Alphabet
The alphabet or alphabet of a language is the ordered set of its letters. It is also the grouping that is read with a certain order of the spellings used to represent the language that serves as a communication system.
The term alphabet comes from the Greek ἀλφάβετον (alphabeton), derived from the first two Greek letters ἄλφα (alpha, α) and βῆτα (beta, β), derived in turn from the Phoenician letters ʾalp and bēt, which meant 'ox' and 'house' respectively. The Greek alphabet is an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, which also gave rise to Hebrew and Arabic, among others. For its part, the term «alphabet» comes from the late Latin abecedārium, also derived from the name of the first letters, in this case four: a (a), b (be), c (ce) and d (de).
Some letters can receive one or several diacritical marks in order to differentiate the sounds of the language or to avoid ambiguities. In the same way, the alphabet can be understood by the use of supplementary letters. The phonetic evolutions of a language are created at a different rate from the written evolution. Alphabetic writing does not guarantee a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes.
In other fields (mathematics, and other formal systems, for example), an alphabet is a finite and ordered set of symbols from which words and well-formed formulas are built. In archaeology, an alphabet is an ancient epigraphy that contains the letters of an alphabet.
Semitic alphabet
In the temple of Serabit el-Khadim, on the west coast of the Sinai peninsula, in 1904-1905 Flinders Petrie found a votive statue addressed to Hathor, a sandstone sphinx with inscriptions in two scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphics and protosinaitic. The famous English linguist Alan Gardiner deciphered the two inscriptions, as if it were a "Rosetta stone", suggesting that the Proto-Sinaitic signs represent objects, with Semitic names that corresponded to the letters of the Phoenician alphabet, derived from the hieratic signs. or hieroglyphics.
This was a simplification of the hieroglyphic system (about 23 signs, of which at least half are clearly Egyptian). Gardiner studied the derivation of the Phoenician signs from the Sinaitic pictograms. It could not be said that it is an alphabet in the strict sense, but rather a syllabary (consonant + vowel); but it must be given the prominence it deserves as the origin or precedent of more evolved alphabets in which each letter represents a sound.
It seems that the first to write the isolated consonants were the West Semitic peoples of the shores of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, Hebrews and Phoenicians. The sequential chain would be: sign-word; consonantal sound-signs mixed with word-signs (Egypt); syllabic sound-signs mixed with word-signs (Sumerian-Akkadian); signs-sounds that represent syllables of constant type (Aegean type). Syllabic alphabet also used by the Tartessos in the south of the Iberian Peninsula and which is the first alphabet in all of Western Europe. Even today, despite so many written samples that exist in Andalusia and southern Portugal, that language is yet to be deciphered or translated.
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is a creation. It is at the end of this chain that a progressive priority of analysis over synthesis is noted. From the pictograph, which is a global representation, we move on to signs that break down the discourse into its constituent parts. The oldest forms of Phoenician script have been found in the archaic inscriptions at Byblos, dating back to the 13th and 11th centuries BCE. C. The archaic Phoenician comprised 22 letters, only consonants, and is now free of ideographic elements, determinatives and all traces of syllabism.
Other alphabets
The paleo-Hebraic alphabet comes from the Phoenician, from which it gradually moved away. Other branches are: the Samaritan, Moabite, Punic and Aramaic alphabets (from which the Arabic alphabets have been derived, through the Nabataean, Hebrew, Syrian, Uralo-Altaic alphabets, etc.) The Arabic alphabet has been used for languages such as Persian, Turkish, Berber languages, Malagasy, etc. As for the Sursemitic alphabets (Sur-Arabic and North-Arabic), they seem to come, with reservations, from the Phoenician. The Pehlvi and Avestan alphabets are derivatives of Aramaic. The origin of the Libyan alphabet is under discussion: Phoenician, Arabic, etc. Brahmi and Kharosthi, according to the classical thesis, derive from Phoenician, with the particularity of the change of direction of the writing and the notation of consonants and vowels.
History of Western Alphabets
The main Western alphabets have their origin in the North Semitic or Canaanite alphabet, dated more than 3,500 years ago, between 1700 and 1500 B.C. C., in the Near East.
The precedent of the western alphabet was devised in the eastern regions of the Mediterranean coast and Phoenician merchants were in charge of disseminating it. The Greeks probably learned about this writing system in the city of Gibl (in today's Lebanon), an important cultural and commercial center that they called Byblos; they adopted it in Greece, although they transformed some consonants and semiconsonants into vowels. They also varied the direction of some letters and generalized writing from left to right. It is usually dated around 900 B.C. c.
The Greek alphabet adopted the Phoenician alphabet and modified the value of certain consonant sounds and designated vowels. From Greek come the Gothic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Albanian, Slavic (Glagolithic and Cyrillic) and Etruscan alphabets.
The Latin alphabet is one of the local alphabets that the Etruscans borrowed from the Greek. It differs from this not only in the form of the letters, but also in their use. In the first century of our era it was made up of 23 letters. With the expansion of the Greco-Roman civilization and Christianity, the Latin alphabet ended up conquering all of Europe: Celts, Slavs, Germans, Scandinavians, etc. They write with Latin letters. This alphabet, adapted by the Romans with their own variants, spread throughout the Mediterranean, and later throughout the West.
The Iberian alphabets appear to have been derived from Phoenician and Greek.
The alphabet of the Germanic peoples, called futhark (runes and oghams) after the name of its first six letters, was reduced from 26 signs to 16. The strongest theory is that gives it an Etruscan origin.
Alphabetical order: past and present
Although there are many similarities between the alphabets of different languages, there are also peculiar differences in each.
It is not always clear what constitutes a specific, unique alphabet. French basically uses the same alphabet as English, but many of the letters use additional marks, such as "é", "à" and "ô". In French, these combinations are not considered additional letters. However, in Icelandic accented letters such as "á", "í" and "ö" are considered separate letters of the alphabet. In Spanish, the "ñ" is a different letter, but accented vowels like "á" and "é" are not. The Spanish alphabet consists of 27 letters. Likewise, five digraphs are also used to represent as many phonemes: «ch», «ll», «rr», «gu» and «qu», the latter two being considered as positional variants for the phonemes /g/ and /k/. The digraphs ch and ll have specific phonetic values, so in the 1754 edition of the Ortografía de la lengua española he began to be considered as letters of the Spanish alphabet, and from the publication of the fourth edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish language, in 1803, they were arranged separately from c and l, and it was during the X Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, held in Madrid in 1994, and on the recommendation of several organizations, that it was agreed to rearrange the digraphs ch and ll in the place assigned to them by the universal Latin alphabet, although they were still part of the alphabet. With the publication of the Ortografía de la lengua española of 2010, both ceased to be considered letters of the alphabet.
In German, words beginning with «sch-» (constituting the German phoneme «ʃ») were interspersed between words beginning with «sca-» and words beginning with «sci-» (all of them, coincidentally, borrowed words from other languages), instead of this graphic group appearing after the letter “s”, as if it were a single letter – a lexicographical decision that is obligatory in an Albanian dictionary, where “dh -”, “gj-”, “ll-”, “rr-”, “th-”, “xh-”, and “zh-” (all of which represent phonemes and are considered separate letters) appear after the letters «d», «g», «l», «n», «r», «t», «x» and «z», respectively. Likewise, in an English dictionary, the words that begin with "th-" do not have a special place after the letter "t", but are included within it, between "te-" and "ti-". German words with umlauts are arranged alphabetically as if there were no umlauts at all – contrary to the Turkish alphabet, which supposedly adopted the German graphemes "ö" and "ü", and where a word like "tüfek" ('arm '), appears in the dictionary after «tuz» ('salt').
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets end with “æ” – “ø” – “å”, while the Swedish, Finnish and Estonian alphabets conventionally place the letters “å”, “ä”, and “ö” at the final.
Some adaptations of the Latin alphabet are augmented by the use of ligatures, such as «æ» in Old English and Icelandic and «Ȣ» in Algonquin; through borrowings from other alphabets, such as the Old English and Icelandic letter thorn, which came from Futhark runes, and through modification of existing letters, such as Old English eth (lowercase "ð") and from Icelandic, which is a modification of the "d". Other alphabets use only a subset of the Latin alphabet, such as Hawaiian and Italian, which use the letters "j", "k", "x", "y" and "w" only in words of foreign origin.
It is not known whether the earliest alphabets had a definite order. Some current alphabets, such as the Hanuno' or script of some original populations of the Philippines, in which one letter is taught at a time, in no particular order, and are not used for alphabetical ordering. However, several Ugaritic tablets from the 14th century BCE. C. preserve the alphabet in two sequences. One of them, the "ABCDE" order, later used by the Phoenicians, is still used today, with minor changes, in the Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Gothic, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabets; the other, "HMĦLQ", was used in South Arabia and is still used today in the Ge'ez alphabet (see also Ethiopian alphabet). Both types of alphabetical order have remained more or less stable, therefore, at least during the last three thousand years.
This historical ordering no longer persisted in the case of the runic alphabet, nor in the case of the Arabic alphabet, although the latter continues to use the so-called "abjadi order" for numbering.
The Brahmic family of alphabets used in India applies a unique ordering that is based on phonology: letters are arranged based on how and where they are generated in the mouth. This organization is used in Southeast Asia, in Tibet, in Korean Hangul, and even in the kana of Japan, which is not an alphabet.
The Phoenician letter names, each associated with a word beginning with that sound, continue to be used in the Samaritan, Aramaic, Syrian, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets. However, they ceased to be used in the Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.
Special alphabets
- Alphabet Braille
- Alphabet Morse
- Alphabet by words
- hangul Korean
- silbo gomero (not exactly alphabet, but interpretation of alphabet in whistles)
- Sign language
Contenido relacionado
Abesive case
Cockney
Second language