't think this is that scandalous?
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - thewakalix 3y ago
      If you're unaware of what "snarky" means, I suggest consulting https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snarky https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snarky.
- natroniks 3y ago
  If you're trying to make a point about sacred writings being the first texts, you may want to consider Linear B and cuneiform, some of the oldest texts of the Mediterranean and which are almost exclusively inventory lists. While we have things like the epic of Gilgamesh preserved in baked tablets, this is the exception to the rule. For the vast majority of these most ancient texts, tabulation was the main use of writing: how many animals were sacrificed, how many sheaves of wheat were in storage, how much fruit a plot of land could produce, etc. As for sacred writings: Many religions were hesitant to commit their wisdom to writing - one reason why so much of Greco-Roman religion is unknown to us. The Oral Torah was supposedly passed on for centuries until the destruction of the temple and fragmentation of the Jews necessitated the writing down of this knowledge. Heck, Homeric poetry (the hymns as well as the epics) was not written down until centuries of oral development had gone on; not because writing had not been invented, but because it was not used for literary material.
effnorwood 3y ago
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gumby 3y ago
The short answer: the equivalent of today's text slang (esp for languages that use roman letters when using the phone). It's a nice idea.
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wolverine876 3y ago
... it is clear that a theory of the alphabet as a casual and playful mode of knowledge explained all of our evidence when I first tackled this back in 2004, and still (encouragingly) explains all of the new evidence discovered in the 20 years since. What we lack is a theory of play as a mode of creativity and knowledge production in ancient writing, which I suggest as a new frontier for research on the early history of writing. That's the most interesting part of the essay, to me (in an otherwise interesting essay). It's an interesting theory for innovation, reborn. How much creativity comes from play? How many get their start in games - within games, doing things within the gaming world, either their play-fort or an online world or their imagination about their book or their role-playing game. Remember when SV companies would encourage play, with rooms designed for it? (Do they still?)
thaumasiotes 3y ago
Cadmus. Everybody knows that. :D
austin-cheney 3y ago
European alphabets descend from the short lived alphabet invented in Ugarit. It spread by the Phoenicians to Mycenaean Greece and Carthage and then later to the Latins who would found Rome. It should be noted the Minoans already had an older writing system at that time now referred to as Linear A, but it was syllabic not alphabetic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit#Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit#Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet
- xenadu02 3y ago
  Correct, the Phoenicians gave it to the Greeks who used vowel letters for the first time... though the Romans mostly inherited theirs from the Etruscans (who got it from the Phoenicians too). That led to some oddities when the Romans conquered the Greeks and started merging the diverged alphabets. Nevertheless... some letters like aleph/alpha/A survive with and nearly identical orthography. The Phoenicians wrote it sideways compared to Latin - IIRC it was the horns of a bull and represented the first sound of the Phoenician word for cattle. I find it quite interesting that a writing system having that higher level of abstraction was invented so early. Most early systems were pictograph/ideograph or syllabic AFAIK. Taking the leap to breaking words into syllables then syllables into sounds reduces the orthography to a compact set of symbols with relatively simple rules that is still capable of expressing an entire language.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Alphabetic scripts are arguably not better than syllabic or ideographic scripts. They take less time to learn and are better able to capture the sounds of foreign words, but they are less efficient to mentally process. An already literate scribe working on one language only gets no advantage from an alphabet. My own theory (as an amateur interested in both linguistics and the history of this time period) is that the late Bronze Age collapse resulted in the decline of Akkadian and the accompanying cuneiform writing system as a diplomatic language, meaning that (1) records started being recorded in the local language only, and (2) what trade and diplomacy did happen had to be multilingual. In this contex, the alphabet does win out. And this is precisely when we saw the alphabet spread across the ancient near east and Mediterranean.
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DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
Nitpick: original title is "Who really invented the alphabet?"

114 points by diodorus 3y ago

A fascinating subject, and there's an extension of it about which I've been curious for years, it's why English doesn't use diacritics or accents on alphabetical characters as do many European languages—French, German, etc. For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation. So why doesn't English use them? It's clear the language needs them with words such as through, thorough and thought which are confusing enough for native speakers let alone those learning English as a second language. And how about inconsistencies such as the verb to lead and the metal Pb lead, or other strange 'gh' words such as cough? Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks. I've never considered myself a particularly good speller and I reckon I would have benefited from diacritics had English used them.

Obscurity4340 3y ago
I wonder if the dot above 'i's and 'j's are in some sense a diacritic or like "1/2 of one"
NeoTar 3y ago
It’s a fascinating subject. I think a lot of the English peculiarities with spelling come from it adopting other vocabulary without enforcing a change to English orthography onto it, so we end up with a crazy mix of Germanic, French, Latin, Greek and other language spelling conventions. Also English speakers were perhaps more willing to coin Latin/Greek terms for new objects than other languages - contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English, with Fernseher (literally far-looker) in German. With respect to dialectical marks, I’m not sure why English in general doesn’t use them (although some might argue we do if we spell words café or naïve), but they don’t seem to be ‘fashionable’ in related languages - Dutch doesn’t seem to use them either, and in German they feel somewhat optional - ä, ö and ü can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively (e.g. where the accented forms aren’t available) and ß can be replaced with ss. Indeed correct alphabetical sorting of German demands this.
- euroderf 3y ago
  > contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English I recall reading somewhere that back in the day, there were complaints that this new word coinage "television" would never catch on specifically because it mixed Greek and Latin.
- jl6 3y ago
  > dialectical marks Of course dialectical Marx is something else entirely.
  - wahern 3y ago
    I wonder how personalized are autocompletions on Android and iPhone. How strongly could we infer, if at all, that someone had used the term dialectical before? Are autocompletions personalized enough that they might suggest dialectical over diacritic because someone had used (or received!) words like Hegel or capitalism? (Or maybe we could merely only infer someone's phone is using a European English word probability database as in European discourse dialectics might be even more common than diacritics. ;)
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > naïve There are actually a good number of words that historically used a diaeresis in English, especially up until about a century ago: noël, reëlect, reënter, Chloë, Zoë, noöne, preëmpt, daïs, coöperate, coöpt, coördinate, zoölogy... The idea was to ensure that the second vowel would be seen as its own syllable.
  - satiric 3y ago
    I'll give the obligatory comment about the New Yorker magazine, which still uses these diaereses... for some reason.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      Because the spelling would otherwise be ambiguous.
lainga 3y ago
Don't quote me on this, but I vaguely recall an explanation years ago, that the one-two punch of Norman French and the Great Vowel Shift arriving were enough for spelling and pronounciation to permanently decouple in English speakers' minds
- housecarpenter 3y ago
  What I've heard is that it was Johnson's dictionary.
nh23423fefe 3y ago
But people don't read letter by letter to recognize a word. The vast majority of readers are fluent and are seeing a word for the 1000th time. Optimizing for foreign learners instead of native adults seems wrong. Words vary in pronunciation across time and across regions and dialects. I would assume those words "used to" (which doesn't sound like it has a 'd') sound like they were written. So what would you do, rewrite the dictionary every couple centuries for zero gain?
- bojan 3y ago
  Maybe one of the reasons the pronunciation varies across time and regions is exactly because the pronunciation rules aren't really standardized, so people can get creative. I wonder if the languages with strict pronunciation rules tend to change less. In my native language we tend to get new words of course, but if I read a text from 100 years ago I will be able to pronounce every word correctly, even if the word is now archaic and fallen out of use. I might get the accent wrong, and indeed accents do vary across regions, and sometimes even between neighboring towns.
  - nh23423fefe 3y ago
    That reason doesn't make sense, because pronunciation has always varied across time and most people were illiterate in the past. the written word, is not the normative form of a language. words aren't made of letters, and letters aren't made of sounds.
notaustinpowers 3y ago
It's hard to know for absolutely certain, but a lot of it might be because diacritics would just make English even harder to read/write. By the invention of printing, English was a very confusing mess of the germanic and romantic languages and there was no absolute agreement on pronunciation. Plus, we were in the middle of the great vowel shift, so slapping diacritics on letters would have been a fools errand since they wouldn't sound like that diacritic says they do. English's lax pronunciation, linguistic changes during the middle ages, and strong romantic language influence, would make it even more confusing to create solid rules on diacritic usage, especially as many people would still be illiterate, and English was an "easier" language than the very complex Latin.
idoubtit 3y ago
I don't have a definite answer on why some writing systems decide to use diacritics why other don't. I'm not sure there is a single reason for English. But I think a bit of historical context would help. Many European languages derive from Latin, and most other were influenced and borrowed its alphabet. Latin didn't have diacritics, despite having pronunciation accents. E.g. "mania" could mean "mănia" (madness) or "mānia" (a kind of spirit). With time, many short vowels disappeared or changed, e.g. "orphănus" became "orphenin" then "orphelin" in French. I suppose that, for languages that are mostly an evolution of Latin, introducing diacritics was a way to mark words that were different from Latin words. It was even more useful because Latin was the written standard (a moving standard across centuries). By the way, French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. Some studies have shown that other languages are much more efficient to read and write. For instance, Spanish readers barely slow down when reading a text that contains rare words, while English readers stumble. I remember stumbling when I first encountered "antienne" in my native language, or "recipe" and "gaol" in English.
- seszett 3y ago
  > French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. English yes of course, but French pronunciation is very regular and only a few loanwords don't follow the rules. "Antienne" is regular and pronounced the same way all other -tienne words are as far as I know (like, say, Étienne). The most difficult rules to master though are those that take into account the origin of a word (Latin, Greek or a Germanic language), especially for how to pronounce "ch", but these are essentially loanwords. The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    > The reverse is not true though, there are many different potential ways to write a word that produce the same pronunciation. For any "real" language it's probably impossible to have a 1-1 mapping in both directions. French tries really hard to embed everything required for pronunciation in the spelling, but because of dialects and phonetic drift that leads to some pronunciations having multiple viable spellings. German seems more concerned with the other direction: for each pronunciation (in high German) there is one obvious way to spell it (barring some baggage around c/k/ck and s/ss/ß, but even that has rules that can be applied to mostly clear it up). The other direction also mostly works, the spelling-pronunciation mapping is fairly obvious even if you don't know the word, but it is more ambiguous than French (no way to differentiate e è é or ê; and ë is mostly inferred). English somehow seems to neither try to maintain a consistent spelling-pronunciation mapping nor a pronunciation-spelling mapping, nor a tradeoff between the two. At least unless you know the origin of the word and are aware of pertinent linguistic history of the last ~200 years, or develop a good heuristic understanding for those. Probably because of the amount of coordination required to maintain a decent mapping in either direction. Both France and Germany have influential central control on spelling.
Merrill 3y ago
It would be nice if word processors had a feature to translate documents to International Phonetic Alphabet. Your second paragraph would be: səʊ waɪ dʌznt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ juːz ðɛm? ɪts klɪə ðə ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ niːdz ðɛm wɪð wɜːdz sʌʧ æz θruː, ˈθʌrə ænd θɔːt wɪʧ ɑː kənˈfjuːzɪŋ ɪˈnʌf fɔː ˈneɪtɪv ˈspiːkəz lɛt əˈləʊn ðəʊz ˈlɜːnɪŋ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ æz ə ˈsɛkənd ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ. ænd haʊ əˈbaʊt ˌɪnkənˈsɪstᵊnsiz sʌʧ æz ðə vɜːb tuː liːd ænd ðə ˈmɛtᵊl Pb liːd, ɔːr ˈʌðə streɪnʤ 'gh' wɜːdz sʌʧ æz kɒf?
- adamrezich 3y ago
  I think I can speak for many many people who casually read Wikipedia articles by asking: how does one go about practically learning the IPA, so as to be able to read (not even write) something like that? every time I come across a Wikipedia article that uses IPA to explain pronunciation, it's wholly inscrutable gibberish, completely useless if there isn't a listen-to-someone-saying-it button.
  - akavi 3y ago
    Just like you learn anything else. Flash cards, pure repeated exposure, reading about the symbols long enough that you have a framework to fit them into, etc.
    - meepmorp 3y ago
      Transcription practice really helped me associate IPA with speech sounds.
  - RandallBrown 3y ago
    Usually those pronunciations are also links to the IPA helper page. I've used it to figure out pronunciations in the past.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/ https://itinerarium.github.io/phoneme-synthesis/
  - 3y ago
jcranmer 3y ago
English spelling becomes a lot more rational [1] when you understand that you are spelling words largely according to Middle English. Sound changes that occur after that are largely not reflected in English spelling. As for why English doesn't use diacritics, well, my hypothesis is that Middle English just didn't need them. Per the Wikipedia article on Middle English phonology, there's 5 short vowels + unstressed vowel + 7 long vowels + diphthonging with /j/ or /w/. With just 5 short vowels, it's possible to write every one with the 5 basic vowels of Latin script, and the long vowels and diphthongs can be written with paired vowels, using different vowels for the extra long vowel sounds (cf. ee versus ea)--no need for diacritics, even if it is a little clumsy. The Great Vowel Shift came along and fucked up all the long vowels, and separate changes caused "a" to break into 2-3 sounds (crowding into the "o" sound, as well), leaving us with clearly multiple sounds for the same short "a" and "long" vowel spellings that bare little to no resemblance to their corresponding pronunciations. Some of the sounds (in particular, ee and ea) merged into one sound as part of the Great Vowel Shift, too. [1] The other thing that ruins English spelling is a proclivity to borrow foreign words with foreign pronunciation and foreign spellings (even if it's not written in Latin script!), so to some extent, you have to play a guessing game as to etymology to work out spelling. But ignoring those cases, you can actually pretty reliably work out the pronunciation of most English words by effectively applying the (mostly regular) phonological changes from Middle English.
- marktani 3y ago
  very interesting! can you share a couple examples of words borrowed with foreign, non-Latin script? I'm having trouble imagining how this could look like
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    Words like 'manga' or 'anime' come from Japanese (written in kanji) or Greek words like onomatopoeia (Greek is a different alphabet from Latin) are ones that come to mind.
    - P-Nuts 3y ago
gumby 3y ago
If you think of english spelling as highly conservative (it is) and only casually connected to pronunciation (an overstatement, but true) the spelling isn't so bad. The conservatism preserves meaning which is lost in languages like German where spelling is periodically "reformed", severing spelling from a word's historical semantics. You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation.
- saithound 3y ago
  > You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation. Back in the day, I spent a couple of years teaching in a high school, which exposed me to a fairly large group of Australians of Japanese descent who were learning Japanese as a second language. They did complain about it, and quite fiercely, especially the ones learning it due of family pressure, and not innate interest. If most people don't complain, I guess it's because a.) they have no exposure to kanji in the first place, b.) they grew up with it, or c.) because their environment regards it as culturally insensitive to complain about foreign writing systems. If none of these apply, you do seem to get plenty of complaints. None of these factors hold for English, so it makes sense that people complain about the spelling.
cryptonector 3y ago
IIRC Benjamin Franklin tried to make use of diacritics in his (U.S.) newspaper, and it didn't fly. English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen -- it's too late and there's too much inertia in the current way of doing things. Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen Sure it is, continuously and gradually. > Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French. IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes.
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    > Sure it is, continuously and gradually. There has been no success to any attempts to regularize the spelling of English in... what, over a century now? Is the New Yorker still the only major publication insisting on using umlauts? :) I'm not saying that English won't evolve, mind you, only that English spelling will evolve [a lot] more slowly than the rest of the language. > IIRC, and its been a long time since I studied French or made use of anything but the the most basic bits, for each vowel there is a consistent (in the general case, but there may be exceptions) pronunciation change associated with the now-elided “s”, so the circumflex serves both historical and phonetic purposes. Wikipedia says it alters the sound of a, e, and o. But I would pronounce château and chateau substantially the same. I would pronounce fantôme slightly differently from fantome. Être and etre, on the other hand, would have substantially different pronunciations.
The_Colonel 3y ago
German is frustrating for its underuse of diacritics - e.g. tetragraph "tsch" representing a single sound, similar for "sch". In Czech, these are č and š respectively. Polish has similar issues, resulting in the infamous "spilled letters" orthography.
- gsich 3y ago
  'Q' could be used for that in German. Rename all other words.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Q has a different pronunciation - e. g. quasi, Quatsch...
    - gsich 3y ago
      Yes. Can be changed to make space for a sch-letter. kwasi, kwatsch.
      - The_Colonel 3y ago
        Changing the pronunciation of an existing letter seems ... unnecessary. German already has diacritics, it can simply adopt more of them.
        gsich 3y ago
        It has been done before. Diacritics suck, German does not use them thankfully.
6510 3y ago
My theory is that one needs a good reason to cross the ocean. Life has to be better on the other side. It is a selection process. You get people who's hands and feet tend to follow their thoughts as opposed to writing them down.
WalterBright 3y ago
English's lack of them greatly assisted alphabets like RADIX-50 for earlier computers. Typewriters, too.
- satiric 3y ago
  Apparently this was one of the major barriers to achieving widespread adoption of computers in China. The sheer complexity of the Chinese written language meant that it was much harder to display Chinese characters on an old 80s monitor. (I assume that Japanese, Korean, etc had the same problem, but the article I remember reading was about Chinese.)
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I read once that the Japanese invented the fax machine as a workaround for difficulties transmitting the character set.
laserDinosaur 3y ago
My personal pet peeve with the English language is the placement of symbols at the end of a sentence which change the inflection of the sentence? Oh that was a question, I guess you didn't know until you got to the very end of the sentence! Yes I was shouting that whole time, I guess you didn't know. I find oh so irritating when reading books and not knowing the inflection of the characters speech until the END of the sentence. I much prefer how other languages put a symbol at the start and end of the sentence. Grumble grumble.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Economy of printing press blocks, and diacritics wouldn't be enough to cover the wide variety of pronunciations, which is inconsistent in English, as highlighted by Wycombe and Warwick. Diacritics wouldn't save those names.
nick__m 3y ago
A little nitpick,there are 5 "forms" for 'e' in French, you forgot ë it is used in words like Noël and België
atkailash 3y ago
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thaumasiotes 3y ago
> For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation. The circumflex is not related to pronunciation; it tells you that in the historical form of the word an S followed the vowel. The other three are just three different French vowels. It's an odd conflation of concerns. > Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks. Same problem; diacritical marks aren't what you want there. What's happening is that the spelling has changed more slowly than the pronunciation. You don't want to disambiguate the pronunciation of Warwick (between what and what?), what you want is to realize that the spelling isn't trying to tell you how it's pronounced. It's telling you how it used to be pronounced. (Though, in that case, it's not at all difficult to predict the modern pronunciation.)
- adastra22 3y ago
  Sometimes there are cercumflexed vowels that change pronunciation. My assumption is that these vowels were accented, but you could only have one diacritic.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Wikipedia says this about modern French spelling: > An acute accent over ⟨e⟩ represents /e/ > A grave accent over ⟨e⟩ indicates /ɛ/ in positions where a plain ⟨e⟩ would be pronounced /ə/ (schwa). > A circumflex over ⟨a, e, o⟩ indicates /ɑ, ɛ, o/, respectively, but the distinction between ⟨a⟩ /a/ vs. ⟨â⟩ /ɑ/ is being lost in Parisian French, merging them as [a]. In Belgian French, ⟨ê⟩ is pronounced [ɛː]. Most often, it indicates the historical deletion of an adjacent letter (usually ⟨s⟩ or a vowel): château < castel, fête < feste, sûr < seur, dîner < disner (in medieval manuscripts many letters were often written as diacritical marks, e.g. the circumflex for ⟨/s/⟩ and the tilde for ⟨/n/⟩). What I can take from that (lacking detailed knowledge of French) is that ê always refers to the same vowel as è (with a length distinction in Belgian French), and sometimes, in contexts which defy simple description†, e refers to the same vowel. (The vowel in question is similar to that in the English word DRESS.) è is used to avoid the suggestion that a plain e might be read in the default way, as /ə/, and ê is used to remind you that the word used to contain an s. It does not appear that a circumflex will generically clobber other accent information; the verb "listen" was formerly escouter and now, pronounced with /e/ and not /ɛ/, is spelled écouter according to the pronunciation rather than êcouter according to the etymology. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography ) If you have a particular example in mind that the treatment of modern French doesn't seem to work for, Wikipedia also has a lot of material on sound changes between Latin and French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_French † The page has a table of how to predict the pronunciation of unaccented "e". These are the listed exceptions to the default reading: (a) "e" appears before multiple consonants, or before a double consonant, or before a silent consonant that is followed by t. (b) "e" appears before a silent consonant that is not t and is not followed by t. (c) "e" appears at the end of a word, except for some (but not all) one-syllable words. In some contexts, those non-exceptional one-syllable words will also be exceptions. (d) "e" as it appears in the words et, femme (first position), solennel (first position), or any word ending in the suffix -emment (first position). A context that doesn't match any of these exceptions, including the unspecified exceptions, calls for a grave accent over the e when the vowel is /ɛ/. Otherwise, you're good to just use e. All this leaves me unenthusiastic about the concept of "make it easier to pronounce unfamiliar words by making your spelling more like French".

orionblastar 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

OnlyMortal 3y ago
I was about to write that I was under the impression it came from ancient Egypt, via the Near East and into Greece.
- continuitylimit 3y ago
  OP’s author is a prof. of religious studies and has a book on Hebrews so possibly his point of view requires the preeminence of Hebrew alphabet. I also found some of the reasoning questionable. The reason Latin teaching was the job of Greek slaves was precisely because they were Greeks and Roman nouveau rich were adorning the education of their children. Who teaches the children of elite today? Millionaires or smart poor people? The second questionable idea of his is that “sex” and stuff like that are not of interest to “elite”. This confused thinking disregarding content for medium also was a rather weak argument. Maybe the elite were using writing as a private very exclusive chat app and sending textual selfies. Hebrew must be first if you are a religious person who believes in God speaking Hebrew letters and creating the world. It just doesn’t work if it turns out the Egyptians created the alphabet.
  - OnlyMortal 3y ago
    Well, a whole load of them did come from ancient Egypt and Babylon. Given the Moses of Exodus came from Egypt, it’s highly unlikely he created a new script when wandering the desert. I’d imagine he had more critical issues. Also, he was brought up as an Egyptian royal and would have been taught how to write. It is plausible that the folks from Babylon brought their script too. Perhaps it has origins in both.
nemo 3y ago
The Rosetta Stone is from c. 200 BCE, issued by the Ptolemies in Egypt, ruling after Alexander had conquered Egypt. The first examples of writing in an ancient ancestor of our alphabet writing in Western Semitic are from c. ~1500 BCE where they were using Egyptian hieroglyphs as a model. People were writing in descendants of that alphabet for more than a thousand years when the Rosetta Stone was carved, the Greek script derived from Phoenician which evolved from West Semitic, while the hieroglyphs on the same stone were the model for West Semitic writing a thousand years before.

olah_1 3y ago

I know it is not a popular opinion, but I think Hebrew came before Phoenician. As far as I can tell, the data could point in either direction.

CogitoCogito 3y ago
Why do you think that?
adrian_b 3y ago
That seems completely impossible, regardless of the ages of any surviving inscriptions. The reason is that the initial North-West Semitic alphabet had 27 consonants, whose order is known from the Ugaritic alphabet derived from it. The Phoenicians have merged 5 pairs of consonants (KHA with HOTA, SHIN with THANNA, DHAL with ZETA, ZU with SADE and AIN with GHAIN), and they have kept only one letter from each pair, the result being a simplified alphabet with only 22 consonants. There is no doubt that all the other later North-West Semitic alphabets have been derived from the Phoenician alphabet and not from any earlier Semitic alphabet, because all of them have started only with the restricted set of 22 letters, even if their languages had more consonants than 22, so the Phoenician letters were too few for writing all the sounds of those languages. Because of this mismatch between the Phoenician alphabet and the sound inventory of the languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic have been forced initially to use a single letter for multiple sounds, which has been corrected later by inventing various diacritic signs to distinguish the multiple meanings of a letter, like in the Hebrew SHIN and SIN (which are distinguished by adding a dot to the letter, in different positions). If the Hebrew alphabet had been older than the Phoenician, it would have included more than 22 letters, e.g. by having distinct letters for SHIN and SIN (whose pronunciations were different from the modern pronunciations, which have merged SIN with SAMEKH).
- olah_1 3y ago
  I am struggling to find information on this initial northwest Semitic alphabet that you mention. Your logic is sound, but I’m just not finding any info that backs up what you’re saying.

dmbaggett 3y ago

An authoritative source on this Inventing the Alphabet by Johnanna Drucker. She covers not only the modern evidence but also attempts to classify alphabets throughout history, with particular focus on the Middle Ages. The first half is a bit dry -- how much do we really care what various scholars in the 16th Century made up about the history of the alphabet? -- (a lot was made up), but the second half looks at the modern archaeological contribution to the study of alphabetic origins and is very interesting. There are also lots of scans of really interesting Medieval manuscripts cataloging alphabets in the book.

acqq 3y ago
Thanks! https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo141943649.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo141943... From the book's "Chapter 7. Modern Archaeology -- Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place" "We can now describe the origin of the alphabet chronologically and geographically with some degree of reliability. The basic outlines are these: The alphabet was formed in the context of cultural exchanges between Semitic-speaking people from the Levant and communities in Egypt after or around 1800 BCE. The earliest evidence is dated to Wadi el- Hol, a site in Egypt just west of the Nile, north of Luxor. Later inscriptions in the Sinai and throughout the Fertile Crescent show the gradual distribution and evolution of alphabetic writing, with most evidence dating from the fourteenth century BCE and after." Regarding "how much do we really care what various scholars in the 16th Century made up about the history of the alphabet?" we should, if we're interested in knowing the context in which various claims, which pop up even today, appeared for the first time. The context often explains the motivation which resulted in specific "made up" narrations, some still (often unfortunately) influencing our lives.

meatmanek 3y ago

If you're interested in fascinating deep dives into the history of a few odd letters, the jan Misali channel on Youtube has a video on the letter W (which, along the way, covers F and Y) and another one on the letter C. w: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y c: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chpT0TzietQ

meepmorp 3y ago

The Greeks. They're the first known group to explicitly represent vowels, unlike the older Egyptian derived systems which only represented consonants and thus were abjads rather than alphabets.

adrian_b 3y ago
While the Greeks have invented the most significant improvement of the writing system, after that when some Semitic people have simplified the Egyptian writing system by eliminating all the multi-consonant signs, any discussion about the Greek alphabet cannot omit the fact that they did not invent the alphabet, but they have only improved the Phoenician alphabet, by reusing signs corresponding to consonants not used in Greek to write the Greek vowels. This was a huge advance, but it cannot be named as "inventing the alphabet".
- DonaldFisk 3y ago
  It depends what you mean by alphabet. In the narrow sense (consonants AND vowels) Greek was the first language to have one - Phoenician had an abjad (consonants only), probably because most words had 3 consonant roots, with vowels varying with their grammatical role.
  - Archelaos 3y ago
    To elaborate on this a bit more: When discussing the history of writing systems, the term "alphabet" can be used in two different senses. In a broader sense the term refers to the set of symbols, typically in a specific order, that are based on representing phonetic elements with signs (in contrast to logographic systems). In a narrower sense, the term refers to the Greek alphabet and its derivatives, to distinguish them from their syllabic or consonant-only predecessors. It should be noted in this context, that Semitic languages can be written with comparatively less disambiguity with a consonant-only set of symbols, as the correct vowels can be inferred with relatively good accuracy from the consonants and the context. For Indo-European languages, such as Greek, this is not the case. However, even for Semitic languages a consonant-only writing-system was far from ideal. Thus, various strategies have been developed to reduce ambiguity, such as the use of plene scriptum[1] or punctation[2] in Hebrew. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plene_scriptum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plene_scriptum [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_punctuation

codeulike 3y ago

Who Put the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRDY30tiD98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRDY30tiD98 A song for children by They Might Be Giants

havblue 3y ago
“Remember how easy it was to learn your ABC's? Thank the Phoenicians – they invented them.” -Dame Judi Dench, Spaceship Earth
heresie-dabord 3y ago
Nova documentaries: * The First Alphabet * How Writing Changed the World

narag 3y ago

The article makes a difference between "learned scribes" and "creative people at the margins" forgeting a third possibility: learned scribes working not for the religious or secular bureaucracies, but for the merchants. A parallelism: programmers have different styles working for an established corporation and for a startup. The bureaucracy tends to stand for the old practices, resisting change. The dynamic environment favours starting from scratch and simplicity.

Merrill 3y ago
>>Remarkably, two recent discoveries from around 1500 BCE do show scribes using the alphabet. But these exceptions prove the rule, because these scribes used alphabetic writing just as sloppily or playfully as its other users did. In an obscure ostrakon from Thebes and a handful of looted cuneiform tablets we find surprising confirmation that even professional writers used it unprofessionally. Perhaps they were early physicians?
hinkley 3y ago
It's interesting how people in this space study twins, and I wonder sometimes if that isn't more on the nose than we give it credit for. Twins likely created the first languages - who does the first person genetically capable of speech talk to, except someone genetically and environmentally identical? Likely had the first verbal families, and then verbal tribes. Written secret codes might have started the same way, and ended up either being tribal or trade secrets. Success leads to imitation. Partial success leads to theft, or acquisition.

User23 3y ago

Funny how the images of early manuscripts look suspiciously like capchas.

lherron 3y ago

Came here looking for “Sergey and Larry”. Guess I’m the only one feeling a little silly on a Friday afternoon.

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atleastoptimal 3y ago

Another semi related thing I've thought about is how the invention of words comes about. I know most words today have an origin that can be traced back through text over hundreds of years, but what about the time way way back, Indo-European era, was there anything to trace back to? Was it just one or a few people who realized there as no grunt sound that meant "cold" or "elbow" so decided one day that that was the grunt sound they were gonna use and it spread naturally?

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aragonite 3y ago
There's a theory that the original words arose via a mechanism essentially analogous to onomatopoeia. But unlike literal onomatopoeia as in "cuckoo", it's a lot harder (and required a genius according to some philosophers like Otto Weininger [1]) to come up with just the sound that when uttered in the presence of other cavemen will correctly evoke such abstract ideas as bigness, smallness, heaviness, lightness, etc. The idea that there's something about (say) the sound "big" that makes it especially suitable for expressing the idea of bigness seems pretty plausible to me. I tried this experiment on my friend. I spoke out loud the Chinese words for big and small in a random order and ask him to guess which means big and which means small. He immediately guessed correctly. I'm pretty sure that if you can find a Chinese person who's never learnt English and try a similar experiment on them with (the sounds of the English words) "big" and "small" the result will be similar. [1] "Cannot the whole of human history (naturally in the sense of the history of the mind and not, for example, the history of wars) best be understood through the appearance of a genius, the inspirations emanating from him, and the imitation of what a genius has done by more pithecoid creatures? Take house-building, agriculture, and above all language! Every word was first created by one individual, by an individual above the average, and the same is still the case today (with the sole exception of the names for new technical inventions, which must be ignored in this context). How else should it have been created? The primal words were “onomatopoeic” and they incorporated without the will of the speaker, through the sheer intensity of the specific excitement, something similar to the cause of the excitement, while all the other words were originally tropes, as it were, second-order onomatopoeias, metaphors, similes: all prose was once poetry. Thus most geniuses have remained unknown."

natroniks 3y ago

Adding to other resources shared here, archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat has written about the evolution of writing (not strictly the alphabet), and much is available online: https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing/ https://sites.utexas.edu/dsb/tokens/the-evolution-of-writing... The roots of writing seems to be in counting/tallying marks, i.e. accounting. Another great book, "Against the Grain" by James Scott, describes how both tallying and writing developed hand-in-hand with the state.

mistrial9 3y ago

oh definitely - that must explain why I saw a guy with a white shawl and a black box filled with written prayer, tied to his forehead today.. counting grains, no doubt! to be very clear - the ways of sacred writing are very old, and not the same as counting grains.

adamlgerber 3y ago
odd thing to be snarky about. organized religious practices coevolved with agricultural societies. I don't think this is that scandalous?
- mistrial9 3y ago
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  - thewakalix 3y ago
    If you're unaware of what "snarky" means, I suggest consulting https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snarky https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snarky.
natroniks 3y ago
If you're trying to make a point about sacred writings being the first texts, you may want to consider Linear B and cuneiform, some of the oldest texts of the Mediterranean and which are almost exclusively inventory lists. While we have things like the epic of Gilgamesh preserved in baked tablets, this is the exception to the rule. For the vast majority of these most ancient texts, tabulation was the main use of writing: how many animals were sacrificed, how many sheaves of wheat were in storage, how much fruit a plot of land could produce, etc. As for sacred writings: Many religions were hesitant to commit their wisdom to writing - one reason why so much of Greco-Roman religion is unknown to us. The Oral Torah was supposedly passed on for centuries until the destruction of the temple and fragmentation of the Jews necessitated the writing down of this knowledge. Heck, Homeric poetry (the hymns as well as the epics) was not written down until centuries of oral development had gone on; not because writing had not been invented, but because it was not used for literary material.

effnorwood 3y ago

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gumby 3y ago

The short answer: the equivalent of today's text slang (esp for languages that use roman letters when using the phone). It's a nice idea.

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wolverine876 3y ago

... it is clear that a theory of the alphabet as a casual and playful mode of knowledge explained all of our evidence when I first tackled this back in 2004, and still (encouragingly) explains all of the new evidence discovered in the 20 years since. What we lack is a theory of play as a mode of creativity and knowledge production in ancient writing, which I suggest as a new frontier for research on the early history of writing. That's the most interesting part of the essay, to me (in an otherwise interesting essay). It's an interesting theory for innovation, reborn. How much creativity comes from play? How many get their start in games - within games, doing things within the gaming world, either their play-fort or an online world or their imagination about their book or their role-playing game. Remember when SV companies would encourage play, with rooms designed for it? (Do they still?)

thaumasiotes 3y ago

Cadmus. Everybody knows that. :D

austin-cheney 3y ago

European alphabets descend from the short lived alphabet invented in Ugarit. It spread by the Phoenicians to Mycenaean Greece and Carthage and then later to the Latins who would found Rome. It should be noted the Minoans already had an older writing system at that time now referred to as Linear A, but it was syllabic not alphabetic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit#Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugarit#Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet

xenadu02 3y ago
Correct, the Phoenicians gave it to the Greeks who used vowel letters for the first time... though the Romans mostly inherited theirs from the Etruscans (who got it from the Phoenicians too). That led to some oddities when the Romans conquered the Greeks and started merging the diverged alphabets. Nevertheless... some letters like aleph/alpha/A survive with and nearly identical orthography. The Phoenicians wrote it sideways compared to Latin - IIRC it was the horns of a bull and represented the first sound of the Phoenician word for cattle. I find it quite interesting that a writing system having that higher level of abstraction was invented so early. Most early systems were pictograph/ideograph or syllabic AFAIK. Taking the leap to breaking words into syllables then syllables into sounds reduces the orthography to a compact set of symbols with relatively simple rules that is still capable of expressing an entire language.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Alphabetic scripts are arguably not better than syllabic or ideographic scripts. They take less time to learn and are better able to capture the sounds of foreign words, but they are less efficient to mentally process. An already literate scribe working on one language only gets no advantage from an alphabet. My own theory (as an amateur interested in both linguistics and the history of this time period) is that the late Bronze Age collapse resulted in the decline of Akkadian and the accompanying cuneiform writing system as a diplomatic language, meaning that (1) records started being recorded in the local language only, and (2) what trade and diplomacy did happen had to be multilingual. In this contex, the alphabet does win out. And this is precisely when we saw the alphabet spread across the ancient near east and Mediterranean.

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DemocracyFTW2 3y ago

Nitpick: original title is "Who really invented the alphabet?"