The Alphabet

The set of characters we use today, the so called Roman Alphabet or Latin script, can be traced to letter shapes and phonograms used 4000 years ago. Given the range of possible variation, the continuity of shape and sound categories is truly amazing. 

The alphabet has been defined as 

While this may describe the situation today, it doesn't explain why we use some of the same shapes and sound categories that were used 4000 years ago. If any shape can be connected to any sound, how can you explain the continuity of alphabet features over time involving entirely different languages and in the context of radically different writing systems, e.g., hieroglyphics and syllabaries? 

The explanation advanced in this paper is that those who developed and first used ancient alphabets did not share our modern notions - the letters were not arbitrary  and the shape had to remain related to the form of the object named by the letter. The ancient scribes believed that if the name of the letter was bird, then even the shorthand version of this letter had to look something like a bird. While this may have allowed for considerable variation, it certainly reduced the range of possibilities. Figure 1. shows the Egyptian process of simplification from a realistic wall painting of the object named by the letter, to a simplified picture or glyph, to a scribal shorthand abbreviation.


Figure 1. The 'aleph-bet bird as a wall painting and hieroglyph.
Does the hieratic shorthand for this glyph, shown above in yellow, resemble our lower case a?

Whether or not all ancient scripts were pictographic in origin is still a debated issue. Most of the debate regards Sumerian cuneiform scripts. A few early cuneiform symbols may have been pictorial but many, according to Schmandt-Besserat , were non-iconic logograms or arbitrary concept signs from the beginning. 

In ancient times, most writing systems went through a picture writing phase which included phoneticizing the picture and using the rebus principle to extend its range. For example, a picture of a bee and a leaf could be combined to represent a completely unrelated word - *belief.  The interesting thing about this specific example is that it only works in English. 

The next step in the historical development of middle eastern writing systems was for the writing system to use just the initial sound or acrophone.rather than the entire syllable. Thus *bee could stand for /bee/, /bah/, /boe/, /beh/,...and so on. In such a system, the picture of the bee as well, as simplified representations of it, would be an acrophonic pictogram. Acrophonic pictograms make excellent phonograms because they establish a meaningful connection between the shape of the mark and the associated sound category. 


Figure 2. The shape, reference, and sound for the letter *AX

As mentioned earlier, the important thing to observe about the rebus principle and pictograms is that they are language specific. Representations and glyphs for the ax and adze are found in many bronze age cultures. They are rarely, however, associated with the sound /ae/ as shown in Figure 2. Much is made of the stimulus diffusion in the context of the spread of writing systems implying that entire writing systems could have been transplanted. The fact is that one cannot borrow a rebus system. There is no way to borrow someone else's acrophonic pictograms because different languages will normally phoneticize a given picture in different ways. The Akkadians were able to adapt Sumerian cuneiform and the Greeks were able to adapt Cadmean letters because the vestigial iconic aspects of these writing systems were overlooked or ignored.

Pictograms and Logograms

A better explanation for the differences between pictographic and logographic symbols is provided later. In our number systems the shape of the symbols for 1-3 are less arbitrary than the shapes chosen for 4-9. The symbols, 1, 2, and 3 are pictographic while 7, 8, and 9 are not. The former were derived from the tally marks /, //, and /// which became the basis of the Roman numerals, I, II, and III. The cursive form for these tally marks were usually connected making their shape similar to the letters: I, N, and M. Rotating N and M, produces the familiar 2 and 3 shapes. The shapes for 7, 8, and 9, are called logograms or word signs because the symbol stands for a whole word or concept rather than a sound. 

There is a possibility that the 8 has some relationship to the 8th letter in the Greek alphabet (n) eta, /eighta/ which was derived from a Canaanite/Phoenician shape that looked like a squared 8, which may have been based on an Egyptian phonogram with the same /h/ sound which looked like two stacked 8's. The Egyptian reference was a twisted wick of flax used in an oil lamp. The Semitic reference may have been a fence or barrier /cheth/. An English acrophonic equivalent would be "hurdle" which happens to have an H shape. the etymology of letter shapes.

The confusing thing about this distinction is that pictograms can also stand for unpicturable concepts and/or whole words. As used by the Egyptians, a picture of an eye might refer to the eye itself, the word for eye (ir), a part of the eye (e.g., the pupil [an]), or something related to the eye, e.g., sight. The Egyptians would use various ancillary marks or pictures (semagrams) to cue the appropriate meaning. Nonetheless, getting from a picture of an eye to the concept of an eye full (i.e., beauty) requires a metaphorical leap. There is a connection between the pictogram or ideogram and the idea but on an arbitrariness scale, it would be midway between a representative picture and a completely arbitrary logogram.

The earliest alphabet

Some claim that it was the cuneiform script which in one way or another caused the appearance of writing systems around the Mediterranean, in the Middle East and in India. Sir Alan Gardiner writes, 
 
 

"Hieroglyphic writing was an offshot of direct pictorial representation. In this respect it resembled the original Babylonian script (circa 3200 B.C.) and indeed it is not improbable that there was an actual relationship between them, though it may have amounted to no more than a hearsay knowledge that the sounds of language could be communicated by means of appropriately chosen pictures. The subsequent development, however, differed very considerably in the two cases. Babylonian writing, using cuneiform (wedge-shaped) characters, quickly ceased to be recognizable as pictures, whereas the Eg. hieroglyphs retained their pictorial appearance... By virtue of this fact, the signs continued to mean what they represented." (p. 22f., Egypt of the Pharaohs, 1961).

. 
The hieroglyphic writing system died out around 400 A.D. but probably, according to Gardiner and Petrie, lived on in transmuted form, within our own alphabet. In 1905, Flinders Petrie, excavating near the turquoise mines in the peninsula of Sinai, came across a number of inscriptions which appeared to be crude copies of Egyptian hieroglyphics but serving to write another language, probably Semitic. At least six of the 30 signs presented appearances corresponding to the meanings of the letter names belonging to the Hebrew alphabet. The bulls head for 'aleph, the zigzag waveform for mem, and the o-shaped eye for 'ayin. 

Gardiner deciphered the string of characters corresponding to B-A-L-T ( building, eye, crook, and X mark ) as Ba'alat, the name always given by the Semites to the Egyptian goddess Hathor, known to be worshipped at the place where the inscriptions were found. Gardiner concludes, "There seemed little doubt that the origin of the alphabet had been discovered." Since 1905, a number of inscriptions using similar scripts have been found leading most scholars to choose the Proto-Canaanite characters, as the first recognizable form of the alphabet. 

During the Middle Kingdom, Egyptian scribes represented foreign place names and the names of prominent people with a limited set of phonetic glyphs. One has to explain why what is now referred to as the "Egyptian alphabet" was not adopted in the same way the Greeks adopted the Phoenician sound signs. 

If this had happened, our alphabet today might have looked something like this



Figure 3. The beginning of an English acrophonic iconic script 
The Egyptian writing system was not always linear. It allowed graphic shapes to be stacked. Wide glyphs tended to be stacked for aesthetic reasons. To be adapted to a purely linear writing system, the forms would have to be narrowed. For example, the forms representing E, F, and K would have to be more upright. 

Proto-Canaanite

About 3700 years ago, according to Petrie, West Semitic-speaking people of the Sinai came under Egyptian domination. Just as the Egyptians may have gotten the idea of visible speech from the Sumerians (3200 b.c.), the Semitic speakers may have picked up the idea of what constitutes an alphabet and adopted a few of the Egyptian glyphs to write down the sounds of their own language (ca., 1800 B.C.)  [latest finds]

The Semites did not invent any totally new sound categories with the possible exception of /z/. Although they did not make use of very many Egyptian phonograms (sound signs) , they invented few new picture categories. 

(Elsewhere Bett argues that the Greek's introduced more novelty in their alphabet than the Semites. This is obscured by the fact that the Greeks retained the name-shape-sound connection in about 50% of their letters compared to less than 10% for the Semites.)

The reason for this is often overlooked. The Semites wanted to create their own pictographic acrophonic alphabet. This required working out a new set of relationships since pictography is language specific. The Greeks were able to borrow both the shape and the sound from the Phoenician and Canaanite scripts because, for them, neither was referential. 

Add old negev and proto sainatic to the list


The evolution of the alphabet

detailed  proto-sinai-table

Loprieno (1995), in his recent book, Ancient Egyptian, explains the situation as follows: Early Semitic scripts appear to have been modeled after the Egyptian script in two ways: (1) they were pictographic, and (2) and acrophonic. In other words, those who developed the first alphabets and syllabaries constrained themselves in two ways. the letter names were the names of familiar objects and the the sound associated with the letter was the initial sound of the letter's name. In addition, the letter shape resembled the familiar object named by the letter. So both the name and the shape had a reference. 

Acrophonic pictograms provide a very efficient means of linking shape and sound. Some of the early success of the Semitic (or Phoenician) alphabet can be attributed to the fact that it could be taught in a week to those who spoke a Semitic language. One can use the same device today to quickly teach the Phoenician and Egyptian phonograms. 

The connection between Semitic and Egyptian writing systems has always been a little obscure because the shape-sound connection was broken. If one is trying to create a pictographic acrophonic alphabet for a different language, however, this is a necessary step. Pictographic acrophonic alphabets are language specific and have to be rebuilt for every new language.

A new alphabet was required because the Egyptian pictograms, when identified in a Semitic tongue, didn't isolate the right sound. In Egyptian, "hand" began with a /d/ sound. In the Semitic language, hand began with a /k/ as in kof or kaph or a /y/ as in yod or iod. In Egyptial, "mouth" began with an /r/ while in Semitic it began with a /p/ as in peh. The shape of this letter was either a diamond (S. Semitic) or a candy-cane shaped curve (Canaanite/Phoenician) . The diamond shape is clearly a copy of the hieroglyphic for mouth. The crook has been said to resemble a frown. :-(or to keep in acrophonic English, a pout. Chances are that as the northern Semitic alphabet developed, less attention was paid to maintaining the pictographic connection. 

Between 2000 B.C. and 1000 B.C., the Semites evidently believed that letter shapes had to be iconic and acrophonic. They had to resemble a familiar object and had to be associated with the initial sound in the objects name. The concept of an alphabet as phoneticized pictograms seems to have lasted about 1000 years. 

When the Greeks adopted the Phonician/Canaaninte script starting around 1000 B.C., the notion of what constituted a proper alphabet had changed. Letter names no longer had to be referential. The Greeks kept half of the Semitic names because, for them, the names were meaningless or abstract. Kaph became kappa, iod /i:od/became iota, and pe became pi /pi:/. The possible exception is omicron (literally, little o) which was derived from 'ain or 'ayin. 'Ayin means "eye". The word for "eye" in Greek is oculus. 

Since they were unconcerned with having iconic-acrophonic script, the Greeks were able to retain 50% of the sound - shape relationships. The same kind of transition from Egyptian to Semitic (about a 1000 years earlier) mixed up the sound-shape relationships. The Semites used nearly the same sound categories and many of the same shapes and references, but the links were switched around to rebuild an iconic-acrophonic (or pictographic) script. 

Over 90% of the Semitic letter shape were borrowed from hieroglyphics, but only 27% were from Egyptian unliteral glyphs. In almost every case, the associated sound was changed. 

A letter consists of a name, sound, shape, and reference. For 1000 years, the name and the shape had the same reference. In the case of the 'ayin (eye), the Greeks kept the shape, and dropped the original name, sound, and reference. In choosing a new sound, they happened to choose one that corresponded to the initial sound in their own name for eye (oculus).


The Egyptian sequence shown as avian, boot, corner, digit, fork, girdle, hurdle, iris, jet, korner, correspond to 'aleph, b., dr-t, akhe?, g., h., double ake, djed (cobra), k...1
The Semitic sequence corresponds to 'aleph (ox), bet (bayit-house), daleth (door), gimel (camel) 

Figure 4. The beginning of two  English acrophonic scripts	avian	boot	girdle	digit	Ref.
	'aleph	foot	jar stand	dr-t	Eg.
	'aleph	bet	gimel	daleth	Sem.
	ox	building /house	camel  goad	door	Ref.

From what we know about how new scripts are developed (which is not that much), script developer's rarely design their own character set. They typically borrow their letter shapes. The Egyptians had 1000 ready made symbols as well as shorthand versions that could be borrowed. Many of these signs show up in the syllabaries of Minoan Crete (Linear A and B), and Cyprus. They also show up in the Byblos pseudo hieroglyphic syllabary (most of these scripts are dated around 1400 B.C., however, Mendenhallwants to date the Byblos syllabary as early as 2800 B.C.).

The earliest alphabet - written in cuneiform
star chart - 22 lunar mansions and their relation to the order of the alphabet
Ugaritic tablets from Ras Shamra

Only 22 or so unique shapes were needed for a consonantal proto alphabet. Those developing syllabaries needed three or more times as many sound signs. Some scholars refuse to call the early Semitic scripts alphabets. Instead, they refer to them as syllabaries without vowel references. By around 1400 B.C., there were two Semitic scripts with vowels, the Urgaritic cuneiform script and the Byblos syllabary. 


Because Egyptian phonetic hieroglyphs were used primarily to indicate consonantal sounds and not the vowels, the Sinaitic script (ca. 1800 B.C.) also adopted this convention. On the other hand, unlike hieroglyphs which had multi-consonant signs, the Sinaitic script only used single consonants (or uni-consonantal) letters. The Semitic script was simpler and more consistent than the script used by the Egyptians. It approached the ideal of one and only one sign for each sound. 

(note) Later, I refer to this as the alphabetic principle which has been largely abandoned in the Anglo-America script. In English, there are 461 signs for the 40 or so sounds of English (Dewey, 1981). 

A key to understanding the transition that occurred around 1800 B.C., is another alphabetic principle that disappears from all scripts developed after 1000 B.C., this is usually referred to as acrophonic (literally initial or topmost sound) but is actually a combination of pictography, naming the picture, and using the initial sound in the name as the sound associated with the letter shape. 

The Proto-Canaanite (aka proto Sinaitic) writing system used symbols that were very similar to Eg. hieroglyphics, but adapted for a language related to Phoenician and Hebrew. Proto-Canaanite used about two dozen hieroglyphic signs but mapped them to semitic words. In most cases, the relationship between sound and shape were so jumbled that one must conclude that no effort was made to preserve the Egyptian connections. An acrophonic English script based on Egyptian glyphs can be developed which retains about 85 %  of the original shape-sound connections. Proto-Canaanite, a language much closer to ancient Egyptian than English, retained or preserved less than 30%. 

What made this the beginning of the alphabet and not Egyptian hieroglyphs? The phonographic insight was evident in the middle kingdom when, due to political expansion, it was necessary to render foreign place names in Egyptian. But the technique used to sound out foreign names was never was extended to the whole writing system. One has the impression that the professional and priestly class wanted to keep things complicated and mysterious. Few were interested in a simplification of their writing system or in spreading it. 

It has been said that the ancient Egyptians were tradition bound. While true, they were probably no more tradition bound than we are today with respect to English orthography. The English writing system could be simplified and the symbol to phonology correspondence made more transparent. But all proposals for an orthographic reform have been resisted. It usually takes a religious or military conquest to change a traditional writing system. New writing systems have been freely adopted only by illiterate cultures. 

Over a period or 300 or so years, proto Canaanite appears to have evolved into several Semitic scripts. Around 1000 B.C., the script used by Semitic sea faring merchants populating the coast of the Western Mediterranean, the Phoenicians (or purple people), began to be spread throughout the Mediterranean. According to Greek legend, recorded in Plato, the Greeks writing system was given to them by the Phoenician king, Cadmus. 

The transition from Semitic to Greek was nothing like the transition from Hieroglyphics to Semitic. Two different languages were involved but there the parallel ends. The Greeks were able to borrow the Cadmean letters because they ignored both the meaning of the letter name and the letter shape. For the Greeks, both the name and the shape are abstract. 

The result is as simple as the Greek letter alpha. The word alpha in Greek does not mean anything at all, but in the original West Semitic form 'aleph it carried the meaning of "ox". One may still invert the letter A and imagine it as the head of an ox. 

An ox-head is exactly the Egyptian hieroglyph Proto-Canaanite adopted to acrophonically represent the sound /'/ as in 'aleph. Similarly, beth, which meant "house" and was written with sign of a house, was used to write the sound /b/. Another good example is the sound /m/, represented by the symbol of water and called mem or "water" in West Semitic. 

Link to Animated alphabet evolution

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