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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:
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features.. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name.
The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic, is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Nabataean, the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of the Arabic alphabet.
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 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]
The final consonantal letter of the alphabet, s 2, has a disputed origin along with both "appended" glottals, but "The patent similarity of form between the Ugaritic symbol transliterated [s 2], and the s-character of the later Northwest Semitic script makes a common origin likely, but the reason for the addition of this sign to the Ugaritic ...
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.
In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world [6] and is the version that is still used for Greek writing today. [7]