Cherokee (syllabary; letter forms only) c. 1820 CE
Vai (syllabary) c. 1832 CE
Deseret 1854 CE
Great Lakes Algonquian 19th c. CE
Blackfoot (influence from Canadian) 1888 CE
Fraser (Old Lisu) 1915 CE
Saanich 1978 CE
Osage 2006 CE
Runic 2nd c. CE
Ogham (origin uncertain) 4th c. CE
Lycian 5th c. BCE
Coptic (influence from Demotic) 3rd c. CE
Gothic 3rd c. CE
Armenian 405 CE
Caucasian Albanian (origin uncertain) c. 420 CE
Georgian (origin uncertain) c. 430 CE
Glagolitic 862 CE
Cyrillic c. 940 CE
Old Permic 1372 CE
Libyco-Berber 10th c. BCE
Tifinagh 4th c. CE
Neo-Tifinagh 1970 CE
Paleohispanic (semi-syllabic) 7th c. BCE
Graphically independent
Hangul 1443 CE (proposed connection to Phagspa)
Thaana c. 1601 CE
Adlam 1989 CE
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The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script.[1] Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt.[2] Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language.[3][4] This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs.[5][6] The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian,[7] Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic (derived from the Phoenician alphabet) and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal alphabets, with the term abjad coined for them in 1996, and "true alphabets" with letters for both consonants and vowels. In this narrower sense, the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Many linguists are skeptical of the value of wholly separating the two categories. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today,[8] in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.
^Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). Writing systems: A linguistic introduction. Stanford University Press. p. 77. ISBN 0-8047-1254-9.
^Goldwasser, O. (2012). "The Miners that Invented the Alphabet - a Response to Christopher Rollston". Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections. 4 (3). doi:10.2458/azu_jaei_v04i3_goldwasser.
^Goldwasser, O. (2010). "How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (2): 40–53.
^Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.
^Goldwasser, Orly (2010). "How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (1). Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society. ISSN 0098-9444. Retrieved 6 Nov 2011.
^Sass, Benjamin; Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology; Makhon le-arkheʼologyah ʻa. sh. Sonyah u-Marḳo Nadler (2005). The alphabet at the turn of the millennium: the West Semitic alphabet ca. 1150-850 BCE : the antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian alphabets. Tel-Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology. ISBN 978-965-266-021-3. OCLC 63062039.
^Haarmann 2004, p. 96.
and 26 Related for: History of the alphabet information
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