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In this narrower sense, the first true alphabet would be the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. Many linguists are skeptical of the value of wholly separating the two categories. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, [7] in turn derives from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, themselves derived from Phoenician.
This places the origin of the artefacts about 500 years before the previously known oldest alphabetic writing. “Previously, scholars thought the alphabet was invented in or around Egypt some ...
It is believed that either the Dipylon inscription or the Nestor's Cup is the oldest known alphabetic Greek inscription. The Nestor Cup, which also bears a verse inscription, was found in an excavation at the ancient Greek colony of Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia, in Italy. It is thought to be of equal age with the Dipylon inscription or ...
The Proto-Sinaitic script eventually developed into the Phoenician alphabet, conventionally called Proto-Canaanite, before c. 1050 BCE. [8] The oldest text in Phoenician script is an inscription on the sarcophagus of King Ahiram c. 1000 BCE. This script is the parent script of all western alphabets.
The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet.
The Latin alphabet is also used for many Austronesian languages, including Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines, and the official Malaysian and Indonesian, replacing earlier Arabic and Brahmic scripts. In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk's reforms, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing the Arabic ...
The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by the Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day.
Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3. Goldwasser, Orly, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Archived 2016-06-30 at the Wayback Machine Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02, Mar/Apr 2010. Millard, A. R. (1986) "The Infancy of the Alphabet" World Archaeology. pp. 390–398.