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