7. The Secret History of the Alphabet

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 7.

The Secret History of the Alphabet

From an ox's head to the English ABC

The alphabet is not an eternal, unchanging list of 26 characters. It is the result of several thousand years of borrowing, adapting and the needs of different languages.

When people wrote in pictures

The oldest known writing systems were not alphabets like ours. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform used complex combinations of signs for words, syllables and other units of language. The idea of writing individual sounds with a small set of signs developed gradually.

One important line of development leading to today's alphabet is early Semitic writing from the area of Egypt and Sinai, often called Proto-Sinaitic. The details of its dating and interpretation are still being studied. So the simple claim that "one particular nation invented the alphabet in one particular year" would be misleading.

Aleph was an ox, beth was a house

In the Semitic tradition, a sign was named with a word that began with the sound it stood for. This method is called acrophony. The ancient aleph is usually connected with the meaning "ox" and beth with the meaning "house". The drawings were gradually simplified, turned around and stopped looking like the original objects.

The names aleph and beth, through Greek alpha and beta, finally gave us the word alphabet itself. Perhaps the greatest success of this idea is not the shape of A or B, but the fact that a small set of signs can write an almost unlimited number of new words.

The Phoenicians carry writing across the Mediterranean

In the first millennium BC, Phoenician traders helped to spread their script around the Mediterranean. Their system wrote mainly consonants. For speakers of Semitic languages this worked well, because a large part of the information was carried by consonant roots.

The Greeks took over and adapted the Phoenician letters in roughly the 9th–8th century BC. They used some of the original consonant signs to write vowels systematically. This created one of the key ancestors of alphabets in which letters stand for both consonants and vowels.

The Etruscans, the Romans and the Latin alphabet

Writing spread further to Italy. The Etruscans took over the Greek alphabetic tradition, and their script influenced the Latin alphabet used by the Romans. Thanks to Roman culture and later to European manuscripts and printing, it was the Latin alphabet that spread to many languages of the world.

But the Roman letters were not today's complete set A–Z. The letter G was created by changing an older C; classical Latin did not separate I/J and U/V as we do today. And lowercase letters did not appear in one day either, but after a long development of handwritten forms.

Where did the letters J, U and W come from?

In historical Latin, one sign could stand for values that we now distinguish as I and J, and similarly V and U. Only later scribal and printing practice began to separate their forms more consistently. J and U became settled as separate letters in the early modern period.

The English W is a particularly nice curiosity: its name, double U, recalls a time when the sound /w/ had to be written with a doubled u or v. That is why today we have a letter W that is named after two Us but often looks like two Vs.

Why is the alphabet different from pronunciation?

Every language has to adapt its writing to its own sounds. So the same letter can stand for different sounds in different languages. On top of that, English took over the Latin script for a sound system that changed a lot over the following centuries.

The next article, about the lost letters of English, shows that even the list of letters is not fixed. Thorn (þ) and eth (ð) disappeared, while J, U and W gained a firm place. So today's A–Z is more a historical compromise than a perfectly planned system.