{"id":129,"date":"2011-01-28T00:02:20","date_gmt":"2011-01-28T08:02:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=129"},"modified":"2011-04-03T21:49:11","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T04:49:11","slug":"ugaritic-syria-1400-bc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/28\/ugaritic-syria-1400-bc\/","title":{"rendered":"Ugaritic — 1400 BC?, Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Ugaritic "ain"<\/p><\/div>\n

Have you ever wondered why the English alphabet is ordered “A, B, C…”?\u00a0 Who decided that A should be first, then B, instead of e.g. S and then D?\u00a0 Well, we don’t know who came up with that ordering, but we know it wasn’t any later than Ugaritic cuneiform, which dates from around 1400 BC.<\/p>\n

There might have been earlier orderings of the alphabet that we just don’t know about (because the order was transmitted orally or the written version was lost), but it seems likely that the Ugarits devised the ordering: two slightly different orderings have been found in Ugaritic cuneiform which seems unlikely if they inherited it from some other writing system.\u00a0\u00a0 Both of those orderings have persisted: the “West Semitic ordering” made it into Hebrew, Phoenician, Greek, Latin, and thus to most of the modern alphabetic world.\u00a0 The “South Semitic ordering” was used by South Arabian, which lead to Ge’ez, the language of Ethiopia.\u00a0 When languages have added letters (e.g. the \u00c5 of Swedish), different languages have inserted them into different places, but the order of the core letters has remained amazingly constant over millennia.<\/p>\n

It is surprising that the ordering has persisted for ~3400 years, but I guess it is one of those things where there was no advantage to changing it, and a slight disadvantage to changing it (because you had to make some effort to changing it, and a bigger effort to retraining anyone who had learned the old way).<\/p>\n

Unusually among abjads, Ugaritic had rudimentary vowels.\u00a0 There were three different signs for glottal stop, depending on whether an a, i, or u was pronounced after the glottal stop.\u00a0 If you believe that glottal stops are consonants, then these marks were syllables and not vowels, but it still shows that people were starting to think about vowels.<\/p>\n

Like Byblos script and Linear B\u00a0 Ugaritic used a vertical mark as a word separator, but due to the writing implements, it was a wedge instead of a bar.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a><\/p>\n

REVISED: Added vowels section; reworded the word separator section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered why the English alphabet is ordered “A, B, C…”?\u00a0 Who decided that A should be first, then B, instead of e.g. S and then D?\u00a0 Well, we don’t know who came up with that ordering, but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abjad","category-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}