It is from the Greeks that we get our name for the
word “alphabet.” It comes form the first two letters of their alphabet, Alpha
and Beta. These names actually came from the Phoenicians; however, whose first
two letters were ‘Aleph and Beth.
Scholars are not quite sure when the Greeks first
came into contact with the Phoenician alphabet; however it seems to have been
about 1000 BC. They changed the alphabet some, both the look of the symbols as
well as adding some symbols of their own. For example their alphabet had an F
character, unlike the Phoenicians, although it originally stood for the “w”
sound.” Because different languages use different sounds, the need to create
new letters was common as the alphabet was distributed.
The Greeks were the first to introduce vowels into
the alphabet. While the Phoenicians did have the letter “aleph” which became
“alpha,” it originally represented a gutteral tone, rather than what we
consider the letter “a.” Within Greece
there were many different alphabets, most of them had about 25 letters and were
mostly similar, with some slight differences.
The Latin alphabet
The Etruscan peoples of Italy
picked up the alphabet from the Greeks, in about the 7th Century BC, and from
the Etruscans it ultimately came to the Romans.
During its nearly thousand year history, the Roman
Republic and later the Roman
Empire grew to be the most influential power in the world, and one
of the most influential empires of history. At its height the Roman
Empire spread from England
to northern Africa, from Spain
to Mesopotamia.
The Roman Empire collapsed
in the 5th Century AD, but its alphabet would remain. The illiterate barbarians
who conquered the remains of the Roman Empire would
ultimately adopt its alphabet as they developed their own written languages.
Many of the new countries formed in the aftermath
of the Roman Empire would actually adopt Latin as their
language as well as the Latin alphabet. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian,
and Italian are all descended from the Latin language. Those countries such as Germany
and England
that did not adopt the Latin language still adopted the Latin alphabet into
their written language.