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Phoenician Alphabet Latin Letters: The With Corresponding

The Phoenician alphabet is considered the first true alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets. It was created by Semitic workers in Egypt who selected hieroglyphs to represent sounds of their languages rather than semantic meanings. Later, the Greek alphabet was developed based on Phoenician and was the first to represent both consonants and vowels, making it the first true alphabet in the narrow sense. Alphabets are useful for ordering words alphabetically and can also be used to number ordered items, and some ancient and Semitic scripts had names associated with each letter.

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54 views

Phoenician Alphabet Latin Letters: The With Corresponding

The Phoenician alphabet is considered the first true alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets. It was created by Semitic workers in Egypt who selected hieroglyphs to represent sounds of their languages rather than semantic meanings. Later, the Greek alphabet was developed based on Phoenician and was the first to represent both consonants and vowels, making it the first true alphabet in the narrow sense. Alphabets are useful for ordering words alphabetically and can also be used to number ordered items, and some ancient and Semitic scripts had names associated with each letter.

Uploaded by

Jan Amira Gonzales
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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An 

alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters)


representing phonemes, units of sounds that distinguish words, of certain spoken languages.[1] Not
all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents
a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other
semantic units.[2][3]
The Egyptians have created the first alphabet in a technical sense.[4] The short uniliteral signs are
used to write pronunciation guides for logograms, or a character that represents a word, or
morpheme, and later on, being used to write foreign words.[5] This was used up to the 5th century
AD.[6] The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, which developed into the Phoenician
alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern
alphabets, abjads, and abugidas, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and
possibly Brahmic.[7][8] It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula in
modern-day Egypt, by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian
surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite
languages.[9][10]

The Phoenician alphabet with corresponding Latin letters

Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base


letters that diacritics modify to represent vowels, like in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts, an
abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants such as the original
Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, and an alphabet, a set of graphemes that represent both consonants
and vowels. In this narrow sense of the word, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet,[11]
[12]
 which was based on the earlier Phoenician abjad.
Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for
purposes of collation, which allows words to be sorted in a specific order, commonly known as
the alphabetical order. 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. There are
also names for letters in some languages. This is known as acrophony; It is present in some modern
scripts, such as Greek, and many Semitic scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. It was used
in some ancient alphabets, such as in Phoenician. However, this system is not present in all
languages, such as the Latin alphabet, which adds a vowel after a character for each letter. Some
systems also used to have this system but later on abandoned it for a system similar to Latin, such
as Cyrillic.

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