ALPHABET, so called from alpha and beta, the first two Greek letters, is the name given to a set of graphic signs, called letters, denoting elementary sounds, by the combination of which words can be visibly represented. Near ly 200 alphabets, ancient and modern, are known, of which about 50 are now in use. Most of them are developments from the primitive Phoenician alphabet, which was itself ultimately derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic picture-writ ing.
All writing was in its origin pictorial. It began with ideograms, which devel oped into phonograms. Ideograms are pictures or symbols intended to repre sent either things or abstract ideas. Phonograms are the graphic symbols of sounds.
Five independent systems of ideo graphic writing have been invented: (1) The Cuneiform, which arose in the val ley of the Euphrates, and developed into the Acheemenian syllabaries. (2) The Chinese, out of which the Japanese syl labaries have arisen. (3) The Hittite, which was the probable source of the Cypriote syllabary. (4) The Mexican picture writing. (5) The Egyptian hieroglyphics, from which the Phoenician alphabet was derived.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic picture writing may be traced back, by means of inscriptions, for more than 6,000 years, to the time of the second Egyp tian dynasty. Of the 400 Egyptian phonograms, about 45 attained an al phabetic character—that is, they either denoted vowels, or could be associated with more than one vowel sound. Out of these alphabetic signs our own letters have grown. The transition to a pure alphabetic writing was made when the Phoenicians rejected the unnecessary portions of the complicated Egyptian system, the ideograms, the verbal phono grams, and the syllabic signs, and se lected from the 45 variant symbols of elementary sounds a single sign for each of the 22 consonants found in Semitic speech.
A knowledge of alphabetical writing must have been obtained by the Greeks from the Phoenician trading settlements in the lEgean as early as the 10th cen tury B. C.
By the middle of the 6th century, the Greek alphabet had in all essential re spects attained its final development. About the 3d century B. c., the lapidary characters, corresponding to the capitals in Greek printed books, began to be re placed by more rounded forms, called uncials, while cursive forms were used for correspondence. Finally, between the 7th and 9th centuries A. D., the minuscules, which are the small letters of our printed Greek books, were evolved from a combination of uncials and cur sives.
The Greek alphabet was the source, not only of the Latin, but of the other national alphabets of Europe. The Runes, which formed the alphabet of the Scandinavian nations, were based on early forms of the Greek letters, which, as Dr. Isaac Taylor has shown, were obtained about the 6th century B. C. from Greek colonies on the Black Sea, by Gothic tribes who then inhabited the region. In our own alphabet, the order of the letters does not differ very great ly from the Phoenician arrangement.
Our letters are named on the same principle as in the Latin alphabet. The vowels are called by their sounds; the consonants, by the sound of the letter combined with the easiest vowels, which, for convenience of utterance, precedes the continuants and follows the ex plosives.