Who Invented Alphabets

An article by Peter Pierce    Comments Off on Who Invented Alphabets

Alphabets have been originated from ancient Egypt and the history of the origin can be traced from 2700 BC.  The alphabets were referred to as Uni-literals by Egyptians who developed a set of 24 hieroglyphs. These alphabets begin with a consonant sound followed by the vowel sound.

Modern alphabets were derived from the idea developed by ancient Egyptians. But the pictures were simplified to represent the sounds of consonants. These pictures were simplified by Phoenicians.

The major problem was, all letters were consonants that was logical for Semitic languages namely Hebrew, Phoenician, Arabic. But Greek required extra sounds in form of vowels in their alphabets. They removed few consonants and replaced these with vowels to represent the extra sound as required by them. The unused letters were retained by Greek in their numbering system.

Greeks followed the system of writing from right side to left side, which is still being followed in Arabian countries.  But gradually they are changing their ancient writing method to the present system of left to right. They have passed this habit to all European countries.

Alphabets being used in South Asia and Southeast Asia have been derived from Brahmi alphabet system, which was based on Aramiac. The phonetic order of the present system of alphabets has been created by Indians.