Abjads to Alphabets

Around 4500 years ago, ancient Egyptians came up with the concept that an image—a hieroglyph—didn’t have to represent the thing that was drawn.

Instead, someone (or several someones, maybe) noticed that several words sounded similar when spoken aloud, and—maybe more importantly—they noticed that words were broken up into syllables. Those syllables, in turn, were the same in lots of different words.

They realized that you could take a symbol that had previously only represented the image itself, and have it represent part of the sound of the word instead. I wrote a bit about how they did this here:

These chunks of sound were called phonemes. What a difference they made in terms of copying and remembering the written language! Instead of having to come up with a symbol for every single word they needed to write down, scholars and priests would instead put phonemes together, so the word that was written would be very close to the sound. An educated scholar could then interpret this and read it out loud for others.

This was useful, but still incredibly cumbersome. Imagine having to do a bunch of little drawings any time you want to make a word!

Then, Semitic peoples working in ancient Egypt came up with a revolutionary concept. Instead of drawings that made up words, this new technology introduced the idea of a simplified drawing that much more closely resembles today’s letters, except these were only consonant sounds.

There still needed to be a bit of specialized knowledge and interpretation in order to figure out which vowel sounds to make, but this was as big a leap for writing as phonemes were.

This system came to be called an abjad. That’s because the first four letters of the Arabic alphabet (alif, ba, jim, dal) can be put together to make this memorable acronym. The name is modern, but the concept is ancient.

Abjads are incredibly useful, and they’re used today by hundreds of millions of people. Modern Arabic and Hebrew, by far the two most common, are considered “impure” abjads by linguists because they incorporate some ways of indicating vowel sounds.

An abjad is almost an alphabet, but not quite. To meet that distinction, we need vowels. Those were added in by the Phoenicians, yet another major innovation in written language.

Today, most human beings use a descendent of the Phoenician alphabet when we write. That’s an incredible legacy from what might seem like a series of small innovations over the course of several thousand years.

Chinese characters are well outside of this arena, completely independent of abjads and the Phoenetic alphabet, but we’ll have to save that rabbit hole for another day. In the meantime, think about this legacy the next time you type or write (or read).

If you write or read in Arabic or Hebrew, let us know what it’s like to infer vowel sounds!

And, if you’re interested in reading more about the long story of language, I’ve created a tag so you can see everything I’ve written on the subject here.