How did the alphabet develop, and what influenced it?

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How did the alphabet develop, and what influenced it?
The alphabet, as we know it, did not simply appear. Many would say that we use the Latin alphabet, but that is completely wrong. True, our alphabet is based on the Latin one, but it began much earlier, and has been changed many times since.
The Canaanites, or more commonly known as Phoenicians, were among the first to use only one sound per letter, as we do today. The other cultures of that time (1100BC) used a mixture of ideograms and syllabic signs. The Phoenicians were a travelling people, and they probably based their alphabet on many different cultures, including the Linear A and B from the Minoan civilization. The idea of that type of alphabet probably originated from the Sumerians who lived in Phoenicia some 3000 years earlier, and their “fasthand” used by the priests. The name alphabet originates from the first two letters in the Phoenician alphabet “aleph” and “beth”.
Around 700BC-800BC the Greeks started to adapt the Phoenician alphabet to their culture, and they added the first vowel sounds to it. Note that the Minoan writing was by then long forgotten, so they essentially “relearned” how to write. All early written languages were written from right to left, but the Greeks later abandoned that. The way that they actually changed direction is a bit peculiar, in the middle of the shift they wrote from right to left and then back again, as the plough follows the ox. The reason that they wrote from right to left in the first place is unknown, but ex. Arabic and Hebrew are still written that way.
The Etruscans learnt how to write from the Greeks, but unlike the Greeks their alphabet almost only consisted of straight lines, probably due to the fact that they mostly wrote in clay. The Etruscan alphabet consisted only of 20 letters, to which the Romans would add some more.
The Romans borrowed nearly their entire culture form the Etruscans, including their alphabet. The first Roman alphabet consisted of 21 different letters, and towards the end of their time it consisted of 23. Funny enough, the “new” signs Y and Z were taken from the Greek alphabet, “ypsilon” and “zeta”. Even though the alphabet was almost complete by this time, there were still only capitals.
However in the roman fasthand, called “kurrentstil” differences were beginning to appear, which together with the slight differences which also can be observed in the “uncial” are carried further, to in the 4th centaury AC to produce the “half-uncial”, which eventually was developed into one of the first “complete” alphabets by Carolus Magnus, the Carolingian minuscule” around 700AC. This alphabet was spread and accepted throughout Europe, and was the one most commonly used.



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