This script had no characters representing vowels, although originally it probably was a syllabary, but unneeded symbols were discarded.

Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1999, John and Deborah Darnell discovered an even earlier version of this first alphabet at Wadi el-Hol dated to circa 1800 BC and showing evidence of having been adapted from specific forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs that could be dated to circa 2000 BC, strongly suggesting that the first alphabet had been developed about that time. In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently 'alphabetic' system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script appears in Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai peninsula dated to circa the 15th century BC, apparently left by Canaanite workers. It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of 'numbering' ordered items, in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements.Ī specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script, one of the earliest (if not the very first) phonemic scripts This makes them useful for purposes of collation, specifically by allowing words to be sorted in alphabetical order. Īlphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. The Khmer alphabet (for Khmer) is the longest, with 74 letters. While most alphabets have letters composed of lines ( linear writing), there are also exceptions such as the alphabets used in Braille. Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet, which was derived from the Greek, and which is now used by many languages world-wide, often with the addition of extra letters or diacritical marks.

In this narrow sense of the word the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, or alphasyllabary, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters which diacritics modify to represent vowels (as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts), an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants (as in the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic), and an 'alphabet', a set of graphemes that represent both consonants and vowels. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula (as the Proto-Sinaitic script), by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. Not all writing systems represent language in this way in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, for instance, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.

Terracotta jar (probably inkwell) with abecedarium of the Etruscan alphabet, 630–620 BCĪn alphabet is a standardized set of basic written symbols or graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages.

Number of letters in alphabet