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The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BC, to become the official script of the Achaemenid Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:
These are other alphabets composed of something other than lines on a surface. Braille (Unified) – an embossed alphabet for the visually impaired, used with some extra letters to transcribe the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets, as well as Chinese; Braille (Korean) Braille (American) (defunct)
Variations of ancient Greek alphabets. In 403/2 BC, following the devastating defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the restoration of democracy, the Athenians voted to abandon the old Attic alphabet (Pre-Euclidean alphabet) and to introduce a standardized variant of the eastern Ionic alphabet, after a proposal by archon Eucleides.
Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today.
The oldest known alphabetic writing has been found etched onto finger-length clay cylinders unearthed from a tomb in Syria.. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in the US dated the writing ...
The old Roman letters were retained for formal inscriptions and for emphasis in written documents. The languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization.
Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through the addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c. 800 BC. Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic: the term derives from the traditional order of letters in the Arabic alphabet ('alif, bā', jīm, dāl). [46]
The Phoenician alphabet is the continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet into the Iron Age; it in turn gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets. To date, most of the writing systems used throughout Afro-Eurasia descend from either Aramaic or Greek. The Greek alphabet was the first to introduce letters representing vowel sounds. [56]