August 22nd, 2011 by
The BBC just put up a five-minute audio slideshow “The story of how we got our alphabets” about the development of western writing, starting in 3,000 BC in Mesopotamia with various attempts at proto-writing systems and then Cuneiform script.
It shows the history of the alphabet, stemming from the Phoenician alphabet and continuing to the Semitic alphabets based around consonants (Arabic and Hebrew) and those derived further via Greek and its addition of vowel sounds (Latin and Cyrillic).
With the development of the Ubuntu Font Family we’re getting to the stage where it’s possible to demonstrate some the similarity using the font itself. The diagram on the right shows Hebrew on the left, Arabic on the right and Greek, Cyrillic and Latin in the centre columns. As Dr James Clackson notes in the slideshow, things are fairly consistent up until T/Τ/Т, after which the additions and expansions of letters diverge in each alphabet system.
The term Alphabet comes from the first two letters in the Greek—and other similar—alphabets: ΑΒ, АБ, AB, אב, اب.
The diagram in this first cut can likely be improved with input from a knowledgeable linguist/palaeolinguist. Please get in contact, or leave suggestions and corrections below if you know how to improve it!
The toolkit
20 Responseshide comments
Fascinating!
the term alphabet comes from the first two letters in the arabic:اب
AB (as the A in arabi is Alef, and the B is ba´).
regards
Eli: Many appreciations for taking the time to flag up something if it needs fixing or can be improved.
Is the above just a statement, or something that needs fixing in the blog post itself? If so, could you suggest a better wording for the post?
My apologies for not understanding at first read—would you be able to word it slightly different here, and then I’ll try to reply to the original post on the blog?
(PS. I tried emailing the email address given, but it bounced—you are welcome to email me using the email addresses on Launchpad).
This is not correct: the word ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos) comes from alpha (α) and beta (β), the first two letters of the _Greek_ alphabet.
What about the Ubuntu Arabic font? Will it be ready for 11.10?
Muhammad: No, Ubuntu Arabic is very unlikely to be ready for Ubuntu 11.10 in October 2011. The latest I have from Bruno Maag is hoping “…to release unhinted Arabic/Hebrew in the autumn.” This is northern-hemisphere autumn 2011, which means that it would land after the next Ubuntu release, and definitely after feature freeze (which was last week) and user-interface freeze (which is 72 hours away).
Currently Dalton Maag are doing some unexpected expansion work to bring in wider glyph cover for other Arabic-script based languages (Pashto, Kashmiri, …) and working on the class-based OpenType placement for all the combinations of diacriticals and vocalisations that can be placed around the core letters. I believe also have some other projects happening at the moment so the Ubuntu Arabic is queued up waiting for the specialist engineering time at Dalton Maag.
Once it’s ready I hope to get a near-final design
.ttfwhich we can start through the phased beta process (Canonical/Aratypo/Font Beta team PPA/font.ubuntu.comand packaged for the distributions) to get it tested in other real-use environments. The most recent snapshot of Arabic I have in.ttfform is from six-months ago; I’ll happily pass on a newer beta drop when it becomes available.Making a good font takes a really long time but hopefully the resulting quality will be worth the wait. On the design side, the Arabic design is pretty much fixed—an 80% Kufic, 20% Naskh style as shown in the preview pictures. Some things are happening though!…
I had a wonderful couple of meetings in Leipzig and Berlin with Rayan Abdullah the calligrapher behind the Ubuntu Arabic design who talked me through the process of how he comes up with his inspiration for doing Arabic extensions to Latin fonts. There’s an article with a preview of the east-west magazine that Rayan and the Markenbau team laid out using a beta of Ubuntu Arabic.
“The word “alphabet” came into Middle English from the Late Latin word Alphabetum, which in turn originated in the Ancient Greek ἀλφάβητος (alphabētos), from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.[1] Alpha and beta in turn came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and meant ox and house respectively. There are dozens of alphabets in use today, the most common being Latin,[2] deriving from the first true alphabet, Greek.[3][4] Most of them are composed of lines (linear writing); notable exceptions are Braille, fingerspelling, and Morse code.”
Quoted from wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet
Messie: Yes, Wikipedia is very useful; in fact, so much so that the English Wikipedia is linked several times in the posting above including the Alphabet article (last paragraph, just before it mentions the origin coming from Greek).
Is there something that you specifically wanted to highlight, or that could be improved in the phrasing in the post itself? If so, could you suggest a better wording?
Interesting that beta means house in Phoenician. ‘beet’ still means house/home in Arabic. Not only in classical arabic, but pretty much all modern dialects/variations as well.
I can think of two letters missing from around 1000 years ago, both of which were used in Anglo Saxon (and therefore Old English), and which I think live on in Icelandic and some other languages.
Those are:
þ “thorn”, a th sound
ƿ “wynn”, the w sound (though as a ruin it looked like ᚹ)
Þ and ð (shown in the chart) were used interchangeably, just like u and v were. Modernly, þ is used for a soft th and ð for a hard th. The letter combination “th” to represent those sounds did not develop until around 700 years ago, about the same time that a solid switch away from ƿ to the more Continental “uu” (and later “w”) occurred.
Of course, there was also the long-s “ſ”, commonly confused with a lowercase “f”. Why do you think an f is crossed though? To distinguish it from ſ! Long-s was in common use through the 19th century. At first it was used anywhere that sound was needed, though later the short-s (the one we’re used to seeing on computers) developed for use at the end of words (which is why it’s also called a “terminal s”) and as the second half of an ſs ligature, AKA the esszett: ß.
</paleography nerd>Oh wow, ƿ is really hard to distinguish from p in the Ubuntu sans font! Or maybe some other font is substituting in? I’d make the round part a bit more “squished” like in http://www.flickr.com/photos/maco_nix/6066930059/ where it says “ſƿa ſƿa”
Since þ and ƿ are borrowings from the runic alphabet(s), wouldn’t they need to go after all Semitic letters? Alternately, runes could be added to the chart, but it’s tightly focused on living scripts.
Granted, the chart is for entertainment purposes only and full of errors (j derives from Latin i not Hebrew waw, dhaal and edh are later additions, etc.).
Just one small correction: the Arabic glyph shown next to English ‘P’ belongs next to English ‘F’; there is no P sound in Arabic.
Bassam: thanks for the note. The diagram is trying to follow the Phoenician alphabet as the common root between all of the scripts shown above, so showing the similarities and also where letters have diverged. I’ll admit that the diagram does wander a little at the end; it gets a bit messy after T because the u-v letters hadn’t really been invented by that stage.
Back to your point; in the case of the Semitic letter Pe (‘Arabic: ‘ف‘, Hebrew: ‘פ‘), this is the letter that gave way to the Greek Pi (‘Π‘), then lead to the Cyrillic Pe (‘П‘) and so finally to the Latin Pee (‘P‘).
You are correct about the sounds though; to get /p/ instead of /f/:
Does that help answer your query?
Are the letters in the table supposed to be matched according to the visual similarity, or how they are pronounced?
If it is the second case, I can see several problems with the table.
First, as you’ve written, the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are based on consonants, so I guess it’s hard to match letters to the latin vowels. The matching between ה and E, and between ע and O, seemed off to me. I would have assigned the letter א with both A and E, and the letter ו with O.
I would write the letters ה and ه next to the letter H. The letters ח and ح should probably be written next to the missing Cyrillic letter Х.
In modern Hebrew, there is no difference between the pronunciation of ס and שׂ, and שׂ doesn’t really appear in alphabet order as a different letter from ש. I suppose you could just remove it from the table, and put ס next to S. (Unless you want both of them so they could be matched with the Arabic ش and س.
That’s about it. By the way, I think the letter Ж is also missing.
As far as I know, the first writing and scriptures originated in the Sanskrit language(in Mesopotamia and the Indus valley) and its called the ‘mother of all languages’ for good reason. Sanskrit is usually written in the Devnagri script, which is much older than the Hebrew or Arabic scripts. There are obvious similarities between the latest Devnagri alphabet and corresponding Cyrillic/Greek/Latin alphabet shown in the post above. With that said, I find it surprising that Devnagri didn’t deserve even a mention in the post above. Maybe its more of a west vs east thing. Just food for thought.
I don’t think it is called ‘the mother of all languages’.
When you google ‘the mother of all languages’ it shows up some discussion if there is one and some religious none sense saying arabic is the first language because it was given by god and the same non-sense for some other religions/cultures like tamil seemed to be amongst the first links.
Reading a bit further you can find few questions ‘is sanskrit the mother of all languages’ which of course is not.
Sanskrit is a sister language to indo-european languages not a mother one.
The earliest writing system was what was discussed about. And B.C. 3200 seems to be the earliest point for a true writing system. In mesopotamia.
“The Nāgarī or Devanāgarī alphabet descended from the Brahmi script sometime around the 11th century AD.”
– http://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari.htm
It seems it was 1200 A.D. which makes it around 4000 years younger than the mentioned mesopotamian writers.
p.s. I am an amateur. Just got a little interested. Also am usually interested in everything. So don’t take anything too seriously.
please add Persian font too (like پ & ژ)
Behzadsh: both Jeh and Peh are included in the
UbuntuBetaArabicFfont already—Rayan Abdullah, the calligrapher behind the Ubuntu Arabic script design is from Mosul.You’re welcome to join the beta test team which has access to proposed fonts in the phased beta programme, including the Arabic script, which you can then try out for yourself.
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