Middle Bronze Age 19 c. BCE
- Ugaritic The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad (alphabet without vowels), used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Northwest Semitic language discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 31 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in it in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere 15 c. BCE
- Proto-Canaanite The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two acrophonic pictorial glyphs, found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age , by convention taken to last until a cut-off date of 1050 BC, after which it is called Phoenician. About a dozen inscriptions written in Proto-Canaanite have been discovered in modern-day Israel and 15 c. BCE
- Phoenician The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BCE. Unlike its Canaanite predecessor, the Phoenician alphabet was non-pictorial. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet has been 12 c. BCE
- Paleo-Hebrew The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is an abjad offshoot of the ancient Semitic alphabet, identical to the Phoenician alphabet. At the very least it dates to the 10th century BCE. It was used as the main vehicle for writing the Hebrew language by the Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans 10 c. BCE
- Aramaic The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet, and became distinctive from it by the eighth century BCE. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels 8 c. BCE
- Kharoṣṭhī 6 c. BCE
- Brāhmī Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of alphabets. The best known inscriptions in Brāhmī are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These are traditionally considered the earliest known examples of Brāhmī writing, though recent discoveries suggest that it may & Indic The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and parts of Central Asia and East Asia, descended from the Brāhmī script 6 c. BCE
- Hebrew The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, and because of its place of origin, the Assyrian script (not to be confused with the Syriac alphabet) is the better-known of two script standards used to write the Hebrew language — the other being the Samaritan script. In adapted forms, is also 3 c. BCE
- Thaana Thaana, Taana or Tāna is the modern writing system of the Divehi language spoken in the Maldives. Taana has characteristics of both an abugida (diacritic, vowel-killer strokes) and a true alphabet (all vowels are written), with consonants derived from indigenous and Arabic numerals, and vowels derived from the vowel diacritics of the Arabic abjad 4 c. BCE
- Pahlavi Pahlavi or Pahlevi denotes a particular and exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages. The essential characteristics of Pahlavi are 3 c. BCE
- Palmyrene Palmyrene or Palmyrenean was a West Aramaic dialect spoken in the city of Palmyra, Syria, in the early centuries AD. The development of cursive versions of Aramaic led to the creation of the Palmyrene alphabets 2 c. BCE
- Syriac The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from around the 2nd century BC. It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets 2 c. BCE
- Sogdian The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdiana. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the 2 c. BCE
- Orkhon 1 The Old Turkic script is the alphabet used by the Göktürk and other early Turkic Khanates from at least the 8th century to record the Old Turkic language. It was later used by the Uyghur Empire. Additionally, a Yenisei variant is known from 9th-century Kyrgyz inscriptions, and it has likely cousins in the Talas Valley of Turkestan and the Old (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE
- Old Uyghur
- Nabataean The Nabataean alphabet is a consonantal alphabet that was used by the Nabataeans in the 2nd century BC. Important inscriptions are found in Petra. The alphabet is descended from the Aramaic alphabet via the Syriac alphabet. It in turn developed into the Arabic alphabet from the 4th century, which is why its letterforms are intermediate between the 2 c. BCE
- Sogdian The Sogdian alphabet was originally used for the Sogdian language, a language in the Iranian family used by the people of Sogdiana. The alphabet is derived from Syriac, the descendant script of the Aramaic alphabet. The Sogdian alphabet is one of three scripts used to write the Sogdian language, the others being the Manichaean alphabet and the 2 c. BCE
- Mandaic The Mandaic alphabet is based on the Aramaic alphabet, and is used for writing the Mandaic language 2 c. CE
- Greek The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent 8 c. BCE
- Etruscan Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC 8 c. BCE
- Latin The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, which alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient 7 c. BCE
- Runic The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter. The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark ; the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc (due to sound changes undergone in Old English by the same 2 c. CE
- Coptic The Coptic alphabet is the script used for writing the Coptic language. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the Greek alphabet augmented by letters borrowed from the Demotic and is first Alphabetic Script used for the Egyptian Language. There are in fact several Coptic alphabets as the Coptic writing system may vary greatly among the various 3 c. CE
- Gothic The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by Philostorgius[citation needed] to Ulfilas , used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language. Before its creation in the fourth century in Nicopolis ad Istrum (modern Bulgaria), Gothic was possibly written in runes. It was primarily used by Ulfilas to translate the Bible 3 c. CE
- Armenian The Armenian alphabet is an alphabet that has been used to write the Armenian language since the year 405 or 406. It was devised by Saint Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian monk. Until the 19th century, Classical Armenian was the literary language; since then, the Armenian alphabet has been used to write the two modern dialects of Eastern Armenian and 405
- Georgian The Georgian alphabet is the writing system currently used to write the Georgian language and other South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages (Mingrelian, Svan and sometimes Laz), and occasionally other languages of the Caucasus (such as Ossetic and Abkhaz in the 1940s). The Georgian language has phonemic orthography and the modern alphabet has (disputed) ca. 430 CE
- Glagolitic The Glagolitic alphabet , also known as Glagolitsa, is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. The name was not coined until many centuries after its creation, and comes from the Old Slavic glagolъ "utterance" (also the origin of the Slavic name for the letter G). Since glagolati also means to speak, the glagolitsa poetically referred to & 862
- Cyrillic The Cyrillic script writing system is an alphabet developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in 9th century, and used in the Slavic national languages of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian. It also was used in (past) ca. 940
- Etruscan Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC 8 c. BCE
- Paleohispanic The Paleohispanic scripts are the writing systems created in the Iberian peninsula before the Latin alphabet became the dominant script. Most of them are typologically very unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic, despite having developed from the Phoenician alphabet 7 c. BCE
- Epigraphic South Arabian The ancient South Arabian alphabet branched from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet in about the 9th century BC. It was used for writing the Yemeni Old South Arabic languages of the Sabaean, Qatabanian, Hadrami (Ḥaḍramī), Minaean, Himyarite, and proto-Ge'ez (or proto-Ethiosemitic) in Dʿmt. The earliest inscriptions in the alphabet date to the 9th 9 c. BCE
- Phoenician The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BCE. Unlike its Canaanite predecessor, the Phoenician alphabet was non-pictorial. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet has been 12 c. BCE
The history of the alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which begins in Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. The civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh, and it developed over the next three millennia. Its history, more than a millennium into the history of writing The history of writing follows the art of expressing thought by letters or other marks. In the history of how systems of representation of language through graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbol. Language. The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages. This family includes the ancient and modern forms of Akkadian, Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Ge'ez, Hebrew, Maltese, Phoenician, Tigre and Tigrinya among others workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian hieroglyphs (pronounced /ˈhaɪroʊɡlɪf/; from Greek ἱερογλύφος "sacred carving", itself pronounced [ˌhieroˈɡlypʰos]) was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent and Latin The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, which alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient alphabets, or were inspired by its design. [1]
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sjurcp
Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:11:22 GM
A cuneiform . abjad. originated to the north in Ugarit, a Canaanite city of northern Syria, in the 14th century BC. Their language, Phoenician, is classified as in the Canaanite subgroup of Northwest . Semitic. . Its later descendant in North ...