Alphabets

Chapter 5 ended with Phoenician giving rise to both the Aramaic line (Hebrew, Arabic) and the Greek line. This chapter follows the Greek line, the one that gave the world the alphabet in the narrow sense of the word, and then the two scripts that grew from it: Latin and Cyrillic.

Greek: Adding the Vowels

From Wikipedia's Greek alphabet article (first 100,000 of 226,322 characters read).

• Date. Commonly dated to the late 9th or early 8th century BC, conventionally around 800 BC. By the end of the 4th century BC the 24-letter Ionic-based alphabet had become standard.
• Method. The Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, which had only consonants, and reassigned letters for sounds Greek needed as vowels.
• Accents. Polytonic orthography (Ancient Greek) has three accent marks and breathing marks; monotonic orthography, adopted officially in 1982 for Modern Greek, uses a single acute accent.

This is the whole trick. Aleph, he, yod, ayin and waw stood for consonants in Phoenician (including sounds Greek lacked), and the Greeks used the spare signs to write vowels. Unlike an abjad, nothing is left for the reader to infer.

Latin

From Wikipedia's Latin script article (first 100,000 of 149,903 characters read).

• Origin. A form of the Greek alphabet used in Cumae, a Greek city in Magna Graecia; the Etruscans altered it and the Romans altered it again. The infobox gives c. 700 BC to the present.
• Later letters. W originated as a doubled V and came into common use in the later 11th century; J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century; a rounded capital U was derived for the vowel in the 16th century. The ISO basic Latin alphabet has 26 letters.
• Reach. The article calls it the most widely adopted writing system in the world and says about 3 billion people (almost 40% of the world population) use it.

Cyrillic

From Wikipedia's Cyrillic script article (first 100,000 of 245,613 characters read) and the Alphabet article.

• Origin. Developed in the 9th century at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire, with earliest variants dated c. 893 to c. 940. It is named after Saint Cyril, but the article says the name "denotes homage rather than authorship": his and Methodius's followers developed it.
• Basis. Adapted from Greek uncial letters, with ligatures and consonants from Glagolitic added for sounds Greek lacked. The Alphabet article says Glagolitic is believed to have been created by Cyril and Methodius.
• Use. About 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script of their national languages (as of 2019), about half in Russia. It is also used for non-Slavic languages such as Chechen, Tatar and Mongolian (in Mongolia). Kazakhstan has moved from Cyrillic to Latin.

Same shape, different letter

The three look the same but are three different code points in three scripts, which the common ancestry explains. My own example, run and copied. A program comparing them treats them as different letters, which is a known source of confusion in text processing.

Adapting an Alphabet to a New Language

When an alphabet is borrowed for a language with sounds it lacks letters for, the Alphabet article lists three devices:

The digraph "cs" is two code points for one sound, while the letter ő (Hungarian, which the Hungarian courses on this site use) is a single code point. Same job, different device.

Try It Yourself