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An alphabet (of and , the first two letters of the Greek alphabet History

In March 2010 , the team led by Pierre-Jean Texier updated 270 fragments of egg shells of ostrich dating about 60,000 years appear to have held that the incisions suggested reasons lately used by the Bushmen of ' South Africa , Jean-Philippe Rigaud believes that "these prints are the oldest known manifestations may be related to a concern of a symbolic rather than functional." In addition, study computer Genevieve von Petzinger establishes the similarity of 26 parietal signs appear repeatedly in 146 French caves between 30,000 and 12,000 BC .

The earliest traces of the ancestor of all existing alphabets are in the desert of Sinai in the vicinity of the fifteenth century BC The alphabet is exclusively consonantal. The letters are initially represented by icons related to hieroglyphs Egyptian but are used to rate a Semitic language. For example "A" included a bull's head with its horns were used this symbol to denote the initial sound of the name that meant something in the language (A = aleph, Hebrew name of the bull), and finally was given to the letter listing the new name of the thing that included the original icon (aleph is the name of the letter A).

The first alphabet in history are the Ugaritic alphabet and the alphabet linear (or alphabet protosinatique), two abjad already ordered in the alphabetical order Levantine. It is followed by that of the Phoenicians , whose descendants are numerous: both the Arabic alphabet that the Latin alphabet.

The first two letters of the Greek alphabet , -(alpha)-and-

(alpha) and (beta) result from the first two letters Phoenician : the glottal stop and / b /, whose name probably meant "bull" and "house".

Franoise Briquel-Chatonnet proposed in 2006 a history of alphabets: 

  O   Scriptures protosemitic
      o linear or Protosinaque Alphabet ( sixteenth century BC. )
      o Ugaritic ( XIII centuryBC. )
    ?   ?
    |   o Phoenician ( XI centuryBC. - X centuryBC. )
    |   o Paleo-Hebrew ( IX centuryBC. , replaced in the sixth century BC. by the square Hebrew )
    |   o Punic
    |   o Aramaic ( IX centuryBC. )
    | |   o Hebrew square ( sixth century BC. )
    | |   o Scriptures of Central Asian ( Sogdian , Uighur , Mongolian , Manchu , etc.).
    | |   o Karoshti ( III centuryBC. )
    | |   o Brahmi (mid- third century BC. )
    | |   o Nabataean ( first century BC. )
    | |   o Syriac ( first century AD.)
    | |:
    | |   o Arabic ( sixth century AD.)
    |   o Greek ( IX centuryBC. )
    |   o Etruscan ( eighth century BC. )
    | |   o Latin ( fifth century BC. - IV centuryBC. )
    |   o Coptic ( fourth century AD.)
    |   o Georgian (early fifth century AD.)
    |   o Armenian (early fifth century AD.)
    |   o Cyrillic ( ninth century AD.)
      o Scriptures arabic (early tenth century BC. )
        o North Arabian ( Safatique , Thamouden , etc.). 
        o South-Arabian
          o Himyarite

Alphabets

Note:

  • were ranked in the list of entries that are not truly but alphabets Abjad , that is to say, noting that entries do mostly consonants or consonants, often referred to as common alphabets. Refer to the article in question for more details. In these writings, moreover, the letters were more or less likely to change shape depending on the context ;
  • the alpha-syllabic scripts noting consonants accompanied by a fundamental one vowel sign, but other vowels indicating by a sign are listed in Annex their own article, although they are often called incorrectly but also alphabets. In these writings, the letters often change shape according to their position in the syllable ;
  • the operation of hangul in fact a very original writing but alphabetical: phonemes are visually grouped by syllable syllabic blocks created but are not independent graphemes.

Alphabets and recent transcript

Languages whose written notation is recent (the number of African languages ), those whose writing is not even Latin alphabet ( Mandarin , Japanese ) or those whose writing is ambiguous and requires clarification in the context of phonetic texts teaching are most often written or transcribed by alphabetic (Latin for the most part). Thus, some African languages are written using the Pan-Nigerian alphabet , purely oral languages are increasingly using the International Phonetic Alphabet (which will record more or less all languages), language to non-alphabetic writing as the Mandarin can be transcribed into pinyin and is used in historical phonetics of the Romance languages the transcription Bourciez , all alphabetic characters.

Refer to the list of transcription methods for details.

Alphabets imaginary

Some authors of literary fantasy and sci-fi fantasy developed an alphabet to give additional relief to the peoples and cultures they have created:


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