The alphabet is a system of signs that expresses the elementary sounds of language. Its name comes from the Latin word alphabetum , formed with the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
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The idea of writing the consonants separately from the vowels appeared, it seems, among the Egyptians and possibly, due to the influence of this country, spread among the neighboring Semitic peoples, in the course of the II Millennium.
The first examples of pre-alphabetic scripts They are the Proto-Sinaitic scripts, the Canaanites, the pseudo-hieroglyphs of Byblos and the inscriptions of Ugarit.
Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions and Proto-Palestinian scripts
Discovered in a temple at Serábít-el-Khádim, written in few pre-alphabetic signs, associated with other Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. They testify to the effort of the Syrian-Palestinian world to give itself a new instrument of graphic expression, simpler than hieroglyphs or cuneiform characters. The total of them is forty. They may not express a Semitic language.
These Sinai inscriptions are the work of Semitic miners in the service of the Egyptians and probably predate the 15th century B.C.
TheCanaaniteinscriptions
Found in Palestine on many small objects, the oldest are dated to around the 16th – 15th century BC. External features resemble Senaites and Semites.
The pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions of Byblos.
They date from the 20th – 17th centuries or the 15th – 14th centuries BC. C. There are only ten and they are engraved on stone or bronze. They were discovered by M. M. Dunand and deciphered by M. E. Ohorme. According to these authors, they are written in the Phoenician language and do not use any ideographic writing system, although the appearance of the signs seems to indicate this. It uses about one hundred and fourteen signs and has two very important peculiarities:
- Gives an example of moving from syllabic writing to simplified alphabetic writing.
- The phonetic value of signs is independent of their origin
For Dunand, they are related to Egyptian hieroglyphics, due to the similarity in fifty of the signs
Here are, therefore, a series of texts that contain the graphic rudiments of alphabetic writing that we still use.
The texts of Ugarit (Ras Shamra)
They are from the 14th century BC. Found by M. CI. Schaeffer, your writing has been deciphered by H. Bauer. E. Dhorme and Ch. Virolleaud.
The language of the Ugarit texts belongs to the Semitic-Canaanite group. The appearance of the writing is cuneiform , but the signs have nothing in common with the Sumero-Akkadian characters, since their drawing is highly simplified and an artificial creation.
Only thirty cuneiform signs are used in this script. Each sign denotes a consonant or one of the three vowel sounds a, e and u and the alef Semitic.
Thus, these Ugarit scribes, suddenly reducing the traditional cuneiform material, invented the idea of an alphabet .