History of the alphabet

Alphabetic writing – where letters generally correspond to individual sounds in a language (phonemes), as opposed to having symbols for syllables or words – was likely invented once in human history. Virtually all later alphabets used throughout the world either descend directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script, or were directly inspired by it.

It emerged during the 2nd millennium BC among a community of West Semitic laborers in the Sinai Peninsula. Exposed to the idea of writing through the complex system of Egyptian hieroglyphs used for the Egyptian language, their script instead wrote their native Canaanite language. It has been conjectured that the community selected a small number of the hieroglyphs commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own language. Mainly through the Phoenician alphabet that descended from this Proto-Sinaitic script, alphabetic writing spread throughout West and South Asia, North Africa, and Europe during the 1st millennium BC.

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, in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.