akkadian - ugaritic - phoenician compared

painting

The Phoenician Connection

By 1000 B.C. the maritime Canaanites or Phoenicians were the lords of the Mediterranean sea routes and beyond.  They reached Ireland, the Atlantic coast of Africa, and perhaps Brazil. 

The Phoenicians shipped lumber to Egypt and borrowed many aspects of Egyptian culture including burial practices and the knowledge of hieroglyphics.  They wanted something simpler than the cumbersome hieroglyphics and when they found it, they shared it with the world. 

The 22 character consonant alphabet could be taught in a week and within a few years similar alphabets reworked to match the phonemes of  the native tongue appeared in many of the lands where the Phoenicians traded.  The Phoenician alphabet was an important stimulus to the development of a writing system suited to the Greek language.  [from phoenician to ancient greek to modern greek]

In Semitic languages [including Arabaic and Egyptian], vowels play a secondary role.  Most of the meaning is carried by consonants.  This is not the case in indo-european languages.  To communicate meaning in these tongues, it was important to distinguish vowels.  The Greeks created the first vowel letters by changing the sound assigned to some of the left over Semitic shapes.  Alef became alpha, he became eta, ayin became omicron, waw became digamma [F] and upsilon.
 

Active version of the above chart.
The Greek adaption of the Phoenician alphabet

The Anglo Saxons adopted the Latin alphabet for their language [Old English} around 700 A.D.  As is usually the case, the Saxons adopted both the letter shapes and the letter's sound associations.  The present day English alphabet lost the long vowel associations around 1400 when many words containing long vowels began to be pronounced in a more closed position.  a: became associated with ae,   æ to e,   e to i:,   i: to ai.   [see the great vowel shift] 

The borrowed  Latin Alphabet is the same as the English except that it does not contain J, U, and W.  The original West Saxon alphabet was augmented with the ash [æ], the eth [ ð ], and the thorn [ þ ].  ð  þ  æ

The Latin alphabet was borrowed in very early times from a Greek alphabet (though not from that most familiar to us) and did not at first contain the
letters G and Y.  The letter C, a converted < [g] was originally only k, around 500 A.D. it started to acquire an S pronunciation when followed by a weak vowel. 

The Latin alphabet consisted of capital letters only, and the small letters with which we are familiar did not come into general use until the close of the eighth century of our era. 

The Latin names of the consonants were as follows:---B-be (pronounced bey)
C-ce (pronounced kay)    D- de (dey)    F- ef;  G- ge (gey)    H- hah    K- kay
L- el   M-em   N -en   P - pe (pey)   Q- qu (koo)   R- er   S -es  T-te (tey)   X-ix  Z  zeta (the Greek name, pronounced dzayta). The sound of each vowel was used
as its name  Ah,  Eh/ey,  I[ee],  Owe/awe,  U[uu] )

 The vowels i and u serve as consonants when pronounced rapidly before a vowel so as to stand in the same syllable.   Consonant i  has the sound of English consonant y;   consonant u (v) that of English consonant w. 

The character C originally referred to  G as in Etruscan.  The G value was retained in the abbreviations C. (for Gaius) and Cn. (for Gnaeus). 

 In early Latin C came also to be used for K, and K disappeared except before a in a few words, as Kal. (Kalendae), Karthago. Thus there was no distinction in writing between the sounds of g and k. Later this defect was remedied by forming (from C) the new character G. This took the alphabetic place formerly occupied by Z, which had gone out of use. In Cicero's time (see N. D. ii. 93), Y (originally a form of V) and Z were introduced from the ordinary Greek alphabet to represent sounds in words derived from the Greek, and they were put at the end of the Latin alphabet. 

 I and V were used both as vowels and as consonants. V originally denoted the vowel sound u (oo), and F stood for the sound of our consonant w [Greek digamma].  When F acquired the value of our f, V came to be used for the
sound of W as well as for the vowel u. 

In Latin,  I= I and Y, V=consonant U: in ius, vir, iuvenis.
I is used for both vowel and consonant i, U for vowel u, and V for consonant u:---ius, vir, iuvenis. 

Etruscan

 Alphabet Evolution

Arabic Alphabet

Armenian Alphabet

Cyrillic Alphabet

Futhark Alphabet

Greek Alphabet

Hebrew Alphabet

Latin Alphabet

Latin 8-bit character sets, in various national sauces, stuffed with BDF fonts, are the main ingredients in Roman Czyborra's ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup -- a classic of Internet cuisine. 

Phonology Test

If you dig deep down the pile, under HTML, under IP, under TCP, under anything  else, you'll find the lowest protocol: the thousands-years-old writing systems. This ancestral layer has not been forgotten by the citizens of the upper levels: the  Internet has plenty information about alphabets, syllabaries, ideograms, logograms,  pictograms...