alphabet

/al"feuh bet', -bit/, n.

1. the letters of a language in their customary order.

2. any system of characters or signs with which a language is written: the Greek alphabet.

3. any such system for representing the sounds of a language: the phonetic alphabet.

4. first elements; basic facts; simplest rudiments: the alphabet of genetics.

5. the alphabet, a system of writing, developed in the ancient Near East and transmitted from the northwest Semites to the Greeks, in which each symbol ideally represents one sound unit in the spoken language, and from which most alphabetical scripts are derived.

[1375-1425; late ME alphabete < LL alphabetum, alter. of Gk alphábetos. See ALPHA, BETA]

* * *

I

Set of symbols or characters that represent language's sounds in writing.

Each character usually represents a simple vowel, a diphthong (two vowels), or one or two consonants. A writing system in which one character represents a whole syllable is called a syllabary. The first alphabet is believed to have been the North Semitic, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean region between 1700 and 1500 BC. Alphabets that arose in the next 500 years included the Canaanite and Aramaic, from which the modern Hebrew and Arabic alphabets descended, and the Greek (ancestor of the Latin alphabet), considered the first true alphabet because it includes both consonants and vowels. Scholars have attempted to establish an exact correspondence between each sound and its symbol in new alphabets such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.

II

(as used in expressions)

Arabic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

Greek alphabet

Hebrew alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet

Latin alphabet

Roman alphabet

* * *

▪ writing

Introduction

      set of graphs, or characters, used to represent the phonemic (phonetics) structure of a language. In most alphabets the characters are arranged in a definite order, or sequence (e.g., A, B, C, etc.).

      In the usual case, each alphabetic character represents either a consonant or a vowel, rather than a syllable or group of consonants and vowels. As a result, the number of characters required can be held to a relative few. A language that has 30 consonant sounds and five vowels, for example, needs at most only 35 separate letters. In a syllabary, on the other hand, the same language would require 30 × 5 symbols to represent each possible consonant-vowel syllable (e.g., separate forms for ba, be, bi, bo, bu; da, de, di, and so on) and an additional five symbols for the vowels, thereby making a total of 155 individual characters. Both syllabaries and alphabets are phonographic symbolizations; that is, they represent the sounds of words rather than units of meaning.

      The word alphabet, from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet—alpha and beta—was first used, in its Latin form, alphabetum, by Tertullian (2nd–3rd century AD), a Latin ecclesiastical writer and church father, and by St. Jerome. The classical Greeks customarily used the plural of to gramma (“the letter”); the later form alphabētos was probably adopted under Latin influence.

Theories of the origin of the alphabet

      The evolution of the alphabet involved two important achievements. The first was the step taken by a group of Semitic-speaking (Semitic languages) people, perhaps the Phoenicians, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean between 1700 and 1500 BC. This was the invention of a consonantal writing system known as North Semitic (North Semitic alphabet). The second was the invention, by the Greeks, of characters for representing vowels. This step occurred between 800 and 700 BC. While some scholars consider the Semitic writing system an unvocalized syllabary and the Greek system the true alphabet, both are treated here as forms of the alphabet.

      Over the centuries, various theories have been advanced to explain the origin of alphabetic writing, and, since classical times, the problem has been a matter of serious study. The Greeks and Romans considered five different peoples as the possible inventors of the alphabet—the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Cretans, and Hebrews. Among modern theories are some that are not very different from those of ancient days. Every country situated in or more or less near the eastern Mediterranean has been singled out for the honour. Egyptian writing, cuneiform, Cretan, hieroglyphic Hittite, the Cypriot syllabary, and other scripts have all been called prototypes of the alphabet. The Egyptian theory actually subdivides into three separate theories, according to whether the Egyptian hieroglyphic, the hieratic, or the demotic script is regarded as the true parent of alphabetic writing. Similarly, the idea that cuneiform was the precursor of the alphabet may also be subdivided into those singling out Sumerian, Babylonian, or Assyrian cuneiform.

      Among the various other theories concerning the alphabet are the hypotheses that the alphabet was brought by the Philistines from Crete to Palestine, that the various ancient scripts of the Mediterranean countries developed from prehistoric geometric symbols employed throughout the Mediterranean area from the earliest times, and that the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (discovered since 1905 in the Sinai Peninsula) represent a stage of writing intermediate between the Egyptian hieroglyphics and the North Semitic alphabet. Another hypothesis, the Ugaritic (Ugarit) theory, evolved after an epoch-making discovery in 1929 (and the years following) at the site of the ancient Ugarit, on the Syrian coast opposite the most easterly cape of Cyprus. Thousands of clay tablets were found there, documents of inestimable value in many fields of research (including epigraphy, philology, and the history of religion). Dating from the 15th and 14th centuries BC, they were written in a cuneiform alphabet of 30 letters.

      The Early Canaanite (Canaanite inscriptions) theory is based on several undeciphered inscriptions also discovered since 1929 at various Palestinian (art and architecture, Syro-Palestinian) sites; the writings belong in part to c. 1700 BC and are thus the earliest preserved documents in an alphabetic writing.

      Despite the conflict in theories, scholars are generally agreed that, for about 200 years before the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, alphabet making was in the air in the Syro-Palestinian region. It is idle to speculate on the meaning of the various discoveries referred to. That they manifest closely related efforts is certain; what the exact relationship among these efforts was, and what their relationship with the North Semitic alphabet was, cannot be said with certainty.

      It can, however, be ascertained that the period from 1730 to 1580 BC in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, during which there was an uprooting of established cultural and ethnic patterns in the Fertile Crescent, provided conditions favourable to the conception of an alphabetic script, a kind of writing that would be more accessible to larger groups of people, in contrast to the scripts of the old states of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which were confined largely to the priestly class. In default of other direct evidence, it is reasonable to suppose that the actual prototype of the alphabet was not very different from the writing of the earliest North Semitic inscriptions now extant, which belong to the last two or three centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. The North Semitic alphabet was so constant for many centuries that it is impossible to think that there had been any material changes in the preceding two to three centuries. Moreover, the North Semitic languages, based as they are on a consonantal root (i.e., a system in which the vowels serve mainly to indicate grammatical or similar changes), were clearly suitable for the creation of a consonantal alphabet.

      The inventor or inventors of the alphabet were, no doubt, influenced by Egyptian writing—perhaps also by other scripts. Indeed, it is probable that those who invented the alphabet were acquainted with most of the scripts current in the eastern Mediterranean lands at the time. It is now generally agreed that the originators belonged to the Northwest Semitic linguistic group, which includes the ancient Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Hebrews.

      Originally, graphs were perhaps “motivated” pictorial signs that were subsequently used to represent the initial sound of the name of the pictured object. The North Semitic alphabet remained almost unaltered for many centuries. If the signs' external form (which, it must be emphasized, had no particular significance) is ignored and only their phonetic value, number, and order are considered, the modern Hebrew alphabet may be regarded as a continuation of the original alphabet created more than 3,500 years ago. The Hebrew order of the letters seems to be the oldest. The earliest evidence that the Hebrew alphabet was learned systematically was left in the form of a schoolboy's scribbling on the vertical face of the upper step of a staircase leading up to the palace at Tel Lakhish, in southern Israel. It includes the scratching of the first five letters of the early Hebrew alphabet in their conventional order, and it belongs to the 8th or 7th century BC.

Development and diffusion of alphabets

      At the end of the 2nd millennium BC, with the political decay of the great nations of the Bronze Age—the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, and Cretans—a new historical world began. In Syria and Palestine, the geographical centre of the Fertile Crescent, three nations—Israel, Phoenicia, and Aram—played an increasingly important political role. To the south of the Fertile Crescent, the Sabaeans, a South Arabian people (also Semites, though South Semites), attained a position of wealth and importance as commercial intermediaries between the East and the Mediterranean. To the west, seeds were sown among the peoples who later constituted the nation of Hellas—the Greeks. As a result, an alphabet developed with four main branches: (1) the so-called Canaanite, or main branch, subdivided into Early Hebrew and Phoenician varieties; (2) the Aramaic branch; (3) the South Semitic, or Sabaean, branch; and (4) the Greek alphabet, which became the progenitor of the Western alphabets, including the Etruscan and the Latin. The Canaanite and Aramaic branches constitute the North Semitic main branch.

The Canaanite alphabet

      The two Canaanite branches may be subdivided into several secondary branches. First, Early Hebrew had three secondary branches—Moabite, Edomite, and Ammonite—and two offshoots—the script of Jewish coins and the Samaritan script, still in use today for liturgical purposes only. Second, Phoenician (Phoenician alphabet) can be divided into Phoenician proper and “colonial” Phoenician. Out of the latter developed the Punic and neo-Punic scripts and probably also the Libyan and Iberian scripts.

      The term Early Hebrew is used to distinguish this branch from the later so-called Square Hebrew. The Early Hebrew alphabet had already begun to acquire its distinctive character by the 11th century BC. It was used officially until the 6th century BC and lingered on for several centuries more. In a stylized form it was used on Jewish coins from 135 BC to AD 132–135. The most ancient example of Early Hebrew writing is that of the Gezer Calendar of the period of Saul or David (i.e., c. 1000 BC). The oldest extant example of the Early Hebrew ABCs is the 8th–7th-century-BC schoolboy graffito mentioned above. A cursive style reached its climax in the inscriptions at Tel Lakhish, dating from the beginning of the 6th century BC. The Leviticus and other small Early Hebrew fragments found in the Dead Sea caves, which are probably from the 3rd century BC, are the only remains of what is considered to be the Early Hebrew book, or literary, hand.

      It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Phoenician alphabet in the history of writing. The earliest definitely readable inscription in the North Semitic alphabet is the so-called Ahiram inscription found at Byblos in Phoenicia (now Lebanon), which probably dates from the 11th century BC. There is, however, no doubt that the Phoenician use of the North Semitic alphabet went further back. By being adopted and then adapted by the Greeks, the North Semitic, or Phoenician, alphabet became the direct ancestor of all Western alphabets. Only very few inscriptions have been found in Phoenicia proper. This rarity of indigenous documents is in contrast to the numbers of Phoenician inscriptions found elsewhere—on Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia, and in Greece, North Africa, Marseille, Spain, and other places.

The Aramaic alphabet

      The adaptation of the North Semitic alphabet to the Aramaic language took place at some time in the 10th century BC, when Aramaic was spoken in several petty kingdoms in northern Mesopotamia and Syria, the most important of them being Dammeshek (Damascus). The process of the reestablishment of the Assyrian Empire and its hegemony over a good part of the Middle East began in the 9th century. One after another, the Aramaean states gave way under Assyrian onslaught. Dammeshek, the last survivor, fell in 732 BC. The end of Aramaean political independence marked the beginning of Aramaean cultural and economic supremacy in western Asia. The transplantation of masses of Aramaeans by the Assyrians, a political measure designed to break up military alliances, bore remarkable fruit. By the end of the 8th century BC the use of the Aramaic language and alphabet had become very widespread in Assyria itself; by the end of the following century all of Syria and a large part of Mesopotamia had become thoroughly Aramaized.

      On the whole, the few early Aramaic inscriptions that have been found belong to the 9th, 8th, and 7th centuries BC. Inscriptions from the 6th and later centuries are more numerous; the increase reflects the rapid spread of the Aramaic alphabet throughout the Middle East. Numerous Aramaic papyri and ostraca (inscribed pottery fragments) have been found in Egypt; the earliest of these can be dated to c. 515 BC, while the most famous are the Elephantine papyri, containing information of a religious and economic nature about a 5th-century Hebrew military colony in Egypt. Aramaic inscriptions have been found in northern Arabia, Palestine, Lycia, Cappadocia, Lydia, Cilicia, Assyria, and as far afield as Greece, Afghanistan, and India.

      Almost as if by prearrangement, all of the alphabetic scripts west of Syria seem to have been derived, directly or indirectly, from the Canaanite alphabet, whereas the hundreds of alphabetic writings of the East apparently have sprung from the offshoots of the Aramaic alphabet. On the whole, the direct and indirect descendants of the Aramaic alphabet can be divided into two main groups: the scripts employed for Semitic languages and those adapted to non-Semitic tongues. With regard to the Semitic offshoots, six separate alphabets may be discerned: the Hebrew, the Nabataean-Sinaitic-Arabic, the Palmyrene, the Syriac-Nestorian, the Mandaean, and the Manichaean. Some of these alphabets became links between the Aramaic alphabet and the numerous scripts used for the non-Semitic languages of Central, South, and Southeast Asia.

      Among these scripts, which were directly or mainly indirectly adapted to non-Semitic languages from the Aramaic alphabet, are: (1) the Persian (Iranian) scripts known as Pahlavi (Pahlavi alphabet), which were used for such writings as sacred (pre-Islamic) Persian literature; (2) Sogdian, a script and language that constituted the lingua franca of Central Asia in the second half of the 1st millennium AD; (3) Kök Turki (Kök Turki alphabet), a script used from the 6th to the 8th century AD by Turkish tribes living in the southern part of central Siberia, in northwestern Mongolia, and in northeastern Turkistan (this alphabet was the prototype of the early Hungarian alphabet); (4) the alphabet of the Uighur (Uighur language), a Turkic-speaking people who lived in Mongolia and eastern Turkistan in the early 13th century; this script was adapted, with Tibetan influence, and adopted as the writing of the Mongol empire (the so-called Kalika script); (5) the early scripts of the Mongols, including Kalmyk, Buryat, Mongolian proper, and the allied Manchu alphabet.

      The Aramaic alphabet was probably also the prototype of the Brāhmī script of India, a script that became the parent of nearly all Indian writings. Derived from the Aramaic alphabet, it came into being in northwest India. The Armenian (Armenian alphabet) and Georgian alphabets, created by St. Mesrob (Mashtots) in the early 5th century AD, were also based on the Aramaic alphabet.

The South Semitic alphabet

      The South Semitic, or Sabaean, branch remained within the confines of the Arabian Peninsula for most of its history. It was in use at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. The most that can be said about its origins is that it neither developed from nor directly depended upon the North Semitic alphabet. It may have been derived, ultimately, from the proto-Sinaitic script, with some influence from the North Semitic. Offshoots from the South Semitic branch include the Minaean, Himyaritic, Qatabanic, and Hadhramautic alphabets in southern Arabia, and Thamudene, Dedanite, and Safaitic alphabets in the northern part of the peninsula. Numerous inscriptions in these alphabets are the principal source for the study of those once-flourishing kingdoms, including Sabaʾ (the biblical Sheba), relegated by the rise of Islam to the backwaters of history.

      The Sabaean offshoot, a graceful and elegant script consisting of 29 letters, spread into Africa, where it became the progenitor of the Ethiopic alphabet; this in turn gave birth to the modern Amharic, Tigré, Tigrinya, and other alphabets of modern Ethiopia. These are the only South Semitic scripts still in use today.

The Greek alphabet (Greek alphabet)

      As in so many other things, the importance of the ancient Greeks in the history of the alphabet is paramount. All of the alphabets in use in European languages (Greek language) today are directly or indirectly related to the Greek. The Greek achievement was to provide representations for vowel sounds. Consonants plus vowels made a writing system that was both economical and unambiguous. The true alphabetic system has remained for 3,000 years, with only slight modifications, an unparalleled vehicle of expression and communication in and among the most diverse nationalities and languages. The Greek alphabet, created early in the 1st millennium BC, spread in various directions in Asia Minor, Egypt, Italy, and other places, but far and away its most important descendants were the Etruscan Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets.

Theories explaining diffusion

      There is no complete agreement among scholars as to how or why certain alphabets have come to dominate much of the world. Some believe that diffusion is explained by the efficiency of the orthography; the Greek alphabet, capable of representing unambiguously a full range of meanings, was adopted throughout western Europe. Others hold that the alphabet follows the flag; that is, that the diffusion of an alphabet results from political and military conquests by the people who use it. Still others hold that the alphabet follows trade or religion. A few examples may illustrate the point: (1) The Latin language and script were carried by Roman legionaries and imperial officers to all parts of the vast Roman Empire, particularly to the regions that were not Hellenized. In later centuries, however, churchmen and missionaries carried the Latin language and script still farther afield. The ascendancy of Latin led to the adoption of the Latin (Roman) alphabet by a large majority of nations; it became used for tongues of the most diverse linguistic groups, not only in Europe but in all other parts of the world as well. (2) Two alphabets, the Cyrillic (Cyrillic alphabet) and the Latin, are used for writing Slavic languages. Cyrillic is used by those Slavic peoples who accepted their religion from Byzantium, whereas Roman Christianity brought the use of the Latin alphabet to the Poles, Lusatians, Wends, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Croats. (3) The Arabic alphabet is, after Latin, the most generally used in Asia and Africa. The rise of Islam in the 7th century AD and the tremendous Islamic expansion and conquest carried the Islamic holy book, the Qurʾān, written in the Arabic alphabet, over a vast area: the Middle East, North and Central Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and even southern Europe. The Arabic alphabet was, therefore, adapted to Semitic and Indo-European forms of speech, to Tatar-Turkish, Iranian, and Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) tongues, and to several African languages. (4) The movement eastward from India of the Indian Brāhmī-Buddhist alphabets was much more peaceful than that of the Arabic alphabet. These offshoots, which took root in Sri Lanka, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, were again the result of the spreading of a religion—Buddhism—in this case by missionaries.

Major alphabets of the world

Hebrew alphabet

      It is generally believed, in accordance with Jewish tradition, that the Early Hebrew alphabet was superseded in the Holy Land by the Aramaic alphabet during the Babylonian Exile (586–516 BC) and that the Aramaic script therefore became the parent of the Square Hebrew (in Hebrew ketav merubaʿ [“square script”] or ketav ashuri [“Assyrian writing”]). The theory may be only partly correct, because in the Holy Land the Early Hebrew alphabet was an object of such strong local attachment that for several centuries it was used side by side with the Aramaic script.

      At any rate, there is little doubt that the Square Hebrew did derive from the Aramaic alphabet. A distinctive Jewish variety of the Aramaic alphabet that can be regarded as the Square Hebrew script can be traced from the 3rd century BC. It became standardized just before the Christian Era, and it was from this script that the modern Hebrew alphabet, in all its styles, eventually developed. The development was gradual and purely external (i.e., in the shapes of the single letters); from the internal standpoint (i.e., considering the phonetic values of the letters), there has been no development, though it must be borne in mind that for several letters (waw, ḥet, tzade, qof, shin, sin, and so forth) the exact original phonetic value is still uncertain. When the Square Hebrew alphabet became standardized, it took (at least, in its formal style and, much later, in its printed form) the form that, with insignificant changes, it has today. Minute rules laid down by the Talmud made further development of the Square Hebrew all but impossible.

      In the Square Hebrew alphabet there are five letters—kaf, mem, nun, pe, and tzade—that have dual forms. That is, there is one character for initial or medial position and another for final position.

      The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters, all consonants, though four of them—alef, he, waw, and yod—are also employed to represent long vowels. The absence of vowel letters was not at first a problem, because Hebrew, like other Semitic languages, has consonantal roots, with vowels serving principally to denote inflections in nouns, moods of verbs, and other grammatical variations. As Hebrew speech passed out of daily use (being superseded by Aramaic, which became the vernacular of the Jews) and the knowledge of biblical Hebrew steadily declined, it became necessary to introduce some form of vocalic distinction so that the Bible could be read and explained correctly. The three main vowel systems now extant are the Babylonian, the Palestinian, and the Tiberiadic; of these the latter is the most important and, indeed, the only one still in use. The Tiberiadic system consists of dots, combinations of dots, and small dashes.

      Before the discovery of the celebrated Dead Sea Scrolls, several Square Hebrew inscriptions belonging mainly to the 1st century BC and the succeeding centuries were known; they were found on rocks, tombs, or ossuaries (depositories for the bones of the dead) and in synagogues and catacombs in Palestine, Syria, North Africa, and Italy. The biblical manuscripts, except for some fragments written on papyrus, belong to a much later date. The earliest fragment is the Nash papyrus of approximately the 1st century BC, now in the University of Cambridge Library. Many thousands of fragments of Hebrew biblical and other manuscripts, partly of the 7th and 8th centuries AD, were discovered in the Geniza, an archive in the old synagogue in Cairo.

      The focus of scholarly interest during the late 1940s and the successive years was the sensational discovery of Hebrew biblical and nonbiblical scrolls in caves near the Dead Sea. The tens of thousands of fragmentary manuscripts, composing what are popularly called the Dead Sea Scrolls, may be divided into several groups, the oldest being a collection of biblical and other Hebrew manuscripts dating approximately from the 3rd century BC.

      In the more than bimillenary development of the Square Hebrew alphabet, four fundamental types can be noticed: (1) the square script, which evolved into the well-proportioned printing type of modern Hebrew (the majority of Dead Sea Scrolls are in this Square Hebrew script); (2) the medieval formal styles; (3) the rabbinic, also known as Rashi writing, which was the medieval book or literary hand; and (4) a cursive script or daily handwriting, which gave rise to many local varieties (Oriental, Spanish, Italian, Franco-German, and so on), of which the Polish-German became the current Hebrew handwriting of today. The Hebrew script has been adapted to some other languages, such as Arabic, Turkish (for the Karaite people of Crimea), and so forth, but particularly to German—hence, Yiddish—and Spanish—hence, Judeo-Spanish.

Arabic alphabet

      The Arabic script descended from the Aramaic through the Nabataean and the neo-Sinaitic alphabets. After the Latin script, it is the most widely used form of alphabetic writing in the modern world. The Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries AD brought the language and the script to the vast expanse of territory extending from India to the Atlantic Ocean. The Arabic alphabet was adapted, with some necessary modifications, to such diverse languages as the Slavic tongues, Spanish, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Hebrew, Berber, Swahili, Malay, Sudanese, and others.

      The Arabic alphabet probably originated at some time in the 4th century AD, but the earliest extant Arabic writing is a trilingual inscription—Greek-Syriac-Arabic—of AD 512. The two principal types of Arabic writing, which developed quite early in the Muslim period, were the Kūfic (Kūfic script), from the town of Kūfah in Mesopotamia, seat of a famous Muslim academy, and the naskhī (naskhī script), or Mecca-Medina script. Kūfic, a heavy, bold, and lapidary style, appeared toward the end of the 7th century AD. It was particularly suitable for writing on stone or metal, for painting or carving inscriptions on the walls of mosques, and for lettering on coins. Its letters are generally thick, squat, and unslanted. With the high development of Arabic calligraphy, Kūfic writing became an exceptionally beautiful script. From it there were derived a number of other styles, chiefly medieval, in North and Central Africa, Spain, and northern Arabia. Thereafter, it was virtually discontinued except for formal and monumental writing. Nevertheless, it was also used for writing precious manuscripts of the Qurʾān, many of which are extant today.

      The naskhī style was from the very outset a more cursive form. It was always employed chiefly for writing on papyrus. In time, it evolved into innumerable styles and varieties, including the taʿliq, the riqaʿ, the divani, the thuluth, and the syakat, and became the parent of the modern Arabic writing.

      Like other Semitic scripts, Arabic is written from right to left. Its alphabet contains 28 consonantal letters, 22 being directly derived from the Aramaic-Nabataean branch of the North Semitic alphabet and six being new additions; three of the letters—alif, wāw, and yāʾ—are also used as long vowels.

      The written letters undergo a slight external change according to their position within a word. When they stand alone or occur at the end of a word, they ordinarily terminate in a bold stroke; when they appear in the middle of a word, they are ordinarily joined to the letter following by a small, upward curved stroke. With the exception of six letters, which can be joined only to the preceding ones, the initial and medial letters are much abbreviated, while the final form consists of the initial form with a triumphant flourish. The essential part of the characters, however, remains unchanged. On the whole, the evolution of the forms of the Arabic letters was the most rapid of all the branches of alphabetic writing.

      Although the absence of vowel letters was not strongly felt in Arabic (as in Hebrew and other Semitic languages), for teaching purposes and for correct reading of the Qurʾān, the use of diacritical marks (including signs for short vowels, which are sometimes used in conjunction with the letters alif, wāw, and yāʾ) was introduced in Basra in the early 8th century. The practice was probably borrowed from the Syriac script. It not only provides vowel sounds but also distinguishes different consonants; diacritical points are also used as endings in the inflection of nouns and the moods of verbs. These marks—there are three of them—are written above or below the consonants (preceding the vowel), while a sign called sukūn indicates the absence of a vowel. Thus, there are, on the whole, a great number of diacritical points; these form a peculiar characteristic of this writing form.

Indian (Indian languages) alphabets

      The Aramaic alphabet was probably the prototype of the Brāhmī script of India, the ancestor of all Indian scripts. The transmission probably took place in the 7th century BC. Adapting the Aramaic script to the Indo-Aryan tongue of India was by no means simple or straightforward. The shapes of many Brāhmī letters show clear Semitic influence; moreover, the Brāhmī script was originally written from right to left. It is obvious, however, that on the whole it was the idea of alphabetic writing that was transmitted and that the fully developed Brāhmī writing was the outcome of the brilliant philological and phonological elaboration of the scientific Indian school.

      During the 5th century BC the second of the prototypal Indian alphabets—the Kharoṣṭhī script—came into being in northwest India (which was then under Persian rule). Although the origin of Brāhmī is still uncertain and hotly discussed, it is commonly accepted that the Kharoṣṭhī alphabet is a direct descendant from the Aramaic alphabet. Moreover, the direction of writing in Kharoṣṭhī script is as in Aramaic, from right to left, and there is also a likeness of many signs having similar phonetic value.

      In the later centuries of its existence, Brāhmī gave birth to eight varieties of script. Three of them—the early and late Maurya and the Śuṅga—became the prototypes of the North Indian subdivision of the Brāhmī script in the 1st centuries BC and AD. Out of this North Indian subdivision there arose the Gupta (Gupta script), which was employed from the 4th to the 6th century AD and became the ancestor of the great majority of Indian scripts.

      The western variety of the Gupta spread into eastern (or Chinese) Turkistan, where it was adopted for a number of languages, including Turfanian and Kuchean (Tocharian A and B), and where it strongly influenced the invention or revision of the Tibetan script (AD 639). There were two main offshoots of the Tibetan writing: the 'Phags-pa, adapted to the Chinese and Mongolian languages in 1272; and the Lepchā, which arose in the beginning of the 18th century.

      Much more important was the Siddhamātṛka script, developed during the 6th century AD from the western branch of the eastern Gupta character. The Siddhamātṛka became the ancestor of the Devanāgarī, or Nāgarī, script (Sanskrit (Sanskrit language) deva [“divine”], nāgarī [“script of the city”]), which is the script used for Sanskrit. It is, therefore, the most important Indian script. Consisting of 48 signs (14 vowels and diphthongs and 34 basic consonants), it is the common means of communication among the learned throughout India. The Devanāgarī developed in the 7th to 9th centuries and has remained since then essentially unaltered.

      From the Devanāgarī writing as used in eastern India in the 11th century, there developed the proto-Bengali and the early Nepālī, or Newārī, scripts, from which the many scripts employed at present in northern India and Bangladesh descended (e.g., the Bengali, Oṛiyā, Manipurī, Assamese, Gujarātī, and Hindi scripts and the various Eastern Hindi local scripts).

      In northwestern India several other scripts are employed. The Sāradā script (Sarada script), a descendant of the western type of the Gupta character, originated in the 8th century and is still employed for Kashmirī. In addition, there are the several varieties of the Ṭākrī, used by the people living on the lower ranges of the western Himalayas; the Dogrī, used for a dialect of Punjābī; the Laṇḍā, the national alphabet of Punjābī, which has many varieties and is used mainly by shopkeepers of Punjab and Sindh; and the Gurmukhi script, the characters of the Sikh scriptures.

      In South India, which is inhabited by peoples speaking Dravidian languages, several other scripts are used, of which the Kannaḍa, or Kanarese, the Telugu, the Grantha, the Tulu-Malayālam, the Tamil, and the Vaṭṭeḻuttu are the most important.

      Long before the existence of the Gupta script, the Brāhmī script had already begun its eastward movement. The Indo-Aryan migration in the 5th century BC to the island now known as Sri Lanka had set the stage there, and the earliest Brāhmī inscriptions in Sri Lanka can be dated to the 3rd century BC. Most dramatic of all, however, was the expansion of Buddhism from India into what are now Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This was a peaceful movement; its “soldiers” were Buddhist monks, political independents who built an empire founded on the cultural and spiritual community of peoples. Among their many achievements, these monks brought into being offshoots from the Brāhmī script, principally from its South Indian varieties, throughout the vast extent of territory from India itself to the Philippines. Thus arose the many scripts of Southeast Asia, from the Cham writing of Cambodia to the Kavi character of Java and its Sumatran offshoots and the Tagalog writing of the Philippines.

      All these Indian and Southeast Asian scripts involve types of semi-syllabaries rather than alphabets. They consist of vowels and diphthongs and basic consonants (i.e., consonants followed by a short a); there are no pure consonants (i.e., consonants written by themselves).

Greek alphabet (Greek language)

      The Greek alphabet derived from the North Semitic (North Semitic alphabet) script in the 8th century BC. The direction of writing in the oldest Greek inscriptions—as in the Semitic scripts—is from right to left, a style that was superseded by the boustrophedon (meaning, in Greek, “as the ox draws the plow”), in which lines run alternately from right to left and left to right. This change occurred approximately in the 6th century BC. There are, however, some early Greek inscriptions written from left to right, and after 500 BC Greek writing invariably proceeded from left to right.

      The letters for b, g, d, z, k, l, m, n, p, r, and t, which are sounds common to the Semitic and Greek languages, were taken over without change. The principal Greek change arose in applying a script developed to represent a Semitic language, in which vowel sounds are of minor importance to the identity of a word, to a language in which such vowel differences are crucial to the identity of a word. In Greek, /kat/, /kit/, and /kot/ are entirely different words, while in Semitic languages they would be the same word in different grammatically inflected forms. The Greek addition of vowels to the alphabet to make it an analogue of the sound pattern produced a writing system that was both manageable and accurate. The different ways in which these adaptations were carried out allow the two main branches of the early Greek alphabet—the eastern and the western—to be distinguished. These again subdivided, each into secondary branches. Within this general grouping there were many local peculiarities, but the differences between all these local alphabets involved variations in detail rather than essential structure.

      The eastern and western subdivisions were the two principal branches of the early Greek alphabet. The Ionic alphabet was the most important of the eastern variety, which also included the Greek alphabets of Asia Minor and the adjacent islands, of the Cyclades and Attica, of Sicyon and Argos, and of Megara, Corinth, and the Ionian colonies of Magna Graecia. A secondary branch of the eastern subdivision was made up of the alphabets used on the Dorian islands of Thera, Melos, and Crete. The alphabets of Euboea (Chalcidian), Boeotia, Phocis, Locris, Thessaly, the Peloponnesus (except its northeastern part), and of the non-Ionian colonies of Magna Graecia belonged to the western subdivision. It is a controversial point whether the eastern or the western branch was the earlier in time, whether there was any derivative link between one and the other, or whether they represent two quite independent adaptations of the Semitic alphabet (Semitic languages). The latter alternative seems rather improbable.

      Gradually, the Greek local alphabets became more and more similar. In 403 BC the Ionic alphabet of Miletus was officially adopted in Athens and later also in the other states. By the middle of the 4th century BC almost all the local alphabets had been replaced by the Ionic, which became the common, classical Greek alphabet of 24 letters.

      After this time the development of the Greek alphabet was almost wholly external, in the direction of greater utility, convenience, and, above all, beauty. The classical style was retained as a monumental script at the same time that more cursive forms grew up for writing on such surfaces as parchment, papyrus, and wax. The classical letters were also retained as the capital letters in the modern print (though some of the capitals in modern Greek handwriting are borrowed from the Latin alphabet). On the other hand, the classical Greek alphabet also evolved into the Greek uncials (uncial), the cursive, and the minuscule script. (Uncial letters were somewhat rounded and separated versions of capital letters or cursive forms; minuscule letters developed from cursive writing and have simplified, small forms.) Until about AD 800 the uncials were used as a book hand; later the minuscule script was employed for the same purpose. The cursive scripts evolved into the modern Greek minuscule.

      In the middle of the 3rd century BC, the Greek scholar Aristophanes Of Byzantium introduced the three accents—acute, grave, and circumflex—that were thereafter used to assist students, particularly foreigners, in the correct pronunciation of Greek words; these continue to be used in most Greek texts printed today. Originally, these marks indicated tone or pitch, not stress.

      Countless inscriptions have been discovered all over the Hellenic and Hellenistic world and beyond. They include official decrees, annals, codes of law, lists of citizens, civic rolls, temple accounts, votive offerings, ostraca (fragments of pottery), sepulchral inscriptions, coins, lettering on vases, and so forth. These, along with many thousands of Greek manuscripts, both ancient and medieval, serve as sources for the studies known as Greek epigraphy and Greek paleography and are of untold importance for all branches of ancient history, philology, philosophy, and other disciplines.

      The most direct offshoots from the Greek alphabet were those adapted to the languages of the non-Hellenic peoples of western Asia Minor in the 1st millennium BC: the scripts of the Lycians, Phrygians, Pamphylians, Lydians, and Carians. The first three of these were derived directly from the Greek; the Lydian and Carian were strongly influenced by it. The Coptic (Coptic language) alphabet was the other non-European offshoot from the Greek and the only one used in Africa. Twenty-four of its 31 letters were borrowed from the Greek uncial writing, and seven were taken over from a particularly cursive variety of the Egyptian demotic writing; the demotic letters were used to express Coptic sounds not existing in the Greek language.

      More significant, however, were the European offshoots. In Italy, two alphabets derived directly from the Greek: the Etruscan (Etruscan alphabet) and the Messapian (Messapic alphabet) (Messapic). The Messapii were an ancient tribe who inhabited the present Apulia (in southern Italy) in pre-Roman times; their language is presumed to belong to the Illyrian group. More than 200 Messapian inscriptions have been discovered. In southeastern Europe there were three offshoots from the Greek alphabet: the Gothic, Cyrillic, and Glagolitic alphabets. The Gothic alphabet, not to be confused with the so-called Gothic script (a variety of the Latin alphabet), was a script created by the Gothic bishop Ulfilas (or Wulfila), who died c. AD 382. The script consisted of 27 letters, of which some 19 or 20 were taken over from the Greek uncial script. Ulfilas translated the Bible into Gothic; of this translation, some fragments are extant in manuscripts of the 5th and 6th centuries. The most important manuscript is the Codex Argenteus, preserved in Uppsala, Swed.

Cyrillic (Cyrillic alphabet) and Glagolitic (Glagolitic alphabet) alphabets

      The two early Slavic alphabets, the Cyrillic and the Glagolitic, were invented by St. Cyril, or Constantine (c. 827–869), and St. Methodius (c. 825–884). These men were Greeks from Thessalonica who became apostles to the southern Slavs, whom they converted to Christianity. An early tradition, in attributing the invention of an early Slavic writing to Cyril, does not indicate whether his contribution was the Cyrillic or the Glagolitic. It is just possible that both alphabets were invented by him. The earliest dated Old Slavic documents belong to the late 10th and the 11th centuries. The Cyrillic and the Glagolitic alphabets differed widely in the form of their letters, in the history of their development, and partly also in the number of the letters, but they were alike in representing adequately the many sounds of Slavic.

      The Cyrillic alphabet was based on the Greek uncial writing of the 9th century. It originally had a total of 43 letters; the two Hebrew letters tzade and shin were transformed into the Cyrillic letters for the sounds ch, sh, and shch. The modern forms of this alphabet have fewer letters. Glagolitic writing consisted of 40 letters, externally very unlike either the Greek or Cyrillic scripts.

      Cyrillic became, with slight modification in each case, the national script of the Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. (The other Slavic peoples—the Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Czechs, Slovaks, Wends, Lusatians, and Poles—use the Latin alphabet.) For a time, Cyrillic was also adapted to the Romanian language, and in recent times, through the medium of Russian script, it became the writing of a number of Finno-Ugric languages (Komi, Udmurt, Mordvinian, Mansi, Khanty, etc.), Turkic languages (Chuvash, Turkmenian, Azerbaijanian, etc.), Iranian languages (Ossetic, Kurdish, Tajiki), and Caucasian languages (Abkhaz, Circassian, Avar, etc.).

      The history of the Glagolitic alphabet is particularly connected with the religious history of the Slavic peoples of southwest central Europe and the western Balkan Peninsula. In the second half of the 9th century it was introduced, together with the Slavonic liturgy, into the Moravian kingdom, but with the banning of this liturgy by the pope it disappeared from Moravia. It was, however, accepted (also with the Slavonic liturgy) in Bulgaria and Croatia and spread along the Dalmatian coast southward into Montenegro and westward into Istria. Although the Glagolitic script soon disappeared among the Greek Orthodox Slavic peoples because of the victory of the Cyrillic, it continued, notwithstanding the opposition of the higher Roman Catholic authorities, to be employed among the Roman Catholics of the western Balkan Peninsula together with the Slavonic liturgy and finally succeeded in obtaining the special license of the pope. It is still employed in the Slavonic liturgy in some Dalmatian and Montenegrin communities; the inhabitants of these places are the only Roman Catholics to use the Slavonic liturgy. The earliest preserved Glagolitic secular document dates from 1309. Glagolitic had a short flourishing period in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Etruscan alphabet

      The Etruscans, a highly civilized people who were the ancestors of the modern Tuscans and the predecessors of the Romans, inhabited what is now Tuscany in central Italy; their language, still mainly undeciphered, has come down in more than 11,000 inscriptions, the earliest being the 8th-century-bc Marsiliana Tablet, preserved in the Museo Archeologico in Florence. This is also the earliest preserved record of a Western alphabet. The early Etruscan alphabet, unlike any early Greek alphabet found in the Greek inscriptions, contains the original—the prototype—Greek alphabet, consisting of the 22 North Semitic letters, with the phonetic values given to them by the Greeks, and the four additional Greek letters at the end of the alphabet. The Etruscans introduced various changes in their script, and several features in the modern alphabets can be attributed to the influence of the ancient Etruscans. An example is the phonetic value of /k/ for the letters c, k, and q. Like the Semitic and the early Greek alphabets, Etruscan writing nearly always reads from right to left, though a few inscriptions are in boustrophedon style. The probable date of the origin of the Etruscan alphabet is the late 9th or early 8th century BC.

      About 400 BC the “classical” Etruscan alphabet took its final form of 20 letters—four vowels and 16 consonants. Because the voiced and voiceless sounds b and p, d and t, g and k were not differentiated in the Etruscan language, the letters b and d never appear in pure Etruscan inscriptions, and after the disappearance of k and q, the letter C was employed for g and k.

      The Etruscan alphabet had many varieties and several offshoots. Among the offshoots, apart from the Latin, were many alphabets used by Italic populations of pre-Roman Italy and by non-Italic tribes (e.g., the Piceni).

Latin alphabet

      The adaptation of the Etruscan alphabet to the Latin language probably took place some time in the 7th century BC. From this century there is a gold brooch known as the Praeneste Fibula (preserved in the Museo Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini in Rome). The inscription, written in an early form of Latin, runs from right to left and reads clearly: manios: med:fhefhaked:numasioi, which in classical Latin is Manius me fecit Numerio (“Manius made me for Numerius”).

      Dating from the end of the 7th or the beginning of the 6th century BC is a famous cippus (small pillar) from the Roman Forum; it is inscribed vertically on its four faces, in boustrophedon style. Another inscription, probably of the 6th century BC, is known as that of the Duenos Vase and was found in Rome, near the Quirinal Hill. It is also written from right to left. Some Sabine inscriptions belong to the 5th or the 4th century BC. There are also a few inscriptions belonging to the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.

      The Roman capital letters, a form of writing that was used under the empire with unparalleled effectiveness for monumental purposes, became a byword for precision and grandeur, despite a very unprepossessing beginning. Indeed, for the first six centuries of its existence, Roman writing was relatively unimpressive. Only with the advent of the 1st century BC were there signs of magnificence to come.

      An opinion that used to be commonly held, and still is held by many, is that the Latin alphabet was derived directly from the Greek in a form used by Greek colonists in Italy. The theory rested on an assertion that the Latin alphabet corresponds to the Chalcidian variety of the western group of Greek scripts employed at Cumae in Campania, southern Italy. This theory is unlikely; indeed, as already mentioned, the Etruscan alphabet was the link between the Greek and the Latin. For instance, the most interesting feature in the inscription of the Praeneste Fibula is the device of combining the letters f and h to represent the Latin sound of f. This was one of the Etruscan ways of representing the same sound. Also, most of the Latin letter names, such as a, be, ce, de for the Greek alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on, were taken over from the Etruscans.

Runic (runic alphabet) and ogham alphabets

      Runes, in all their varieties, may be regarded as the “national” script of the ancient North Germanic (Germanic languages) tribes. The origin of the name rune (or runic) is probably related to the fact that the ancient Germanic tribes, like many other peoples, attributed magic powers to the mysterious symbols scratched on armour, jewels, tombstones, and so forth. This is given credence by two related Germanic forms that mean “mystery, secret, secrecy”: the Old Germanic root ru- and the Gothic runa. The most interesting runic inscriptions are those that were cut for magical purposes and those that appeal to deities.

      The origin of the runes offers many difficult problems and has been hotly argued by scholars and others. The theory of the Urrunen (forerunners of the runes), a supposed prehistoric north Germanic alphabetic script, holds that it is the parent not only of the runes but also of all the Mediterranean alphabets, including the Phoenician. This belief, based on racial and political grounds, need not be seriously considered. Some scholars propounded the 6th century BC Greek alphabet as the prototype of the runes; others have suggested the Greek cursive alphabet of the last centuries BC. Several eminent scholars have proposed the Latin alphabet as the source of the runes. The most probable theory, supported recently by many scholars, is that the runic script derived from a North Etruscan, Alpine alphabet. In that case, it is very probable that it originated about the 2nd century BC or a little later.

      It is still unknown whether the runes were originally employed mainly for magical purposes, as suggested by the name runa, or as a usual means of communication. The earliest extant runic inscriptions, numbering over 50, come from Denmark and Schleswig and date from the 3rd to the 6th century AD. About 60 inscriptions from Norway date from the 5th to the 8th century, slightly later than the continental ones. There are also about 50 Anglo-Saxon runic inscriptions extant, including the Franks Casket (about AD 650–700); the right side of the casket is in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, in Florence, and the rest is in the British Museum. The largest number of inscriptions, about 2,500, come from Sweden; most of these date from the 11th and 12th centuries AD.

      There is no certain evidence of wide literary use of runes in early times, but some scholars hold that the runic writing was widely employed for all kinds of secular documents, such as legal provisions, contracts, genealogies, and poems. The known manuscripts are, however, rare and relatively late. The gradual displacement of the runes coincided with the increasing influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The runic scripts lingered on for a long time after the introduction of Christianity, however; indeed, the use of runes for charms and memorial inscriptions lasted into the 16th or even the 17th century.

      The ogham alphabet (ogham writing) was restricted to the Celtic (Celtic literature) population of the British Isles. There are over 375 known inscriptions: 316 of them have been discovered in Ireland, chiefly in the southern counties, with only 55 from the northern counties; 40 inscriptions have been discovered in Wales; two come from Devon; and one from Cornwall. One inscription was discovered at Silchester in southern England. About 10 come from the Isle of Man, and a few from Scotland. The Welsh inscriptions are usually bilingual, Latin-Celtic. With one exception, the Irish records are in ogham alone. Most peculiar is the runic-oghamic inscription from the Isle of Man (the runes being a kind of “secret” writing and the oghams being a cryptic script). The distribution of the ogham inscriptions, combined with their language and grammatical forms, point to South Wales or southern Ireland as their place of origin and to the 4th century AD as the date of their origin.

      The ogham character was used for writing messages and letters (generally on wooden staves), but sometimes it was also written on shields or other hard material and was employed for carving on tombstones. The oghams formed a cryptic script, and there were several varieties, such as wheel oghams, bird oghams, tree oghams, hill oghams, church oghams, colour oghams, and others. The main ogham alphabet consisted of 20 letters represented by straight or diagonal strokes, varying in number from one to five and drawn or cut below, above, or right through horizontal lines, or else drawn or cut to the left, right, or directly through vertical lines. The ogham alphabet was divided into four groups (aicme), each containing five letters. Oghams were employed during the Middle Ages; the 14th-century Book of Ballymote reproduces the earliest keys for translation. In many cases the ogham inscriptions run upward.

      Several ogham inscriptions known as the Pictish (Pictish language) oghams were found in western Scotland, on the small island of Gigha off the western coast, in Argyll, in northeastern Scotland, and on the northern isles, such as the Shetland Islands. They either belong to the same type as the Irish and Welsh oghams or are written in another ogham variety.

Later development of the Latin alphabet

      As already mentioned, the original Etruscan alphabet consisted of 26 letters, of which the Romans adopted only 21. They did not retain the three Greek aspirate letters (theta, phi, and chi) in the alphabet because there were no corresponding Latin sounds but did employ them to represent the numbers 100, 1,000, and 50. Of the three Etruscan s sounds, the Romans kept what had been the Greek sigma. The symbol that represented the aspirate later received the shape H as it did in Etruscan. I was the sign both of the vowel i and the consonant j. X was added later to represent the sound x and was placed at the end of the alphabet. At a later stage, after 250 BC, the seventh letter, the Greek zeta, was dropped because Latin did not require it, and a new letter, G, made by adding a bar to the lower end of C, was placed in its position.

      After the conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, a large number of Greek words were borrowed by the Latin language. At that time the symbols Y and Z were adopted from the contemporary Greek alphabet, but only to transliterate Greek words; hence, they do not appear in normal Latin inscriptions. They were placed at the end of the alphabet, and the Latin script thus became one of 23 symbols.

      A few permanent additions or, rather, differentiations from existing letters occurred during the Middle Ages, when the signs for u and v, and i and j, previously written interchangeably for either the vowel or the consonant sound, became conventionalized as u and i for vowels and v and j for consonants. W was introduced by Norman scribes to represent the English sound w (a semivowel) and to differentiate it from the v sound.

      The connection of the capital letters of modern writing with the ancient Semitic-Greek-Etruscan-Latin letters is evident even to a layman. The connection of the minuscules (i.e., the small letters) with the ancient Latin letters is not as evident, but in fact both the majuscules and the minuscules descended from the same ancient Latin alphabet. The different shapes of the small letters are the result of a transformation of the ancient letters by the elimination of a part of the letter—as, for instance, h from H or b from B—or by lengthening a part of it—for instance, d from D. Moreover, the change of the Latin writing into the modern script was induced by the nature of the tool, primarily the pen, and the material of writing, mainly papyrus and parchment, and, from the 14th century onward, also paper. It was the pen, with its preference for curves, that eliminated the angular forms; it was the papyrus, and still more the parchment or vellum, and, in modern times, paper, that made these curves possible.

      In ancient times the minuscule did not exist, but there were several varieties of the capital and the cursive scripts. There were three varieties of the capitals: the lapidary capitals (used mainly on stone monuments); the elegant book capitals, somewhat rounded in shape; and the rustic capitals, which were less carefully elaborated than the lapidary script and not as round as the book capitals but more easily and quickly written. In everyday life the cursive script—i.e., the current hand—was developed with continuous modifications for greater speed. There were several varieties of it, such as those of Pompeii and Alburnus Major (a town in ancient Dacia, modern Roşia Montană, Romania). Between the monumental and the cursive scripts there was a whole series of types that had some of the peculiarities of each group. There were lapidary mixed scripts and book semicursive scripts, and there was the early uncial, or rather semiuncial, script of the 3rd century AD, which seems to have developed into the beautiful uncial script.

      When the various European countries had shaken off the political authority of Rome and the learned communities had been dissolved and their members scattered, a marked change took place in the development of the Latin literary, or book, hand. Several national hands, styles of the Latin cursive, assumed different features. There thus developed on the European continent and in the British Isles the five basic national hands, each giving rise to several varieties: Italian, Merovingian in France, Visigothic in Spain, Germanic, and Insular or Anglo-Irish hands. At the end of the 8th century the Carolingian (Carolingian minuscule) (Caroline) hand developed and, after becoming the official script and literary hand of the Frankish Empire, developed as the main book hand of western Europe in the following two centuries. The combination of the majuscules (majuscule), or capital letters, and minuscules, or small letters, can be attributed mainly to the Carolingian script.

      In the course of the next centuries, various book hands or chart hands and other cursive scripts developed from the Carolingian style. In the late 12th century and during the next two centuries the letters gradually became angular in shape; this resulted from the pen being held in a position that made a slanting stroke. The new hand, termed black letter or Gothic (black letter), was employed mainly in northwestern Europe, including England, until the 16th century. It is still used, though rarely, in Germany, where it is called Fraktur script.

      In Italy the black letter was also used, but the Italians preferred a rounder type, called littera antiqua, “old letter.” During the 15th century the round, neat, humanistic or Renaissance hand was introduced in Florence and was employed for literary productions, while the needs of everyday life were met by an equally beautiful, though not as clearly legible, cursive hand. The two styles developed into two main varieties: (1) the Venetian minuscule, nowadays known as italic (italic script), traditionally (though wrongly) considered to be an imitation of Petrarch's handwriting; and (2) the roman type, preferred in northern Italy, chiefly in Venice, where it was used in the printing presses at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries; from Italy it spread to Holland, England (about 1518), Germany, France, and Spain. The classical Roman character was adopted for the majuscules. This majuscule writing, along with the Roman-type minuscule and the italic, spread all over the world. In England they were adopted from Italy in the 16th century.

      The survival of the black letter (Gothic) in Germany is attributed to the fact that it was the current style at the time of the invention of printing in Germany and was thus employed by Gutenberg. In Italy the littera antiqua was used by the German printers Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, as well as by Nicolas Jenson, the great Venetian printer who perfected the Roman type.

      The modern national alphabets of the western European nations are, strictly speaking, adaptations of the Latin alphabet to Germanic (English, German, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, etc.), Romance (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, etc.), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian), Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.), and other languages. The adaptation of a script to a language is not easy, especially when the language contains sounds that do not occur in the speech from which the script has been borrowed. There arises, therefore, the difficulty of representing the new sounds. This difficulty was met quite differently in various alphabets. For instance, the sound shch as in English “Ashchurch,” which in Russian is represented by one sign ({shcha}), is represented in Czech by two signs (šč), in Polish by four (szcz), in English likewise by four, though different ones, and in German by as many as seven (schtsch). Thus, in these instances, combinations of two or more letters were introduced to represent the new sounds.

      In other cases, new signs were invented; e.g., in the early Greek (Greek language) alphabet and in the Anglo-Saxon adoption of the Latin alphabet. In more recent times the most common way of representing sounds that cannot be represented by letters of the borrowed alphabet has been to add diacritical marks, either above or under the letters, to their right or left, or inside. To this group belong the German vowels ü, ä, ö; the Portuguese and French cedilla in ç; the tilde on Spanish ñ and Portuguese ã and õ; the Italian à, é, è, ì, ù, etc.; the great number of marks in the Latin-Slavic alphabets (Polish, Czech, Croatian, etc.)—, , č, ć, š, ś, ž, ż, ź, and so on. The Latin-Turkish (Turkish language) alphabet, introduced in 1928, became general throughout Turkey in 1930. It contains 29 letters, of which two vowels (ö and ü) and three consonants (ç, ĝ, and ş) are distinguished by diacritical marks; in one instance there is a distinction in reverse—the dot from i is eliminated (ı) to represent a new sound.

David Diringer David R. Olson

Additional Reading

Almost all of the following works contain excellent, copious, and classified bibliographies: Arthur B. Allen, The Romance of the Alphabet (1937); David Diringer, Writing (1962); Ernst Doblhofer, Voices in Stone: The Decipherment of Ancient Scripts and Writings (1961, reprinted 1973; originally published in German, 1957); Walter Durfee, Alphabetics as a Science (1956); Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez, A B C Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet (1985); Samuel A.B. Mercer, The Origin of Writing and Our Alphabet (1959); A.C. Moorhouse, The Triumph of the Alphabet: A History of Writing (1953); Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, rev. ed. (1971, reissued 1983); Peter Rudland, From Scribble to Script (1955); Martin Sprengling, The Alphabet: Its Rise and Development from the Sinai Inscriptions (1931); and Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing (1995). A thematically organized comparative account is found in Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems (1996); an alphabetically organized survey is Florian Coulmas, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems (1996). A presentation of the ludic properties of the English alphabet is Ross Eckler, Making the Alphabet Dance (1996). Albert Kapr, The Art of Lettering: The History, Anatomy, and Aesthetics of the Roman Letter Forms (1983; originally published in German, 1971) is also useful.

* * *