Alpha, Beta, ...

subject area and scope
The original brief was the following:
“The spread of the original alphabet and its adaptation by various peoples around the world in the period 2000 BC – 2000 AD”.
As well I posed a number of questions:
1. Why was it that the symbols used by people before the time of the Greeks and the Phoenicians are not generally regarded as contributing significantly to modern alphabet languages?
2. To what extent were the Greeks and the Phoenicians responsible for laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages?
3. What other races had a significant part to play in laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages, and to what extent?
4. How is it that Asian languages and those based on the Cyrillic alphabet have characters which are so different from the 26 letter “Western” alphabet?
Some progress was made in regard to questions 1&2. Question 3 was found to be ill-posed in that there was confusion between "race" and "alphabet" and even "writing system".

research findings
The Rosetta stone provided a crucial stepping stone in the deciphering of ancient Egyptian writing.
The consonantal alphabets added special markings to existing "letters" so that vowel sounds could be explicitly incorporated in writing. In the case of speakers of Ancient ("Square") Hebrew, this was done for pragmatic reasons. Local languages were adopted for convenience, and spoken Hebrew was relegated to religious ceremonies. With this relegation came loss of familiarity with the spoken language and the previously "understood" placement of vowel sounds. The diacritics were adopted to maintain the integrity of Hebrew pronunciation for subsequent generations.

This is the Neo-Punic alphabet from around 4th century AD. It is a consonantal alphabet - it has consonants but no vowels.







The alphabets from which the modern Roman alphabet derives, used a variety of writing directions. Some wrote right to left, some right to left then turned around and came back left to right, amongst other variations. Some had multiple versions of the one letter, apart from upper and lower case. Some alphabets (the consonantal ones) incorporated diacritics (which are similar in one sense to the French accents) yet served to add a vowel sound to an existing letter. Modern Hebrew still employs these diacritics. Languages freely borrowed letters from one another, sometimes so that borrowed foreign words could be written, and sometimes because the language's alphabet wanted another sound (or even a vowel!). The Etruscan alphabet is an example of one which derives from a variety of the Greek alphabet. Etruscan letter looked like this:







The Latin alphabet is the "parent" of most Western European alphabets and it comes from the Greek alphabet, and was also influenced by the Etruscan alphabet. However some, like Vajda, see the Greek alphabet as the most important root of modern alphabets.
Here is a diagram due to Boeree:




























A common question about the Modern Roman Alphabet, when compared with the Latin Alphabet, is "Where did the lower case letters come from that we have today?". Some say that lower case letters were invented by scribes in the Middle Ages as "contractions" or "faster versions" of the normal "capital" letters.

For those who are still mystified by the title of a TV drama called "I CLAVDIVS", the following may help. The letters K, X, Y and Z were only used for writing Greek (except for Roman numerals). The letters J, U, and W were much later additions. J is a variation of I, and U is a variant of V. Thus:

Latin "IVLIVS CAESAR" = English "Julius Caesar"

The W was introduced as a "double-v" to identify a sound that developed later, differentiating it from the "v".
It is no accident, also, that Caesar is reminiscent of Tsar, but that is a whole new blog.

To finish, but how? The alphabet we use is an amazing melting pot of 4,000 years of flux. We have dealt with writing on cave walls, to writing on pyramids. We have found fragments of script, that must wait 2,000 years before we can read them. A chance discovery by an 19th century physicist/surgeon who just "happened" to be an ancient language expert, was the key to an astounding mystery - the Rosetta Stone. We have seen languages without vowels, decide to "borrow" them. We have seen alphabets change themselves to look like others, increase in size and even reduce! There were the "Enigmatic Etruscans" who just seemed to assimilate into Roman society before the Roman Republic was established - and their literature was lost forever! We cannot leave out the Hebrew alphabet - the longest continuously recorded (and still spoken) language in the world!

I managed to cover not half of what I intended, but the trip has been fascinating. The future? The future must bring change. Change has been the one constant theme in this blog. I wonder what our alphabet will look like in 1,000 years time?

Thanks for reading.

Tez

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bibliography
Agar, S 2010, Etruscan alphabet, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 8 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/etruscan.htm

Agar, S 2010, Latin Alphabet, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 17 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm.

Agar, S 2010, Syllabaries, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 25 April 2010, .


Agar, S 2010, Writing direction index, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 25 April 2010, .

Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 8 May 2010, http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html.

Boeree, CG 2009, The origin of the alphabet, Shippensburg University, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/alphabet.html

‘Etruscan Myths’, review of Etruscan Myths by L Bonfante& J Swaddling, University of Texas, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exbonetp.html

Hooker, R 1996, Rome: the Etruscans, Washington State University, viewed 8 May 2010 http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ROME/ETRUSCAN.HTM

Robson, E 2009 ,Cuneiform script and the Sumerian and Akkadian languages, Knowledge and Power, Higher Education Academy, viewed 25 April 2010, .

‘The religion of the Etruscans’, review of The religion of the Etruscans by NT de Grummond & E Simon, University of Texas, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exdegrel.html

Vajda, E 2006, The alphabet, Western Washington University, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing3.htm.

Vajda, E 2006, Phonetics, Western Washington University, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test2materials/phonetics.htm.

van der Meer, LB 2008, 'Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis: A Comment on the Longest Etruscan Text',Bryn Mawr College, viewed 8 May 2010, http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008-05-37.html

Worley, G 2007,'Rethinking the English Alphabet', Red Bird Island, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://homepage.mac.com/redbird/personal/E20070407212055/index.html.

Latin alphabets to modern Roman alphabets

Looking once more at Boeree's¹ chart of the Evolution of the Greek and Latin alphabets, it is noticeable that the Latin alphabet seems to be "missing" a few letters. Where did the extra ones come from that we use?









It is generally agreed that the Roman alphabet is mainly derived from the Etruscan writing system.

The Letter “C”
Etruscan had no "voiced plosives". In English, b, d and g are voiced plosives, while ph, and th are not. The "plosive" refers to closure of the oral cavity, a build up of pressure with vocal cord vibration, ("voiced"), followed by sudden release. The Etruscan, C, was derived from the Greek gamma. The letter G appeared around 230 BCE.



















Here is another view of the Greek alphabet with lower case versions and approximate English pronunciations:













Early Latin
A B CG D E F(Z) H I K L M N O P Q R S T V Y X

The following is from Omniglot¹
"There were no lowercase letters, and K, Y and Z were only used for writing words of Greek origin. The letters J, U and W were added later to write languages other than Latin. J is a variant of I, U is a variant of V, and W was introduced as a 'double-v' to make a distinction between the sounds we know as 'v' and 'w' which was unnecessary in Latin."

Vajda² is a very useful resource on this. He also discusses the I.P.A. or International Phonetic Alphabet.

Ancient Latin alphabet
A chart from Omniglot(1) shows an even earlier version of the Latin alphabet dating from 6th Century BCE. Here it is called the Ancient Latin alphabet:












Notice the clear Etruscan shape to the letters. It is interesting to note that there were several different shapes for the same letter, bearing in mind that they had no lower case letters.

The earliest Latin inscription is on a cloak pin (a fibula) which was found in Palestrina (Praeneste) in the 6th century BCE. It is now known as the Pranaeste Fibula. Here are two images, the second one enabling the script to be seen more clearly:
























and here is a reversal of the inscription:








The fibula was thought to originate from the 7th century BCE. It is inscribed with a text that appears to be written in Old Latin, here transcribed to English letters:

MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI

The equivalent Classical Latin sentence obtained by applying the appropriate differences between Old Latin and Classical Latin would probably have been:

MANIVS ME FECIT NVMERIO

translated as:

MANIUS FASHIONED ME FOR NUMERIUS.


Debate continues over whether the inscription was a hoax, perpetrated at the beginning of the 20th century by a German scholar, or not!


Roman alphabet for Latin

Here is the Roman alphabet for Latin. They used only 23 letters.






Modern Latin alphabet
Here is the more familiar version of the alphabet:









It is observed by Omniglot¹ that the lower case versions of the capital letters derived from cursive script variations of the upper case letters.

The Latin alphabet is the "parent" of most Western European alphabets and, as we discussed last time, it comes from the Greek alphabet, and was also influenced by the Etruscan alphabet.. However some, like Vajda¹, see the Greek alphabet as the most important root of modern alphabets.

Looking at the chart here from an earlier post, it can be seen that Ancient Greek was the branching point for two important language streams, apart from Modern Greek. Our alphabet, shown as Modern Roman, is on one branch and on the other is Modern Cyrillic, used by speakers of Russian.





















Future

I suppose it's all about evolution. The April Fool's Day joke I put on the first Post is an example, but how far fetched is it? The joke was that Barack Obama was proposing a new letter, but is this the way change begins?

















Could our alphabet evolve further?

Here is a proposal by Worley¹
"Rethinking the English Alphabet

English spelling is inconsistent, inefficient, and insufficient. Almost the instant English spelling was codified people have wanted to improve it, but found it almost impossible to introduce changes. Perhaps equally troubling, though less commonly addressed, is the English alphabet, full of redundant letters. So, in the spirit of countless orthography reformers, I propose the following changes to the English alphabet.

First, we drop the letter "x". It appears rarely, and when it does it always makes a sound that is either the same as "z" or "ks". Next, since "c" always either sounds like a "k" or an "s", I propose we drop it, too. Third, I propose we drop "q", since it makes the same sound as "k". This leaves us with 23 letters, so I additionally propose we replace "y" by the digraph "ij" to keep the number of letters in English even (this is for the sake of making rot11 symmetric, just as rot13 is today).

This leaves us with "a b d e f g h i j k l m n o p r s t u v w y z", but I want to tweak it a little more. "s" and "5" are easily confused on a blackboard, so let's replace "s" with "c". Similarly, "h" and "k" are often confused, so let's replace "k" with "q". Since "l" and "1" look very similarly, let's replace "l" with "y", and finally let's replace "o" by "x" to eliminate confusion between "o" and "0". So this leaves us with "a b d e f g h i j q y m n x p r s t u v w y z".

My changes require only direct substitutions of letters; the spellings don't change, just the symbols, thus it could easily be accomplished by substitution on the computer to bring electronic texts into the modern spelling. If this alphabet was adopted by schools, we could be using this simplified system in a generation.

I realize, of course, that there is no hope of my improvements taking root; it's simply not better enough to motivate people through the transition. But it ic a fun mentay eksersize!"












the above was written in the font "Brand New Alphabet" by Rachel Spoon @ http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/




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Discussion/Reflection


describe the research process for that week

Being the final post it has really been a gentle walk to the finish line. I found a number of references which describe how the Ancient Latin alphabet became the Roman alphabet became the Modern Roman alphabet but I found either the sources to be too brief, or they got way too difficult for an amateur researcher like me. In the end, I had to omit quite a lot of detail about the way the Ancient Latin alphabet was pronounced and the way the Roman alphabet was pronounced due to the linguistic complexity of the discussion. I found this disappointing but inevitable, I suppose. I had to ignore labial fricatives, voiced and non-voiced plosives, and a whole thesis on a language's phonemes - disappointingly! However, I have found some wonderful resources and I have mentioned them later on.


document your research findings so far

People started drawing pictures on cave walls but there was no thought, or metacognition happening. That is, they could not write in a way which expressed insight into their own thinking, as came much later on. There have been so many highlights for me doing this project! The hieroglyphics of Egypt and the origins of the Proto- S(e/i)mitic language, the pervasive influence of varieties of Hebrew on later languages, the amazing Etruscans whose language just disappeared as they became part of Roman civilisation - there have been so many highlights! The main outcomes of the research are that alphabets change because:
* the speakers of the language allow "foreign" words to enter their vocabulary and they need new characters to write them
* the speakers may decide they need say, vowels, because their's is essentially a consonantal alphabet, and other alphabets in nearby countries have the sounds that they want
* the speakers of the language are concerned that their language may be lost as they assimilate the culture of another people - e.g. the speakers of Hebrew added diacritics to their characters for speech and even chanting. The Etruscans, unfortunately, did not take this path.
* over time, letters are omitted from certain words and diacritics are used to signify that this process has occurred e.g. the French omitting the "s" in estude and "inventing" the acute accent to place on the "e".

include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

The problem this week was how to finish. The concept that "our" alphabet is something set in concrete is quite foreign to me. With the advent of texting and email, many abbreviations have crept into common usage and I wonder how long before further contractions become "accepted" as normal expression? The April 1st joke about Obama's new letter, the "th", started me thinking. Given typography is a growth industry, it is not unlikely that changes are occurring to the way we write letters every day, yet very slowly.

This led me to researching Wim Crouwel's "machine" alphabet from the 1967
(There is also YouTube on this - see right hand side movie clips)


Here is the cover of his "proposed" typeface for computer representations of the alphabet on screens. He didn't like the way curves were pixellated by the early printers and screens and so he "proposed a new font with no curves and only 45 degree angle line segments".





















share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

For me the most exciting discoveries were:

• there are people in Ethiopia who are using one of the longest unchanged languages in the world. I didn't manage to discuss this in the posts.

• Hebrew wins the prize for the language which has been continuously recorded for the longest time.

• Just because two scripts look the same, doesn't mean that the languages are linguistically related

• Two languages which have very different scripts may be quite closely related, linguistically.

• There are black Americans learning hieroglyphics, via YouTube, so that they can translate original material which they believe is important to their understanding of their own history.

• the website Omniglot.com is an amazing resource. You really must have a look at it. It is also very useful when constructing Dewey numbers because it can tell you which languages are derived from Devangari - quite handy!

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References

Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 17 May 2010, http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html.

Omniglot¹
Agar, S 2010, (italic)Latin Alphabet(/italic), Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 17 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm.

Vajda¹
Vajda, E 2006, (italic)The alphabet(/italic), Western Washington University, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing3.htm.

Vajda²
Vajda, E 2006, (italic)Phonetics(/italic), Western Washington University, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test2materials/phonetics.htm.

Worley¹
Worley, G 2007, (italic)Rethinking the English Alphabet(/italic), Red Bird Island, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://homepage.mac.com/redbird/personal/E20070407212055/index.html.

The Penultimate Signpost – The Enigmatic Etruscans

A word about the direction in which different writing systems were written. Recall that the Egyptians has some very creative ways of writing. There was the “Ox ploughing” way where, stating at the right hand side, the scribe would reach the end of the current line, then write back underneath the line that was just written but in the opposite direction. The Phoenicians wrote from right to left always, as do the Hebrews and Arabs today. The Greeks, on the other hand, initially wrote “Ox ploughing” style but then changed over to the system they currently use – left to right always.(Bouree¹)

The Greek alphabet was the origin of other alphabets. One of the most famous, from the point of view of the development of the Modern Roman Alphabet (our alphabet) is the Etruscan alphabet.

The Etruscans
The role of the Etruscans in the development of the Modern Roman Alphabet is an important one and was often overlooked in the history taught to people of my generation.

Nobody can agree upon the reason why the Etruscans decided to colonise Italy between 900 and 800 B.C.E. but it is agreed that the Romans (who were only villagers during the rise of the Etruscans civilisation) were in close contact with them.Hooker¹ notes that it was the Etruscans who were the single most important influence on Roman culture in its transition to civilization.
In their fortified city-states, the Etruscans used their strong military forces to basically subjugate the local tribes which they encountered, which left them free to conduct trade and develop industries. Their alphabet was based upon the Greek alphabet and it is said that they were a very sophisticated people.
Here is a quote from Hooker¹:

“While the Etruscans were busy building their power over Italy and engaging in active commerce with the east and with Africa, a city to their south began to grow precipitously, a city imitating Etruscans in many ways: the Roman kingdom.”

This is a comparative chart showing Phoenician to Latin alphabets.











Here are a few examples of how some of the Greek letters were adapted or borrowed by the Etruscans. This information is found in Boeree².
The following table describes the transitions in more detail.


(click either table for a larger image)

















Some observations about both tables.
[1] The Etruscans seemed to have adapted, without much alteration, the following Early or Later Greek letters for their alphabet: A, E, F, Z, H, ‘theta’, I, ‘lambda’, M, N, P, T, Y and ‘phi’. There are others, such the “backward S” which appears as a reflected Greek ‘sigma’.

[2] Jumping ahead a little to the next topic, it is apparent that the Etruscans, like the Romans, did not possess all the sounds which we now have in our language. An example is the sound of the letter B. But then they had sounds which we don’t have, such as the character which resembles a square 8, below the H. This letter was pronounced deep in the throat and was adapted to an H in the Modern Roman alphabet. It is perhaps best known as the sound at the start of the Hebrew word Hanukkah (the Festival of Lights).

Returning to the Etruscan alphabet again, this time pronunciation approximations are written underneath.









Notice that the Neo-Etruscan has three allographs for ‘th’. (Allographs are letters which have different characters representing them depending upon where in the word the letter appears – see last blog post for a less confusing description!). Again, the alphabet is written left to right.

Summary
It is said that more than 10 000 Etruscan inscriptions have been found all over Italy on tombstones, vases and statues. Fragments of an Etruscan book made of linen have also been found. The reason it exists today is that, being written on a scroll several metres long, and being linen, it was used to wrap a mummified body.

























It is believed that the Liber Linteus (the Linen Book) was religious as it contained the names of gods (Anonymous²).

It was known that religion was very important to them, and it has been said that the Romans followed some Etruscan books when trying to foretell the future e.g. how to read the entrails of sacrificed animals for signs. There is a collection of religious rituals (Liber Rituales), written in Latin, which are said to be direct translations of an Etruscan text (Anonymous¹).

Etruscan texts can be read – that is, the pronunciation of the letters is known, but nobody is really sure what the words mean. Omniglot¹ suggests that they may even have had a notation for music.

The language was spoken in Etruria (modern day Tuscany and Umbria) until the first century AD after which it became the province of academics and the religious. It was used in religious ceremonies until early in the 5th Century AD.

There are conflicting viewpoints on what happened to the independence of the Etruscans. While it is accepted that there were separate Etruscan city states, some Roman accounts have the Etruscans being “routed” by the Romans while others contend that the Etruscans approached the Romans with a plan for peace and mutual benefit. Either way, it is a fact that 3 of the 7 famous kings who ruled Rome before the beginning of the Republic were Etruscan - Tarquinius Priscus was the first.

Perhaps the demise of the Etruscan language was inevitable as the Etruscan people were assimilated into the dominant Roman society.

Next week, Rome and beyond!

Thanks for reading.

Tez

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Discussion/Reflection

describe the research process for that week

Because the structure has been set in place, this week was an easier one and I seemed to be more on auto-pilot week. The discussion's main topic would be the Etruscans but I wanted to start describing some of the actual letter transformations.

document your research findings so far

The Greeks initially wrote the "Ox ploughing" way then changed over to left to right on every line. This has continued to the present day and has also been followed by all other alphabets which derived from the Greek writing system.
The Etruscans helped the Romans make the transition from fairly unsophisticated villagers to a powerful, educated civilisation.

include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

Getting sidetracked was a real risk this week as I am keen on Greek and Roman History. My knowledge of the Etruscans has been through Roman eyes when our year 12 class translated Livy's accounts of the Roman wars around 300 BCE. This was when I was nearly derailed and I wanted to research the accounts of the "other side". Of course direct accounts are unobtainable because there are no decipherable Etruscan texts available.

The problem of how to present observations about 3 or 4 alphabets without access to the fonts left me the unacceptable alternative to wordy descriptions about a table (Boeree's). Certainly the Phoenician, Etruscan and Early Greek fonts are available for MS Word, but it is no straightforward task for this author to transfer the characters to the blog's HTML. I felt I didn't have the time to follow up on this.

share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

I suppose it is fairly obvious, but I had never really thought seriously about the direction in which we write. The more I think about it, it seems more logical to write the "Ox ploughing" way - you are already at the side of the page, why not just turn around and come back the way you have come? Think about the saved travel of your arm and hand! I find this quite fascinating.

The Etruscans basically had no sexual discrimination with men and women being equals in society.

There is not necessarily a genetic link between two languages which use the same writing system. Vajda also quotes the cases of Hindi/Urdu, and Serbian/Croatian where two language are very closely related yet have very different scripts.


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References:

Anonymous¹
Anonymous 2010, ‘The religion of the Etruscans’, review of The religion of the Etruscans by NT de Grummond & E Simon, University of Texas, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exdegrel.html

Anonymous²
Anonymous 2010, ‘Etruscan Myths’, review of Etruscan Myths by L Bonfante& J Swaddling, University of Texas, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exbonetp.html

Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 8 May 2010, http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html.

Boeree²
Boeree, CG 2009, The origin of the alphabet, Shippensburg University, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/alphabet.html

Hooker¹
Hooker, R 1996, Rome: the Etruscans, Washington State University, viewed 8 May 2010 http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ROME/ETRUSCAN.HTM

Omniglot¹
Agar, S 2010, Etruscan alphabet, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 8 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/etruscan.htm

van der Meer¹
van der Meer, LB 2008, Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis: A Comment on the Longest Etruscan Text,Bryn Mawr College, viewed 8 May 2010, http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008-05-37.html

Alphabets without vowels

The first Semitic Alphabet was quite important in the development of later alphabets which were based upon it. Like the early Greek alphabet, there were other alphabets which didn't have symbols for vowels until much later on. This is quite difficult for some of us, including the author, who don't have a knowledge of languages with this characteristic. This form of writing is called "consonant writing" or "consonantal writing".

If you refer back to the alphabet tree, the Proto-Semitic script is at the top. The main change from the Proto-Semitic to the Phoenician script was that the latter script became more abstract and the letters less resembled the object upon which the original Proto-Semitic character was based.

(click on this for an image you can actually read - sorry)

An interesting point of comparison between Hebrew, Arabic and English is the use of different symbols for the same "letter" depending upon where the letter appears appears in the word. In English we are used to to using a different shape for the first letter of our alphabet if it occurs as the first letter in the word - i.e. "A" is used as a capital letter and "a" is the lower case letter. Here is our alphabet with the uppercase versions written underneath:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

For this font, the letters CKOSUVWXZ seem to have very similar lower case versions. Hebrew uses different versions of four letters (kap, mem, pe and tsade) - the second version being used if the letter occurs "last" in a word. Or is it "first" given that Hebrew is written right to left?

Arabic is very interesting in that it has three versions of a letter depending upon whether the letter occurs at the beginning, the end or the middle of the word. The use of a specific version of a letter for a particular place in a word is called allography and the letters so used are called allographs.

Now, back to languages which didn't have vowels in them - the so called consonontal writing systems.

Referring back to Boeree's alphabet tree, locate the branch occurring at Canaanite/Phoenician/Early Hebrew, and follow that right hand branch through Aramaic to Hebrew (Square and Modern). The Hebrews adapted the Aramaic script into what has become known as Jewish or square script.

Although we have departed from the branch containing Modern Roman, this serves as a good illustration of how the consonantal Aramaic was adapted to an alphabet containing vowels by using diacritics. By 900 BCE, dots and lines were being added to letters to indicate the presence of a vowel. The following implementation of diacritic use was known as the Tiberian system - Tiberias was a city in Palestine.

This example shows how the letter "b" (bet) was "accented" (using the French equivalent term):







The superscripts on the letter "o" (i.e. bo¹, and bo²) indicate pronunciation variations between dialects.

Around 600AD a group of scribes in Tiberias supplemented the vowel dicaritics with further embellishments which indicated how the texts were to be chanted. This was considered important because the Jewish people were adopting the local languages more and more for everyday use, and the Hebrew was left for religious occasions and texts.

On the map to the left, Tiberias is North East of Nazareth.

But I digress.

The alphabets of India, Buddhist Southeast Asia and Ethiopia also add vowel marks to consonant letters.

Vajda contends that one of the modern day Ethiopian alphabets derives from Phoenecian consonant writing, but this is at variance from Boeree (see his alphabet tree again). The language, Amharic, uses diacritics with consonants the denote vowel sounds and they produce what are called "syllabic letters". I will not go any further into these here but I refer you to Vajda and Omniglot (see References last post) should you want to read further.

It is interesting that Omniglot agrees with Boeree (see Reference last post)about the origins of the Ethiopian language. Just to clarify the situation, there are about 5 languages spoken in Ethiopia, of which Amharic is the most widely spoken. Both Boeree and Omniglot agree that Ethiopian (well, Ahmaric) derives from the Proto-Semitic writing system via the Sabaean writing system. A reference for Sabaean is again at Omniglot Another interesting note is that the now extinct Sabaean was once spoken in Saba in southern Arabia. We know Saba as the biblical name Sheba.

Well, thanks for following this week. Next week I'll come back to the main branch of Boeree which puts us back on track for the Roman Alphabet.

Thanks for reading this week!

Tez


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Discussion/Reflection

describe the research process for that week

Following Boeree's alphabet tree, I continued to look at the consonantal nature of the Phoenician language alphabet. This led onto investigating how the vowels were incorporated into their alphabet without adding any new letters, a process which I found intriguing. Their use of diacritics led me to a brief examination of a similar change that was made to Ancient Hebrew - it uses consonantal alphabet also. I then wondered about accents in French and when/why diacritics are used in English words (e.g. learnèd and Brontë).


document your research findings so far

The consonantal alphabets added special markings to existing "letters" so that vowel sounds could be explicitly incorporated in writing. In the case of speakers of Ancient ("Square") Hebrew, this was done for pragmatic reasons. Local languages were adopted for convenience, and spoken Hebrew was relegated to religious ceremonies. With this relegation came loss of familiarity with the spoken language and the previously "understood" placement of vowel sounds. The diacritics were adopted to maintain the integrity of Hebrew pronunciation for subsequent generations.



include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

I have strayed a little from the predicted research path but have encountered some fascinating facts about how alphabets have evolved and, just as importantly, why? The difficulty this week has been "what to leave out". There is so much amazing material to be read. I have decided to "get back to the Etruscans" but I have enjoyed the journey this week.


share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

The French use diacritics to change the sound of letters.

For French words which have a diacritic on a letter when written in lowercase (eg the e in sales, meaning salted), the diacritic is sometimes omitted when capitals are used. So biscuits saleés (salted crackers) "may" be written BISCUITS SALES on a sign. One problem with this is that "biscuits sales" means dirty crackers, as does BISCUIT SALES! Some people prefer to maintain the diacritic (also known as an accent) when the letter is capitalised, so it is written BISCUIT SALEÉS instead. The practice of leaving out the accent on capitalised letters was a throw back to the times when diacritics could not be represented on early computer keyboards, so their inclusion became optional.

Some French diacritics, eg that used in étude, derives from the Old French estude. It became a habit to omit the "s" following the "e" and the accent on the "e" in étude is used to signify this. So has English done something similar when we write "haven't" when we mean "have not"? The answer is no, but if you are interested see the Trask¹ discussion. In particular you should see his references to learnèd and Brontë.

The Grunert¹ discusses diacritics in French.

The story of the Hebrew language is an interesting one and I recommend Omniglot¹ for further reading.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

References

<sup>Grunert1
Grunert, J 2010, French accent marks, Love To Know Corporation, viewed 8 May 2010, http://french.lovetoknow.com/French_Accent_Marks

Omniglot1
Ager, S 2010,Hebrew,Omniglot: writing systems and languages of the world, viewed 8 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hebrew.htm

Trask1
Trask, L 1997, Diacritics,University of Sussex, viewed 8 May 2010,
http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/department/docs/punctuation/node43.html</sup>

Hieroglyhpics and Cuneiform

Here is a graph from Boeree¹ representing the development of our Modern Roman alphabet (also known as the Western, Latin or Roman alphabet).

As you work down through the tree, be aware that the words represent writing systems rather than nationalities, although sometimes they coincide. Also it needs to be said that linguists have been known to disagree on what the major influences have been on a particular writing system.


In South East Asia the Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics gave rise to more recognisable and regular systems of writing.


(click the map for a clearer view)








There is a word, syllabary, which linguists use to describe sets of characters or symbols which represent syllables and which effectively fulfil the role of alphabets. A syllable often consists of a consonant plus a vowel. Two examples of syllabaries which a still uin se are the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana (Omniglot¹). Around 2500 BCE the Sumerians of Mesopotamia were using their cuneiform writing (a syllabary) and the Egyptians were using hieroglyphics

(click the map for a clearer view)











The images below show examples of Egyptian and Sumerian writing.

Egyptian












Sumerian



















This second example shows more clearly how the characters were formed. The word cuneiform, describing the writing used by the Sumerians at this time, comes from the Latin word, cuneus, meaning wedge.






These syllabaries did not often have a predictable link between the character and its sound and the individual needed to learn sometimes thousands of characters. Because this required great skill and tuition, only the elite usually mastered the written language. By 2000 BCE the Akkadians (a Semitic race) had conquered the Sumerians (from Mesopotamia) and they absorbed the cuneiform writing system into their own. In the map below, Akkad is in the green area North West of Ur, and Mesopotamia is North of Akkad.
















One effect of this absorption was that there emerged a more regular correspondence between the character and the sound, and thus a step in the right direction for a more familiar alphabet. This occurred at some time after 1800 BCE, and is significant also for the fact that a single hieroglyphic was selected for each consonant sound, and thereafter it was used for that purpose, regardless of the meaning of the word in which it appeared. Up to that time, a scribe would use a different symbol for the same sound if it occurred in a “word” with a different meaning.

The alphabet so derived was called the Phoenician alphabet, but it is recognised that the Phoenicians themselves didn’t start using it for another 500 years (Vajda¹).

The Phoenician alphabet

The first letter is alef and last letter is taw.








The Modern Hebrew alphabet













Notice how similar the alphabet is to the Modern Hebrew alphabet. Looking at Boeree’s “Evolution of Alphabet” tree this is not so surprising.

Another one of the really interesting consequences of the “one sign, one sound” invention, was that the sounds of any other language could be written in it, even if some alterations to pronunciation were needed (Robson¹).

Eventually the end of Sumerian cuneiform occurred in the last two centuries BCE. But even the Akkadian system was not to last indefinitely:
“Just as Latin lingered on in Europe as a scholarly and liturgical language for many centuries after it was last spoken as a mother tongue, hymns were still composed in Sumerian until at least 200 BC, over 1500 years since it had ceased to be a living language. ... No-one in the world has been brought up as a native Akkadian-speaker for the last two millennia or more.” (ibid)

With both Sumerian and Akkadian writing systems, what started out as an exclusive activity for the religious and elite of society, gradually became more accessible to others when the system was used for accounting and literary purposes. However as long as literacy was expensive or impossible , writing systems continued to be a powerful tool of the wealthy and the upper classes.


Before winding up this post, I thought it interesting to make some notes on the directions in which characters are written (Omniglot²).

This example shows Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics being written in what is called boustrophedon format. The word derives from a Greek word for ox, and the writing direction follows that of an ox ploughing a field – it ploughs in one direction then turns around and ploughs back in the opposite direction when it gets to the end of a row.









The situation could be more complicated than that, however, as the Egyptians would write in any direction they thought appropriate. The one clue given to the reader is that the animals and people always look towards the beginning of the line!

Phoenician was written right to left, horizontal as this Hebrew example shows:









Next time we will examine what had been occurring with the Greek language and find out the answer to “Who were the Etruscans?”.






















Thanks for reading!



----------------------------------------------------------
Discussion/Reflection

describe the research process for that week

It was clear from work done for the second post, that the topic is a lot broader than first imagined, and so I proceeded to gather as much information as I could on alphabets and writing systems (see difficulties experienced below).

document your research findings so far and include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

One of my greatest challenges has been keeping to the questions posed in the first post. This has hampered my progress. Question 4 [How is it that Asian languages and those based on the Cyrillic alphabet have characters which are so different from the 26 letter “Western” alphabet?] prompted me to try to answer another unposed question which was Question 5 [How is it that the Chinese form of writing has not been influenced in the way other forms of writing were influenced around the world at the same time?]. It then emerged that I should have been concentrating on writing systems rather than alphabets, a term which includes the East-Asian forms as well. Having established a firmer footing, I felt better prepared to attack the so called “easier” questions of the first post.


share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

Some interesting things I have discovered this week include:
• The Chinese writing system is not as old as I first thought. The agreed upon “first example” of Chinese writing were the oracle bones (http://www.logoi.com/notes/chinese_origins.html), which date from 1200 BCE . The 2003 evidence at Jiahu, dating back to 6600 B.C.E., is still disputed. Thus the dates of the beginnings of written Chinese are not too dissimilar to western writing systems.
• The similarity of Phoenician and Modern Hebrew is remarkable, although Boeree’s “tree” shows that they are related through Aramaic and Square Hebrew.
• That linguistics is a very, very complex area of study but thoroughly fascinating! A casual perusal of Omniglot is recommended.


-----------------------------------------------

References


Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 25 April 2010, < http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html>.

Omniglot¹
Agar, S 2010, Syllabaries, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 25 April 2010, <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/syllabaries.htm>.


Omniglot²
Agar, S 2010, Writing direction index, Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 25 April 2010, <http://www.omniglot.com/writing/direction.htm>. .

Robson¹
Robson, E 2009 ,Cuneiform script and the Sumerian and Akkadian languages, Knowledge and Power, Higher Education Academy, viewed 25 April 2010, <http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing3.htm>.

The Story of Alphabet by O. F, Ege

This week's post is about my reading of a classic reference on alphabets by Ege¹, and my first reading about the Rosetta stone.

The relevance of this post is that it deals with part of Question 2: " To what extent were the Greeks and the Phoenicians responsible for laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages?"

Ege¹ contends that the transformation of a race from a barbaric one to a civilised one is due, in large part, to the invention/adoption of an alphabet. There were no practical alphabets in the world for 3000 years until hieroglyphics and other writing systems were discovered around 2000 BCE.


The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone¹ is a stone with writing on it in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek). It was carved in 196 BCE and is so called because it was found in a small town near the Nile Delta called Rashid (or El-Rashid), which the French called Rosette, and the English Rosetta.

It is written in three scripts because when it was written, there were three scripts being used in Egypt. The first was hieroglyphic which was the script used for important or religious documents. The second script was written in demotic which was the most common script used in Egypt at the time. Finally, Greek was used as it was the language used by the leaders in Egypt at the time.

Although the Rosetta stone was discovered by Napoleon's soldiers in 1799, it had to wait for over 100 years before its content could be decoded. Apart from its discovery being quite fortuitous, if it hadn't been for the right scholars viewing it at the right time it is possible that its meaning may have remained a secret for even longer.

The importance of the discovery and its value to linguists will be discussed more in a later post. However it will become evident that a knowledge of many languages and their origins are essential to the work of a professional in this field.

This also gives us a motivation for studying, in some depth, the origins of our alphabet.


After a brief introduction, Ege¹ describes the origins of the modern English/Western/Latin alphabet characters. It is a fascinating read and well worth the effort.

Here is a summary of Ege¹ in graphic-organiser / mind mapping form:
* click the image to enlarge it
* for an interactive image click here
* FreeMind was used to draw it.















Thanks for reading!


----------------------------------------------

Reflection/Discussion

describe the research process for that week
After what seemed like an eternity scanning websites of ancient writing and history, I finally decided to concentrate on one or two sites and "jump in". The site by Boeree¹ is an excellent starting point, though it is written by a professional linguist and contains serious content for the interested amateur.

A chance stumbling upon the Ege¹ text provided my first in-depth study on alphabets. I did not know how to record my reading in such a way that I could return to my notes and retrieve material easily in the future. I had used graphic organisers before and managed to find a free one FreeMind¹. The rest of the week I spent creating a "mind map" content.

document your research findings so far

It is clear that the Rosetta Stone played an important part in the decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics. What I didn't know, was that it was discovered so recently, that a physicist identified the word Ptolemy in several places, and that the stage was then set for another to complete the translation.

The only reference to Chinese I have found, so far, is that it provided characters for the Japanese and Korean languages.

The Caananite, Phoenician and Early Hebrew writing systems were very important in the development of our alphabet.


include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced
I felt that I could have spent longer collecting information which may prove useful. The difficulty has been finding a suitable entry point, but I think I have found one in the Bouree¹ site. I was also lucky to find a "scrap booking" tool - Google Notebooks - into which I could place web site fragments and my own observations. I feel that that the project may be coming together at last.


share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

Google Notebooks¹ for keeping website material together - simply select the images/text and right-click add to note. It is no longer supported by Google though it may be obtained from http://www.google.com/notebook . I believe you will need to be using the Firefox browser with a Google Notebooks Add-On installed.

Don't copy and paste from Word into Blogger! I always prepared the Post in Word first, together with images, then tried to copy/paste into Blogger. Word attaches HTML code to your typing which Blogger can't handle. If you get a "Meta tags not handled" error in Blogger, that's the reason. If you must type into Word first, then copy/paste into Notepad, then copy paste into Blogger.




----------------------------------------------

References

Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 25 April 2010, < http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html>.


Ege¹
Ege, O F 1921,The story of alphabet, Norman T A Munder & Co., Baltimore, Maryland
available at <http://www.archive.org/details/storyofalphabet00egeorich>.

Google Notebooks¹
Anonymous [eHow Contributing Writer] 2010, How to download browser extension for Google Notebook, eHow Inc., viewed 26 April 2010,
<http://www.ehow.com/how_2318524_download-browser-extension-google-notebook.html>.

Rosetta¹
Strachan, RA & Roetzel, KA 1997, Ancient peoples: a hypertext view, Minnesota State University at Mankato, viewed 26 April 2010, <http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/egypt/hieroglyphics/rosettastone.html>.

first questions, some bigger than others

1. Why was it that the symbols used by people before the time of the Greeks and the Phoenicians are not generally regarded as contributing significantly to modern alphabet languages?
   
   
2. To what extent were the Greeks and the Phoenicians responsible for laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages?
   
   
3. What other races had a significant part to play in laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages, and to what extent?
   
   
4. How is it that Asian languages and those based on the Cyrillic alphabet have characters which are so different from the 26 letter “Western” alphabet?

Thanks for reading.

-----------------------------------------------

Discussion/Reflection


describe the research process for that week

I started collecting bookmarks (favourites) and created subfolders based on keywords in the project title.

document your research findings so far
include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

The more I read, the larger the task seemed to become. The work seemed intimately connected with linguistics, which was inevitable, but I had hoped to be able skip over the detail in some areas but still be able to tell the story. At this stage I am happy to have posed a few questions and hope, optimistically, that a way through this research will come to me.

I don't have any reportable findings at present, but as a supervisor once told me, it's not about the actual problem solving (important though that may be), it's about asking the right questions.

share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

I have bookmarked the following websites, though I have not worked through 1/3 of them yet.


http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/

http://www.pandia.com/cgi-local/plus3.pl?etype=odp&passurl=/Science/Social_Sciences/Linguistics/

http://www.omniglot.com/

http://www.math.twsu.edu/history/topics/num-sys.html#greek

http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t102.e4660&category=

http://www.archive.org/details/storyofalphabet00egeorich

http://phoenicia.org/alphabet.html

http://www.jstor.org/pss/4604349