the.com/alphabet
twenty-six symbols that conspired to make every book, lie, and love letter possible
means The set of letters used to write a language, arranged in a conventional order.
from A word built from its own first two bricks: the Greek 'alpha' and 'beta,' the opening pair of the Greek alphabet. Those names were themselves borrowed and reshaped from Phoenician letters — 'aleph' (ox) and 'beth' (house) — so the very word for the system carries fossils of an even older script. It reached English through Latin 'alphabetum.'
- origin
- born from Egyptian hieroglyphs via Phoenician traders
- order
- nobody knows why ABC ranks the way it does
- j newcomer
- the letter J is barely 500 years old
- vowel famine
- early Semitic alphabets skipped vowels entirely
- name
- alpha plus beta, the first two Greek letters
for instance
greek alphabet — 24 letters used in greek language since 8th century bce, basis for cyrillic and latin scripts
phoenician alphabet — 22-letter script from 1200 bce that became the ancestor of greek, hebrew, and arabic alphabets