alt Hacker NewsFun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who were taught a simplified version by seafaring Canaanites — the Phoenicians — and termed it the "Phoenician alphabet" [2] despite the Phoenicians not specifically inventing it), significant alterations had to be made and it's been an imperfect match for most Western languages ever since.
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My understanding is it’s the earliest known alphabet but not the ancestor to all alphabetic languages as there are Asian and other alphabetic languages that are not derived from western or Arabic alphabets. Specifically Greek and Latin alphabets and their descendants are based on it. Specifically Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic alphabets derived from kanji (and Chinese pictograms) as a simplification of the pictographic language and not derived from proto sinaitic. Others are possibly linked, like Thai, Khmer, etc through an Aramaic -> Brami-> Pallava->Khmer linkage but the Brami link is not fully established to be true.
Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels).
Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”
Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.
The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.
"and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible": That is the definition of a dialect.
Also, I don't know how you can claim Hebrew is phonetically represented by its alphabet rather than the other way around, as a revived language the pronunciations are largely a matter of convention based on Yiddish. It would be more accurate to say that modern Hebrew uses an ancient writing system, which happens to be closely related to the ancestor of modern European alphabets.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language
Very enjoyable documentary on this alphabetic development with relevant on-site visits.
https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B
Episode 2 then covers the printing press.
> all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite
Counterexample: Korean Hangul [0]
"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.
Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.
Egyptian hieroglyphics already had alphabetic elements, and the canaanites borrowed those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs (“Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system”).
At least one counter-example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is technically an alphabet, and is non-Canaanite derived.