Who Invented the Alphabet?

[shazbang]

Just curious. Who decided on 26 letters etc?

[vehelpfulguy]

Not all alphabets have 26 letters like the English one.

Some European countries have letters we do not have, like German umlauts (mostly characters like A, O or U with two dots above them).

I guess we have some letter other European countries dont have.

[vehelpfulguy]

Here is some nice graphics showing how our alphabet evolved. Just open the page and watch the letters move around.

http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/latin.html

No text to back it up, but it looks great.

[jno]

just gradually changed. J, V and W are the most recent letters, I think, emerging in the late middle ages. There used to be different letters for the different sorts of th - soft one in the, hard one in thick - but they've vanished.

[Narolines]

H'mmm....I'm not sure whether letters with diacrtitic marks (such as the German umlaut, which actually indicates an a/e, o/e or u/e diphthong) actually count as separate characters in an alphabet. On the other hand, the sound in Welsh represented by "LL" does, presumably because there is no other way to represent it. The Hawaiian alphabet has only 12 letters, all "borrowed" from the Latin alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian has 33 characters, and the Greek alphabet only 24. I've no idea about Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Korean etc etc etc - but I'm sure they all have disparate numbers of characters. It's a matter of how many symbols you need to represent the sound you use in your language. If you don't use many sounds, you don't need so many letters to represent them.

[Narolines]

Where did that extra "t" in "diacritic" come from?

[bernardo]

It evolved from Greek from Phoenician from Egyptian and Coptic and other stuff.

[jno]

there's a case for having more than 26 letters, as there are more than 26 sounds. X isn't needed (KS would do as well) but the two THs, SH and CH could have characters of their own as they're very common. (Not counting the CH in loch, which is rare.) So could NG. As for the vowels, there are far more than just five sounds.

[Sonja85]

The Romens created the letters as we know them. they the once that decided on 26
but the whole concept of the Alphabet was created first by the Agypts,,,