A Rambling History of Our Alphabet
The Origins of Writing
Most writers I know think that they are much more creative than boring old accountants, but it was the accountants who got the whole writing thing started. Those artsy writers are using a system developed by and for accountants. They created the first writing system a little over 5,200 years ago in a place called Sumeria (now southern Iraq). Accountants came up with the idea of scratches on tablets to record information. We call those scratches cuneiform. While it was the first writing system, it wasn’t the first true alphabet.
There are several types of writing systems. Cuneiform was a logophonetic system, where a symbol can represent a word, an idea, or a sound. Chinese is a modern example of a logophonetic system. Another system is the syllabary. It uses symbols for each syllable. A modern example is Japanese Kana. An abjad is a writing system that only uses consonants. You have to figure out the vowel sounds from context. Arabic and Hebrew are modern examples of abjads. An abugida is like an abjad, except that it uses diacritics (accents, umlauts, tildes, and other diacritical marks) to indicate which vowel sounds to use. Hindi is a good example of an abugida. Finally, we have alphabets, which use letters for consonant sounds and include letters for vowel sounds.
Shortly after the Sumerians were scratching out their cuneiform writing, the Egyptians started drawing hieroglyphics, which was another logophonetic system. It is thought to have influenced the development of the Proto-Sinaitic script by people in the Sinai Peninsula.. It was the first writing system to consistently use symbols to represent sounds, but it sometimes relied on ideographic symbols. While it was an early form of an abjad, its reliance on ideographic symbols kept it from being purely phonetic. It was something like combining our alphabet with emojis.
The First True Abjad
Proto-Sinaitic eventually led to the Phoenician Abjad, which was developed in what is now Lebanon and Northern Israel. It has 22 letters, all representing consonants. Some sources refer to it as the first true alphabet, but the lack of vowels means that it was an abjad. The drive for its creation once again came from accountants rather than creative writers. The Phoenicians created it as a concise way to record trade information in different languages.
Phoenician was written from right to left. When the Greeks started writing, they adopted a system called boustrophedon—literally “as the ox turns”—where each line alternated direction, first right to left, then left to right. After a couple of hundred years of that, they realized that it was a terrible idea and standardized on left to right, which is how most civilized countries do it today. I suspect that the growing use of ink made it more practical because normal people don’t smear their writing that way. The sinister lefties probably objected, but to no avail.
The First True Alphabet
The other major thing the Greeks did was add vowels, creating the first true alphabet. The Phoenician abjad worked fine for Semitic languages, where vowel sounds could usually be inferred from context, but Greek didn’t work that way. To fix that, the Greeks repurposed some letters for sounds they didn’t use—assigning them to vowel sounds instead. No need to invent new symbols (or new keyboards).
For example, the Phoenician “a” represented a glottal stop, not the “ah” sound the Greeks needed. What’s a glottal stop? Say “kitten” like a normal person (not some nutter who painfully enunciates every letter). That little pause between “ki” and “en” is a glottal stop. You’ll also hear it in “uh-oh” or “mountain.” It’s the sound you make by briefly closing and reopening your vocal cords.
We tell children to learn their ABCs, but we use the more grown-up term alphabet in serious conversation. I find that amusing because the word “alphabet” is just a concatenation of the words for the first two Greek letters - “alpha” and “beta.” Here’s a weird piece of trivia: The names of the original Phoenician letters came from symbols for “ox” and “house”, so an alphabet could be called an ox house, although no one will have a clue what the heck you are talking about. Oh, and the word abjad comes from the first four letters of the Arabic script, A-B-J-D.1
Here is the Greek alphabet: A B Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω.
Alphabetical Order
I have always wondered where alphabetical order came from. I’ll have to keep wondering, because nobody wrote down the rationale when they were inventing it. What I find interesting is that the order appears to predate the Greek alphabet, with even the Phoenician Abjad borrowing order from earlier writing systems. And when the Greeks repurposed existing letters to serve as vowels, they left them in the same places, which explains why there isn’t a “vowel” section of the alphabet. One weird exception is “Z.” I’ll get to that in a bit.
The Latin Alphabet
Our modern alphabet is called the Latin alphabet. The Romans took it from the Etruscans, who got it from the Greeks. The Etruscans lived in central Italy and were eventually subsumed into Roman civilization. The Romans dropped some unneeded letters and got the alphabet down to only 21 characters from the Greeks’ 24, a significant cost reduction for people designing typefaces. Here’s the original Roman alphabet: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X. You’ll notice that it lacks J, U, W, Y, and Z.
The Missing Letters - J, U, W, Y, and Z.
It didn’t take the Romans long to reintroduce “Y” and “Z.” They didn’t need them for Roman words, but they started using a lot of Greek words, and they represented sounds used in Greek. The re-addition of “Y” may have been the result of a misunderstanding, when the request to bring it back was answered with “why not?” I think the fact that “Z” is worth 10 points may have played a role in that decision.
Things got a little awkward for Romans when they adopted Christianity, with “Jesus” being spelled with a very prominent “j” right at the start. The Romans used “i” for both “j” and “i”. So they wrote it “IESVS” and assumed that you’d figure it out. They also combined “U” and “V”. If you look at old marble carvings, you’ll often see a “V” used where a “U” is more appropriate. I suspect that it was easier to carve a “V” than a “U”, so the powerful Roman stonemasons’ guild probably lobbied to keep “U” out. Even with all of his clout, IVLIVS CAESAR wasn’t able to get people to spell his name properly. It is possible that he became obsessed with power to make sure that people didn’t call him “ivlivs”.
The tale of “W” is a little weird. Back in the 700’s, Germanic scribes started writing “uu” or “vv” to represent the “w” sound. Sometime around 1100, they bonded them together into a single letter - “w.” Why call it “double-u” instead of “double-v”? I’m not sure. Whether you wrote “uu” or “vv” depended on your script type, and most writing at that time used “uu”, so that was probably the main reason. Back then, letters didn’t have standardized names. The symbol we now distinguish as “u” or “v” was written the same way, and its pronunciation—/u/ or /v/—depended entirely on context, not on shape.
What gets weird is that the Germans dropped the “w” sound from their language not long after they invented a letter for it. This was during the High German consonant shift, a phonetic upheaval that shifted /t/ into /ts/, /p/ into /pf/, and /w/ into /v/. The shift affected the southern German-speaking regions, the areas that still speak German, but not the Dutch or English regions. That’s why English and Dutch still pronounce “w” correctly.
The “w” to “v” shift in German was gradual and subtle, so no one bothered to change the spelling. It also helped that German only had the /v/ sound in borrowed Latin words and for reasons that aren’t clear to me, they pronounced it with a /f/ sound.
Making a Case
Back in Roman times, everything was written in UPPERCASE. Hearing aids had not been invented yet, and it is likely that Romans were somewhat hard of hearing. Later, monks, who try to be soft-spoken, invented lower-case. Grammarians loved having both because it allowed them to create more rules, and grammarians love arbitrary rules. By default, they say that you should use lower-case letters except:
Starting a sentence
Proper nouns
Words in a title, unless the word is an article, preposition, or conjunction, but ignore that rule and use upper-case whenever the word is the first or last in the title, usually
The personal pronoun I, because why not
Days, months, and holidays
Acronyms and Initialisms2
The first word of a quote
Why are they called “capital” letters? Because they were used at the start (head) of sentences, and the Latin term for “head” is “caput.” You can see it in words like capital, cap, captain, decapitate, and capital punishment (which originally meant beheading). What about the terms “upper-case” and “lower-case”? These terms came from early printing presses, where the upper-case letters were literally stored in the upper case of letters and the lower-case letters were stored in the lower case. If they’d designed their cabinets differently, we could be describing them as left-case and right-case or front-case and back-case. Having upper and lower case letters not only makes text more readable, it also helps make passwords more secure.
The Lost Letters
Several letters have disappeared from our alphabet. We’ve lost Þ (thorn), Ð (eth), and ƿ (wynn). Thorn and eth were replaced by the digraph “th”. A digraph is a sparkle word meaning a two-letter combination for a single sound. A thorn represented the voiceless “th” from words like “thing” and eth represented the voiced “th” in words like “this.” The difference is subtle, so having different letters for the different sounds wasn’t missed.
Incidentally, “the” used to be spelled with a thorn as “Þe” (which is a little odd because it sounds like a voiced “th” sound to me). Because printing started in Germany, most typesets in England were imported. The Germans didn’t use a thorn, so they didn’t include one in their typesets. English printers substituted the vaguely similar-looking “y” in the place of the missing “Þ” when they wrote “the.” Nobody ever pronounced it as “ye” until modern Renaissance Festivals. Now that misunderstanding is a thorn in the side of historical linguists.
The wynn was the letter for the “w” sound. Once the Germans invented “w”, we didn’t need the wynn anymore, so we dropped it. The wynn came to the Old English alphabet from earlier runic writing, so writers in Germany didn’t know about it or include it in their typesets. Even if it was included, “ƿ” looked a lot like a “p”, so it was confusing. That alone would have ruined it.
We also have a letter Æ (ash). It was another vowel, pronounced like the /a/ in “cat.” In fact, it was close enough to an /a/ sound that it got dropped in favor of just using “a” (or occasionally “e”) instead. It is often mistaken for a diphthong, but it is a single vowel sound and is not pronounced like an “a” and an “e” run together.. They still regularly use it in Iceland, but that’s understandable. There isn’t much else to do there.
We also used to use two forms of the letter “s”. If you look at original copies of any of our nation’s founding documents, you’ll notice some weird uses of what looks like the letter “f” when they clearly mean to use “s.” The truth is that they wrote a “long s” when an “s” was at the beginning or middle of a word and a “short s” at the end of words. It didn’t serve a purpose, but they thought it looked cool. It was confusing because a “long s” looked for all the world like an “f” missing a bit of its crossbar. Eventually, they dropped the idea. Who knows what weird conclusions fovereign citizens draw from this?
Diacritics
Most other languages using the Latin alphabet use diacritical marks. These are those little symbols like accents, circumflexes, umlauts, and tildes. A problem with the Latin alphabet is that there are more vowel sounds in most languages than there are vowels. Some English examples of the problem include the “a” in cap and cape, the “e” in “bet” and “the”; the “i” in “bit” and “bite”; the “o” in off and oaf; and the “u” in up and dupe.
Many languages distinguish between which vowel sound to use with diacritical marks. In English, we just assume that you’ll figure it out without much help. We sometimes use tricks like the “e” in “cape”. An experienced English speaker knows that the “e” changes the sound of the “a” and is otherwise silent. But then we have words like “read” and “read”, which are written identically but pronounced differently based on context. It’s one of those weird language quirks you’re expected to pick up over time rather than learn as a formal rule, like the English adjective order.3
The Vowels, including W
When I was growing up, they taught us that the vowels were “a,” “e,” “i,” “o,” “u,” and sometimes “y” and “w.” That mostly made sense, because “y” was sometimes a consonant (“yell”) and sometimes a vowel (“my”). But what about “w?” When I asked, my teachers would lamely explain that it was a helper vowel in words like “vowel” or “now”. But it turns out that there are at least two Scrabble-legal English words where “w” acts as a vowel. The words are “cwm” (a bowl-shaped depression in a hill) and “crwth” (an ancient stringed instrument). Both words have Welsh origins. Feel free to use them in Boggle to confound your opponents.
Spelling
Fun fact: “Correct” spelling wasn’t even a concept until the 15th century. You just wrote things however you pleased. When the printing press arrived, people started standardizing spelling, and suddenly, if you didn’t follow their standard, you were wrong.
The timing was a little awkward. We started standardizing spelling right around the start of the Great Vowel Shift. As a result, many words are spelled in ways that no longer reflect how they are pronounced. That’s why “great” and “meat” are spelled with a similar pattern but are pronounced very differently. It makes more sense when you realize that “meat” used to be pronounced like “mate”. And the “i” in “friend” used to be pronounced, but heaven forbid that you correct the spelling because you’d be accused of getting it wrong, so we pretend “friend” is better than “frend.” We can fix words over time (witness the elegantly compact “donut” replacing the godawful “doughnut”), but it requires a legion of determined souls willing to endure decades of ridicule. This problem has become so acute that we annually divert some of our brightest young people and encourage them to memorize the bizarre spelling of arcane words in a sadistic spelling bee contest. We could be encouraging them to learn something actually useful, like accounting. The Sumerian accountants would be very disappointed that we lavish praise on students who can correctly spell “diphthong” but don’t seem to care that they can’t balance their checking account.
A guy named Samuel Johnson wrote the first major English dictionary. Unfortunately, he loved Latin and etymology, so he messed up the spelling of a lot of words to suit his tastes. That’s where we get the superfluous “b” in “debt” (to match the Latin “debitus”). He’s not responsible for the pointless “l” in “salmon”, but the concept of uselessly adding letters to match Latin roots was at play there as well. He also added all those silly “u”s to words like “colour” and “labour” that had no need for them. Fortunately, Daniel Webster came along and wrote the first American dictionary, and he ditched the extra “u” nonsense, which is why Americans spell “color” properly.
Webster also tried to simplify double consonants, bless his heart. He said that you no longer needed to double the consonant in words before adding a suffix like “ing” or “ed.” So that’s why we go “traveling” while the Brits still go “travelling.” But, he couldn’t leave it simple. He decided that you still needed to double the consonant if the root word has one syllable (“running” instead of “runing”) or if the stress wasn’t on the last syllable (“preferred” instead of “prefered”). Nobody learns or remembers that rule, so you just have to memorize which words get double letters and which don’t. BTW, the only word I can think of with four consecutive double letters is subbookkeeper. It all keeps coming back to accountants, doesn’t it?
Cursive and Italic
If you are old, you probably remember a type of handwriting called cursive. It was designed to be an easy-to-write (but unintentionally hard-to-read) way of writing your letters. It was sort of a bridge between proper letters and shorthand. At one time, students were required to learn to use it and to memorize bizarre quirks like using something resembling a number “2” in place of the capital letter “Q” for no good reason. Fortunately, cursive has effectively died out for everyone but old people holding up the grocery checkout by hand-writing a paper check. And with self-checkout, that’s no longer my problem.
We also have italic letters—those stylish slanted ones. They were invented by Venetian printer Aldus Manutius and his type designer Francesco Griffo, who apparently thought they looked cool. The idea caught on as an alternative writing style and got the name “italics” simply because it came from Italy.
Back in sixth grade, I got swept up in one of those educational fads. Cursive was banned (yay!), and I was forced to write everything in italics using a calligraphy pen (boo!). At least, they still taught real math instead of that new math nonsense. Now people use italics for emphasis rather than simply trying to look cool.
Wrap Up
OK, I think it’s time to wrap up. Here are a few bits of trivia before I go: “E” is the most frequently used letter, which might explain why it doesn’t mind being silent so often. “Z” and “Q” are the least used, which is why they are worth so many points. “X” isn’t far behind—probably because we usually spell that sound with “cks” instead, with the “c” pulling its weight mostly by preventing a rogue “e” from messing with the vowel before it. Oh, and that little dot over the “i” and “j”? It’s called a tittle. Not very titillating, but there it is.
Footnotes
1How can the name abjad start with an “a” if there are no vowels in an abjad? That’s because the “a” comes from the Arabic alif, which is technically a consonant. It’s pronounced as a glottal stop—just like the Phoenician “a” was, before the Greeks repurposed it as a vowel.
2What’s the difference between an acronym and an initialism? Both are formed by taking the first letters of a series of words to create a shorter version—like SCUBA for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. An acronym is pronounced like a word (e.g., NASA, RADAR), while an initialism is read letter by letter (e.g., FBI, ATM). Some terms can go either way—SQL is commonly pronounced both as “S-Q-L” and “sequel.” While the general rule is to capitalize acronyms, that rule often relaxes as the word becomes part of everyday language. That’s why it’s perfectly normal to write “radar” or “scuba” in lowercase today. Some acronyms sit in a hybrid state for a while—like “Covid” or “WiFi”—gradually drifting toward lowercase as they settle into common usage.
3Different types of adjectives are supposed to follow a natural order. Quantity, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Color, Origin, Material, Purpose. It’s one of those rules you don’t know you know—until someone breaks it. Nobody says the red, flat, big disc. You say the big, flat, red disc. It’s unclear whether someone deliberately created it or if it just evolved that way, but the general rule is to have subjective/opinion information before big-picture stuff, before detailed stuff, and then finally immutable or fixed stuff. Quantity comes first, of course, because, after all, we started all this language for accounting.