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A Brief History of Writing Systems

One of the greatest human achievements is the creation and development of writing systems.  Prior to the advent of writing, all useful information had to be memorized.  History and the knowledge of a civilization were passed on from generation to generation through stories and speaking between individuals.  Most early civilizations have legends of how their writing came to be.  Most suggest that writing was brought as a gift from the gods in some fashion.  Although the legends are fascinating, it is very apparent that human language existed long before even a single word was written down.  The invention of writing systems comes much later than the beginnings of language.  The earliest writing likely developed gradually with its beginnings as early as twenty thousand years ago in the form of early cave drawings, called petroglyphs.  Later drawings clearly became pictograms, or picture writings that were a direct image of the object represented.  Such early forms of writing were relatively unrelated to the language spoken because they simply represented physical objects rather than the sounds used linguistically to identify the objects.  Later the meanings of many pictograms were extended to represent concepts related to objects such as a picture of the sun to represent heat, or daytime, etc.   Such pictures are called ideograms since they represent an idea rather than an object alone.  Later as the pictures progressed, they became simplified and stylized to the point where they would only be understood by those educated in the system.  As the evolution of writing progressed, the pictograms and ideograms became symbols that represented the linguistic sounds that represented the ideas, and objects and the words of the language. (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998)    

The oldest known writing system is that of the Sumerians, an ancient civilization of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from over six thousand years ago.  Their pictograms progressed to ideograms and later to a simplified set of symbols produced by a wedge shaped stylus pressed into clay tablets.  This form of writing is called cuneiform writing from the Latin cuneus meaning wedge-shaped.  The cuneiform writing system spread throughout the Middle East and Asia Minor, and was borrowed by the Babylonians, Assyrians, and the Persians.  At around 4000 B.C. the Egyptians were also using a pictographic writing system called hieroglyphics.  The Phoenicians living in what is now Lebanon, aware of both the Egyptian and Sumerian writing developed the West Semitic Syllabary by 1500 BC.  composed of only consonants.  The ancient Greeks, using some of the characters to represent vowels, were able to apply it to their language, consequently starting the first known alphabetic writing system of 26 characters.  The Chinese writing system is a word writing system where each character itself represents an entire word or idea.  The Chinese system has a thirty-five hundred year uninterrupted history. (Fromkin & Rodman, 1998)

The Indus Writing System

The Indus Valley civilization was the first major urban culture of Southern Asia dating from around 2600 to 1900 B.C.  This civilization flourished along the broad fertile floodplains of the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra Rivers in what is now Pakistan.  Geographically the Indus Civilization was comprised of about 1000 settlements of varying sizes, and includes almost all of present-day Pakistan, parts of India as far east as Delhi and south as Bombay, as well as parts of Afghanistan.  Most of what is known about the writing system of the Indus civilization is found on about 4000 inscribed soapstone seals that were used to make impressions on malleable material such as clay.  Most seals have holes in them possibly indicating that they might have been strung to be worn around the neck.  Inscriptions with both writing and pictures have been found on small copper tablets as well as many fragments of pottery.  This writing system is quite different from that of the Sumerian script of relatively nearbyMesopotamia.  In addition to writing symbols, many pictures of animals are depicted on the seals.  Such animals as the elephant, water buffalo, rhinoceros, tiger, crocodile, antelope, bull, goat, and even the unicorn are depicted on the seals.  Another common theme is a figure seated in the yogic cross-legged position wearing a buffalo-horned headdress. The figure, which is surrounded by many animals, leads some archaeologists to suggest that it may represent an early form of the Hindu deity, Shiva, Lord of the Beasts. (Price & Feinman, 2001)

The Language History of the Indus Area

In India there are 18 languages officially recognized by the constitution, and these fall into two major groups: Indic, or indo-Aryan, and Dravidian. Additionally, there are over 1600 minor languages, and dialects. The official language of Pakistan is Urdu, but comparatively few people use it as their first language. Punjabi is probably the most widely spoken language, and Sindhi, Pashto, Saraiki and Baluchi are also spoken by many people. Brahui, another Dravidian language is also spoken inPakistan mainly in the Kalat and Hairpur regions. The total number of Brahui speakers is estimated to be approximately 2,000,000 people. All Brahuis are bilingual and most of them also speak Baluchi. In addition, English is extensively used by educated people in both India and Pakistan today. (Services International, 2001)

The Dravidian languages consist of a family of about 23 languages that appear to be unrelated to any other languages.  These languages are now spoken by over 200 million people in South and Central India as well as in Northern Sri Lanka and parts of Pakistan.  Research indicates that the Dravidian languages probably evolved from a language spoken in India prior to the invasion of the Aryans around 1500 B.C.  Dravidian languages have some distinct characteristics such as the formation of a large number of sounds in the front of the mouth.  The verbs have both a negative and affirmative voice, and gender classification is made on the basis of rank rather than sex, with one class including beings of a higher status and the other beings of a lower status that includes inanimate objects and sometimes women.  Another distinctive feature is that there is a great use of suffixes but not prefixes with the nouns and verbs.  Dravidian languages have their own alphabets that can be traced back to a common source related to the Devanagari alphabet used for Sanskrit.  Brahui, however, uses the Arabic script. (Encyclopedia.com, 2001)

The Aryans were part of a great migratory movement that spread in successive waves from Southern Russia and Turkistan around 2000 B.C.  Their warrior bands invaded many urban centers throughout Mesopotamia and Asia Minor.  Most of the languages spoken in northern India are of the Indo-Aryan language family.  The general script of the Aryan languages is different from that of Dravidian languages as well.  The modern Aryan languages are considered to have evolved from Sanskrit, the classical sacred and literary language of the Hindus of India.  Sanskrit is a complex language that is highly inflected and is subject to certain alternations of vowels and context-influenced modifications of sounds. It has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural). In addition to ancient Sanskrit, the Indo-Aryan language family includes the medieval languages called Prakrits; and modern languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, and other languages of India, Nepali, and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. The Dardic languages, which include Kashmiri and Romani (Gypsy), are considered to be an Indo-Aryan subgroup or a third Indo-Iranian branch. (Encyclopedia.com, 2001)

The Indus Script and Language Theories

Pen

Saturday, April 11, 2015 Category : Writing Off

History[edit]

M. Klein and Henry W. Wynne received US patent#68445 in 1867 for an ink chamber and delivery system in the handle of the fountain pen.

Ancient Egyptians had developed writing on papyrus scrolls when scribes used thin reed brushes or reed pens from the Juncus maritimus or sea rush.^[4] In his book A History of Writing, Steven Roger Fischer suggests that on the basis of finds at Saqqara, the reed pen might well have been used for writing on parchment as long ago as the First Dynasty or about 3000 BC. Reed pens continued to be used until the Middle Ages although they were slowly replaced by quills from about the 7th century. The reed pen, generally made from bamboo, is still used in some parts of Pakistan by young students and is used to write on small boards made of timber.^{[citation needed]}

The reed pen survived until papyrus was replaced by animal skins, vellum and parchment, as a writing surface. The smoother surface of skin allowed finer, smaller writing by the quill pen, derived from the flight feather.^[5] The quill pen was used in Qumran, Judea to write some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back to around 100 BC. The scrolls were written in Hebrewdialects with bird feathers or quills. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans had difficulty in obtaining reeds^{[citation needed]} and began to use quills. There is a specific reference to quills in the writings of St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century.^[6] Quill pens were still widely used in the 18th century, and were used to write and sign the Constitution of the United States in 1787.

A copper nib was found in the ruins of Pompei showing that metal nibs were used in the year 79.^[7] There is also a reference to 'a silver pen to carry ink in', in Samuel Pepys' diary for August 1663.^[8] 'New invented' metal pens are advertised in The Times in 1792.^[9] A metal pen point was patented in 1803 but the patent was not commercially exploited. A patent for the manufacture of metal pens was advertised for sale by Bryan Donkin in 1811.^[10] John Mitchell of Birmingham started to mass-produce pens with metal nibs in 1822, and thereafter the quality of steel nibs had improved enough that dip pens with metal nibs came into generalized use.^[11]

The earliest historical record of a pen employing a reservoir dates back to the 10th century. In 953, Ma'ād al-Mu'izz, the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes, and was provided with a pen which held ink in a reservoir and delivered it to the nib.^[12] This pen may have been a fountain pen, but its mechanism remains unknown, and only one record mentioning it has been found. A later reservoir pen was developed in 1636. In his Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae (1636), German inventor Daniel Schwenter described a pen made from two quills. One quill served as a reservoir for ink inside the other quill. The ink was sealed inside the quill with cork. Ink was squeezed through a small hole to the writing point. In 1809, Bartholomew Folsch received a patent in England for a pen with an ink reservoir.^[12]

While a student in Paris, Romanian Petrache Poenaru invented the fountain pen, which the French Government patented in May 1827. Fountain pen patents and production then increased in the 1850s, especially steel pens produced by John Mitchell.

The first patent on a ballpoint pen was issued on October 30, 1888, to John J Loud.^[13] In 1938, László Bíró, a Hungarian newspaper editor, with the help of his brother George, a chemist, began to work on designing new types of pens including one with a tiny ball in its tip that was free to turn in a socket. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. Bíró filed a British patent on June 15, 1938. In 1940 the Bíró brothers and a friend, Juan Jorge Meyne, moved to Argentina fleeing Nazi Germany and on June 10, filed another patent, and formed Bíró Pens of Argentina. By the summer of 1943 the first commercial models were available.^[14] Erasable ballpoint pens were introduced by Papermate in 1979 when the Erasermate was put on the market.^[15]

1915 advertisement for "Vulcan" Ink Pencils.

Slavoljub Eduard Penkala, a naturalized Croatian engineer and inventor of Polish-Dutch origin from the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia in Austria-Hungary, became renowned for further development of the mechanical pencil (1906) – then called an "automatic pencil" – and the first solid-ink fountain pen (1907). Collaborating with an entrepreneur by the name of Edmund Moster, he started the Penkala-Moster Company and built a pen-and-pencil factory that was one of the biggest in the world at the time. This company, now called TOZ-Penkala, still exists today. "TOZ" stands for "Tvornica olovaka Zagreb", meaning "Zagreb Pencil Factory".

Modern marker pens.

In the 1960s, the fiber or felt-tipped pen was invented by Yukio Horie of the Tokyo Stationery Company, Japan.^[16] Papermate's Flair was among the first felt-tip pens to hit the U.S. market in the 1960s, and it has been the leader ever since. Marker pens and highlighters, both similar to felt pens have become popular in recent times.

Rollerball pens were introduced in the early 1970s. They make use of a mobile ball and liquid ink to produce a smoother line. Technological advances achieved during the late 1980s and early 1990s have improved the roller ball's overall performance. A porous point pen contains a point that is made of some porous material such as felt or ceramic. A high quality drafting pen will usually have a ceramic tip, since this wears well and does not broaden when pressure is applied while writing.

Although the invention of the typewriter and personal computer with the keyboard input method have changed how users write, the pen has not been entirely replaced.^[17] Higher end pens including types such as fountain pens are still a status symbol.^[18]^[19]

The Invention of the Alphabet

Category : ***, Essentials, Script, Writing Off

Figure 1: From Egyptian to Phoenician
Proto-Sinaitic Symbol (ca. 1700 BCE)	Semitic Name	English Meaning	Approximate Sound	Phoenician Symbol (ca. 700 BCE)
	'aleph	Ox	glottal stop (catch in voice)
	beth	House	b
	gimel	Throwing stick	g in glory
	daleth	Door	d
	he	Man praying, shouting	h
	waw	Hook, peg	w
	zayin	Ax	z
	heth	Fence	kh
	teth	Wheel	t'
	yod	Arm and hand	y in yellow
	kaph	Palm of hand	k
	lamed	Ox-goad	l
	mem	Water	m
	nun	Snake	n
	samekh	Fish	s
	`ayin	Eye	voiced pharyngeal fricative (gagging sound)
	pe	Mouth	p
	tsadhe	Papyrus plant	ts
	qoph	Monkey	rough k
	resh	Head	r
	shin	Bow	sh
	taw	Mark	t

According to AncientScripts.com: Proto-Sinaitic, "Proto-Sinaitic, also known as Proto-Canaanite, was the first consonantal alphabet. Even a quick and cursory glance at its inventory of signs makes this script's Egyptian origin very apparent. Originally it was thought that at around 1700 BCE, Sinai was conquered by Egypt, and the local West-Semitic population was influenced by Egyptian culture and adopted a small number of hieroglyphic signs (about 30) to write their own language. However, recent discoveries in Egypt itself have compounded this scenario. Inscriptions dating to 1900 BCE written in what appears to be Proto-Sinaitic were found in Upper Egypt, and nearby Egyptian texts speak of the presence of Semitic-speaking people living in Egypt.

"No matter where and when the adoption of Egpytian signs onto a Semitic language occurred, the process of adoption is quite interesting. Egyptian hieroglyphs already have phonetic signs (in addition to logograms), but the Sinaitic people did not adopt these phonetic signs. Instead, they randomly chose pictorial Egyptian glyphs (like ox-head, house, etc), where each sign stood for a consonant. How did they decide which sign get which consonant? A sign is a picture of an object, and the first consonant of the word for this object becomes the sound the sign represents. In short, this is called the acrophonic principle.

"For example, the word for an ox is /'aleph/, which is the first sign on the left Proto-Sinaitic column. It stood for the sound /'/, which is the glottal stop (also written as /?/)."

During the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, foreign names, including Semitic names, were written in characters of only one consonant, in other words, alphabetically. This may have inspired the Semitic adapter(s) (Sass). The style observed in the 1999 find in Wadi el-Hol shows that the adoption took place around 2000 BCE, most likely in Egypt itself. You can see examples of Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions at Middle Bronze Age Alphabets (WikiPedia) and The Origins and Emergence of West Semitic Alphabetic Scripts .

The Proto-Sinaitic alphabet moved north and the Phoenicians eventually adapted it by 1100 BCE. By then it had become more stylized and simpler. The order, which basically has been maintained to this day, was established by 1300 BCE. The reason for the order is not known. It may simply be the order in which the symbols were invented (Peter T. Daniels), or it may be based on an ancient calendar (Garbini).

Note that the Proto-Sinaitic and Phoenician alphabets only write consonants, perhaps because the Egyptians had symbols for single consonants but not vowels. The Greeks were to change this.

Figure 2: From Phoenician to Greek
(Click here to see a version of this table that includes the Modern Hebrew script)
Phoenician Symbol (ca. 700 BCE)	Semitic Name	Approximate Semitic Sound	Euboean Greek Symbol (ca 700 BCE)	Ionian Greek Symbol (ca 700 BCE)	Modern Greek Symbol	Greek Name
	'aleph	glottal stop (catch in voice)				alpha
	beth	b				beta
	gimel	g in glory				gamma
	daleth	d				delta
	he	h				epsilon ("plain e")
	waw	w			---	digamma
	zayin	z				zeta
	heth					eta
	teth					theta
	yod	y in yellow				iota
	kaph	k				kappa
	lamed	l				lambda
	mem	m				mu
	nun	n				nu
	samekh	s				xi
	`ayin	pharyngeal consonant (gagging sound)				omicron ("little o')
	pe	p				pi
	tsadhe	ts			---	san
	qoph	rough k			---	qoppa
	resh	r				rho
	shin	sh				sigma
	taw	t				tau
	(waw)	w				upsilon ("plain y")
						phi
						chi
						xi (alternate)
						chi (alternate)
						psi
						omega ("big o")

The Greeks next adapted the Phoenician alphabet for their own use. The date for this is controversial, but certainly no later than 800 BCE, although the place that this occured is unknown. Bear in mind that while Phoenician was always written from right to left, ultimately Greek came to be written from left to right, as is our own Latin alphabet. This explains many of the changes made to the Phoenician symbols in the Greek alphabet. The Greeks rotated some characters, such as 'aleph as alpha, and changed the shapes of others. There had been many variations of the Phoenician characters in their development in any case.

The great innovation of the Greeks was to provide letters for vowels as well as consonants, although this probably happened by accident rather than by design. Most likely the Greeks simply did not hear the beginning non-Greek consonants of the names for certain letters, so they assumed that the letters stood for vowels. Thus 'aleph became alpha (a Greek word cannot end in a consonant, with few exceptions), he became e (later called epsilon, "plain e"), heth became heta, yod become iota, and `ayin became o (since this Semitic consonant is pronounced far back in the throat, the Greeks heard an "o"; this was later called omicron, "little o", that is "short o", in contrast to omega, "big o" that is, "long o".) They adopted the rest of the names of the Phoenician characters with minor changes to make them more pronounceable. Thus the Greeks invented the first true alphabet in history, the first to indicate both consonants and vowels independently and more or less completely.

The Greeks used the Semitic waw in two places: for digamma, which had the sound of the English consonant w, and for upsilon, where it must have originally had the sound of oo in "moon". Later the Greeks omitted digamma , although it had already made its way into the Latin alphabet as F. The Greek language later changed so that the sound originally represented by upsilon changed to the vowel like German ü or French u in "du" . They then used omicron-upsilon for the oo sound in "moon", much as French does.

San was an alternative for sigma for a while and then disappeared. Qoppa, an alternative for kappa, also disappeared, but not until it made its way into the Latin alphabet as Q .

To represent some sound distinctions made in Greek but not in Phoenician, the Greeks added phi, chi, psi, and later omega to the Phoenician symbols, listing these at the end. It is not clear where they got these symbols, although omega seems to be omicron with the bottom opened.

At the beginning there were different local versions of the Greek alphabet. The version used in Ionia eventually became the standard one. The version used in Euboea did not use the Phoenician symbol samekh for xi (although it did list it), instead using the symbol like our letter X for the consonant group /ks/, and using a symbol somewhat like psi for chi. This is important, since it was the Euboean Greek alphabet that would become the Latin alphabet.

Figure 2a: From Phoenician to Modern Hebrew and Greek
Phoenician Symbol (ca. 700 BCE)	Modern Hebrew Symbol	Semitic Name	Approximate Semitic Sound	Greek Symbol (ca 700 BCE)	Modern Greek Symbol	Greek Name
		'aleph	glottal stop (catch in voice)			alpha
		beth	b			beta
		gimel	g in glory			gamma
		daleth	d			delta
		he	h			epsilon ("plain e")
		waw	w		---	digamma)
		zayin	z			zeta
		heth				eta
		teth				theta
		yod	y in yellow			iota
		kaph	k			kappa
		lamed	l			lambda
		mem	m			mu
		nun	n			nu
		samekh	s			xi
		`ayin	pharyngeal consonant (gagging sound)			omicron ("little o")
		pe	p			pi
		tsadhe	ts		---	san
		qoph	rough k		---	qoppa
		resh	r			rho
		shin	sh			sigma
		taw	t			tau
		waw	w			upsilon ("plain y")
						phi
						chi
						psi
						omega ("big o")

Figure 3: From Greek to Latin
Euboean Greek Symbol (ca 700 BCE)	Greek Name	Early Latin	Modern Latin	Notes
	alpha		A
	beta		B
	gamma		C
	delta		D
	epsilon		E
	digamma		F
			G	In the 3rd century BCE Spurius Carvilius Ruga created this from C.
	zeta	See below		See at bottom
	eta		H	The Euboean Greeks used eta for the English sound h , which the Romans continued.
	theta	---		The Romans did not have this sound and did not use this character.
	iota		I
			J	From the 14th to the 17th centuries CE scribes created J to distinguish the semi-vowel English y from the vowel i.
	kappa		K	The Romans used K for a few names.
	lambda		L
	mu		M
	nu		N
	(Ionian xi)	---		The Etruscans listed this in their model alphabet but did not use it. The Romans never adopted it.
	omicron		O
	pi		P
	san			The Etruscans had this redundant letter and sometimes used it but the Romans never adopted it.
	qoppa		Q
	rho		R
	sigma		S
	tau		T
			U	Around 100 CE the Romans created this rounded form to stand solely for the vowel, and then V stood for the semi-vowel alone.
	upsilon		V	This was the original Roman form for both the vowel oo as in moon and the English semi-vowel w .
			W	Medieval scribes created this letter, sometimes for our "v", sometimes for our "w" semi-vowel.
	phi			The Etruscans adopted this but the Romans did not need it.
	Euboean xi		X	The Euboian Greeks used this letter for the /ks/ combination. The Etrusncans used it for something else, but the Romans adopted it with the Greek value.
			Y	Around the end of the Roman Republic, Y was included at the end to transcribe upsilon in Greek loan-words.
			Z	Around the end of the Roman Republic, Z was included at the end to transcribe zeta in Greek loan-words.
	Euboean chi/ Ionian psi			The Etruscans and Romans never adopted this letter.
	omega			The Etruscans and Romans never adopted this later Greek letter.

The Etruscans adopted the Greek alphabet from Greek colonies at Pithekoussai (on the island of Ischia) and Cumae. In turn the Romans adopted their alphabet from the Etruscans. The Etruscans abandonned the Greek letter names, calling the letters simply by their sounds, much as we do today.

These Greek colonists were from Euboea and thus used their own local version of the Greek alphabet at the time they colonized Italy. One can see its influence where the Euboean gamma, delta, and sigma clearly resemble the modern Roman C, D, and S, which the Ionian forms do not. The Euboean alphabet also used the X symbol rather than the Phoenician samekh for the consonant combination /ks/. Since X did not come with the Phoenician alphabet, it was placed at the end. (Most western Greek alphabets did not include the samekh symbol at all, but apparently the Euboean one did, since the Etruscans list it in their model alphabet, although they did not use it in practice. The Romans never even listed the samekh symbol.)

The Greeks used the Semitic waw in two places: for digamma, which has the consonant sound of English w, and in upsilon, where it originally had the sound of oo in "moon". The Etruscans used F (digamma) for a /v/ sound and wrote our /f/ sound as FH. The Romans simply used F for the sound we know. Digamma disappeared after a while from the Greek alphabet itself. Upsilon became the Etruscan and Roman V. Later the Romans added the Greek upsilon itself at the end of the alphabet as Y to transcribe Greek loan-words.

At first the Romans omitted zeta and placed the newly invented G in its place, and later they added zeta back in at the end of the alphabet to transcribe Greek loan-words.

Qoppa, in Greek an alternative for kappa, made its way into Etruscan and Latin as Q, even though it then disappeared from the Greek alphabet. The redundant letter san disappeared from Greek but made its way into the Etruscan alphabet, though not into the Latin one.

Bibliography

AncientScripts.com: Proto-Canaanite & Phoenician , <http://www.ancientscripts.com/>, July 29, 2005. Figures 1, 2, 2a, and 3.
Evolution of Picture Writing to Alphabet , <http://www.phoenicia.org/demotic.html> , July 29, 2005 . Figures 2 and 2a.
Evolution of Phoenician into Latin/Western scripts and Arabic/Eastern scripts , <http://www.phoenicia.org/imgs/evolchar.gif> , in Phoenician Alphabet <http://phoenicia.org/alphabet.html> , July 29, 2005 . Figure 3.
Omniglot , <http://www.omniglot.com/>, July 29, 2005.
Wikipedia , <http://www.wikipedia.org/> , July 29, 2005.
The Origins and Emergence of West Semitic Alphabetic Scripts , <http://www.lib.byu.edu/%7Eimaging/negev/Origins.html> , July 29, 2005.
Albright, William Foxwell; The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions and their decipherment; (Series: Harvard theological studies, 22); (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1966.)
Bonfante, Giuliano and Larissa; The Etruscan language : an introduction; (New York : New York University Press, 1983.)
Coulmas, Florian, The Writing Systems of the World; (New York, Basil Blackwell Inc. 1989.) [Excellent overall discussion of writing sytems, more in depth than Sampson.]
Daniels, Peter T.; "Writing Systems," pp. 43-80, in Aronoff, Mark, and Rees-Miller, Janie; The Handbook of Linguistics; (Malden, Mass., USA : Blackwell Publishers, 2001.) P121 .H324 2001. [Excellent brief overview of all writing systems; gives reason for Greek vowel development, p. 54.]
Garbini, Giovanni; “The Question of the Alphabet,” pp. 86-103, in Moscati, Sabatino; The Phoenicians / under the scientific direction of Sabatino Moscati; 1st American ed. (New York : Abbeville Press, 1988.) [Mentions Alessandro Bausani, 1978 hypothesis on alphabet order, p. 102.]
Jeffrey, L.H.; The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece; (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1961.) [Most definitive info on early Greek scripts and use of samekh, X.]
Man, John; Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World; (Barnes and Noble, by arrgt with John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2005.) copyright 2000 by John Man. ISBN 0-7607-6610-X .
Robinson, Andrew; Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts; (New York, McGraw-Hill, 2002.) [Good treatment of Etruscan and Linear B. All discussions of undeciphered scripts are excellent.]
Sacks, David; Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z ; (Broadway Books, New York, 2003). ISBN 0-7679-1172-5.
Sass, Benjamin.; Studia alphabetica : on the origin and early history of the Northwest Semitic, South Semitic and Greek alphabets; (Series: Orbis biblicus et orientalis ; 102); (Freiburg, Schweiz, UniversitStsverlag, 1991.)
Sampson, Geoffrey; Writing Systems: A linguistic introduction; (London, Hutchinson and Co. 1985.) [Good, brief info on early Greek and Latin, also on medieval and Renaissance scripts. Very good overall view of writing systems.]
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary. (Springfield, MS, USA, Merriam-Webster, Inc., ©1984.) Alphabet table near "alphabet" entry used in Figure 3.

Thanks to Dr. John E. Koontz and Dr. Peter T. Daniels for their comments.

Numbers, Alphabet, Symbol, Geometry and The Universe

Writing

INDUS SCRIPT

A Brief History of Writing Systems

The Indus Writing System

The Language History of the Indus Area

Pen

History[edit]

The Invention of the Alphabet

Figure 1: From Egyptian to Phoenician

Figure 2: From Phoenician to Greek

Figure 2a: From Phoenician to Modern Hebrew and Greek

Figure 3: From Greek to Latin

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Bibliography

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