Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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Most modern forms of shorthand are also unrelated to the alphabet, generally transcribing sounds instead of letters. The ancient Greeks didn’t invent the alphabet, though they may be credited with inventing an alphabet – a new form of alphabetic writing, one that added signs for vowels to signs for consonants. Note that the scripts mentioned above are not considered proper alphabets, as they all lack characters representing vowels. In early medieval Ireland, Ogham consisted of tally marks, and the monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem to have been created for the occasion.

Monophthongs are produced with a single articulatory movement (hence the prefix mono), while diphthongs feature an articulatory change. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/, continued to use the Phoenician letters for those consonants as well. Consonants in the Korean alphabet can be combined into one of 11 consonant clusters, which always appear in the final position in a syllable block. The ancient Greek alphabet we are familiar with begins with alpha and ends with omega – something referenced in the Bible.However, as Korean documents, history, literature and records throughout its history until the contemporary period were written primarily in Literary Chinese using Hanja as its primary script, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters especially in the academia is still important for anyone who wishes to interpret and study older texts from Korea, or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. The pronunciation of a syllable-final consonant (which may already differ from its syllable-initial sound) may be affected by the following letter, and vice-versa. South Korea uses Choe's traditional names, most of which follow the format of letter + i + eu + letter.

Its use in Phoenicia (coastal Levant) led to its wide dissemination outside of the Canaanite sphere, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it was adopted and modified by many other cultures. 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. However, many lower class uneducated Koreans were illiterate due to the difficulty of learning the Korean and Chinese languages, as well as the large number of Chinese characters that are used. The vowel can be basic or complex, and the second consonant can be basic, complex or a limited number of tense consonants. These ancient Greek letters appear in other fields too, including mathematics (most famously perhaps, pi) and astronomy (where Greek letters are used to designate the brightest stars in a constellation).

Without vowels, consonants can't be pronounced, so only partial information on how to read a passage is provided by just the consonants. Because the u at the time looked like a v, the double u looked like two v's, W was placed in the alphabet after V. The alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol, which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn. However, the Korean alphabet was still taught in Korean-established schools built after the annexation and Korean was written in a mixed Hanja-Hangul script, where most lexical roots were written in Hanja and grammatical forms in the Korean alphabet.

Actual phonological studies done by studying formant data show that current speakers of Standard Korean do not differentiate between the vowels ㅔ and ㅐ in pronunciation. The tensed consonants are produced by constricting the vocal chords while heavily aspirated consonants (such as the Korean ㅍ, /pʰ/) are produced by opening them. According to Herodotus, [16] the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet— phoinikeia grammata, "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet. According to Greek legends transmitted by Herodotus, the alphabet was brought from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos.

The original sequence of the Korean vowels, as stated in Hunminjeongeum, listed these three vowels first, followed by various combinations.

The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century.

Bottom) Derivation of 'Phags-pa w, v, f from variants of the letter [h] (left) plus a subscript [w], and analogous composition of the Korean alphabet w, v, f from variants of the basic letter [p] plus a circle. Phoenician is well prolific in terms of writing systems derived from it, as many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, and consequently Egyptian hieroglyphs.