Where did the alphabet come from?
The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently “alphabetic” system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remain open to interpretation. Over the next five centuries this Semitic “alphabet” (really an abjad like Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world with the
