Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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N.While its development started from Egyptian hieroglyph “snake” that represented a different sound, a long way through Phoenician, Greek, Arabic, and Latin alphabets shaped its current representation. Simplified relationship between various scripts leading to the development of modern lower case of standard Latin alphabet and that of the modern variants, Fraktur (used in Germany until recently) and Insular/ Gaelic (Ireland). In the modern alphabet, an additional vertical stroke indicates i mutation, deriving ㅐ [ɛ], ㅚ [ø], and ㅟ [y] from ㅏ [a], ㅗ [o], and ㅜ [u]. In contrast to two other widely used writing systems at the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, it contained only about two dozen distinct letters, making it a script simple enough for common traders to learn. Professor Gari Ledyard of Columbia University studied possible connections between Hangul and the Mongol 'Phags-pa script of the Yuan dynasty.

The alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol, which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn.South Korea uses Choe's traditional names, most of which follow the format of letter + i + eu + letter.

Thereby their alphabet is the world’s first fully phonetic alphabetic script, which emerged sometime around 800 BC. A number of Indonesian Cia-Cia speakers who visited Seoul generated large media attention in South Korea, and they were greeted on their arrival by Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul. The double letters are placed after all the single letters (except the null initial ㅇ, which goes at the end).Before diving into the ocean of historical facts one needs to clearly understand what alphabet is exactly and what is its main purpose.

The Phoenician letter forms shown are idealized: actual Phoenician writing is less uniform, with significant variations by era and region. Phoenician was usually written right to left, though some texts alternate directions ( boustrophedon).F.The Phoenician letter Waw was adopted by the Greeks but it represented a different sound, that was later changed to /f/ when the Romans borrowed Greek letter, eventually allowing it to enter English. Although it is conventional to refer to the introduction of the vowels by the Greeks as an "addition" to the 22 consonants, Powell explains that some unknown Greek reinterpreted 5 of the Semitic signs as vowels, whose presence were required, in conjunction with any of the other, consonantal signs.

In Hebrew, the first two letters of the abecedary (as in A-B-C) are, likewise, aleph and bet, but unlike the Greek letters, the Semitic "alphabet" lacked vowels: Aleph wasn't an /a/.Maria Eugenia Aubet, The Phoenicians and the West Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, London, 2001. A now obsolete letter, ㆆ, represented a glottal stop, which is pronounced in the throat and had closure represented by the top line, like ㄱㄷㅈ. They also adapted the Etruscan letter F, pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. Cookies collect information about your preferences and your devices and are used to make the site work as you expect it to, to understand how you interact with the site, and to show advertisements that are targeted to your interests.