The First Alphabet - It Was by the Canaanites
From PBS Nova documentary https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet/
Wait for commercial. Go to minute 40 for the “mini-sphinx” from the town of Serbit, which is the Rosetta stone of the alphabet.
The first alphabet
The first alphabet according to this Nova documentary was made by the Canaanites from Egyptian hieroglyphics around 1850 BC. The evidence was found at a turquoise mining town called Serbit El-Khadim in the Sinai desert at the norther tip of the Red Sea.
The Canaanites who lived between the Red Sea and Persian Gulf (fertile crescent) created a script by using the picture words of Egyptian writing and shortening them to represent only the first sound of the pictured item. This could be done because Egyptian picture words were also based on sounds themselves called the “rebus” technique using whole words to make up new ones.
This Egyptian rebus phonetic code was first revealed by the famous Rosetta stone that showed the same inscription in Greek Hebrew and Egyptian. Similarly, the alphabet’s Rosetta stone is a shoebox-sized mini-sphinx found in Serbit in 1905. It had a woman’s face and inscriptions on both cat=like flanks, both in Egyptian and Canaanite It was Sir Allen Gardiner who broke the code. The new writing was not pictures, but actual letters which spelled “Beloved of the goddess Ba’alat” for a consort of a Canaanite king.
The Canaanites condensed writing down to indicating sounds themselves (phonemes), making the first alphabet. In this way a limited number of “letters” could spell an entire language, about 30 for the Canaanite language.
This alphabet idea spread northward, and the Phoneticians adopted it as well, changing letter forms and spreading it around the Mediterranean where the Greeks and Romans also changed letter forms a bit. For instance the initial letter “A” in Canaanite was a bull’s head taken from Egyptian “aleph” with the sound “ah”. The original letter had an oval face and two horns atop. Eventually, the letter got turned upside down with the horns on the bottom and the face on top being delta shaped, and thus our “A”.
Truespel Simplifies Phonetics As Well
This story reminds me of the goals of truespel, which is to simplify the spelling of phonetics using the most popular language, English. Many capabilities arise from this. See the omplete set of truespel links at https://bit.ly/2D7V3CH .