History of Alphabets

Roman Alphabet took over 4000 years of developing. First type of alphabet that was found was Proto-Sinaitic. There are many different alphabets even “syllabaries” which exist in the same family of scripts, although the Greek alphabet and Roman alphabet are most known. There is alphabets such as Samaritan which has a limited use however there are a lot of popular alphabets which are more common such as Proto-Arabic, Ugaritic, Ethopian, South Arabian etc. Proto-Sinatic (Proto-Canaanite) was formed about 3700 years ago when the workers of Sinai were under the powered by Egyptian rule. The alphabet started slowly develop over time. The Sinaitic script only had single consonants letters however hieroglyphs which had not single like Sinaitic script but multi consonant sings. This unusual method formed Proto-sinatioc which was related to Hebrew and Phoenician alphabet.

Looking at how this made the start of the alphabet not Egyptian hieroglyphs was the letter alpha. This word in Greek did not mean anything however in original West Semitic form 'aleph' had a meaning of “ox” so its not too hard to imagine letter A as the head of an ox. As well as 'aleph' the symbol of water was named mem (which is water in West Semitic) which we can imagine water wave in the letter M.

Nicolas jenson (1420-1480) began printing in Italy (Venice) with the original font from 1470s. Italic type was found and started in 1499. Over the years the fonts developed further.

Important part of the Historical alphabets are the Gutenberg Bible which is also known as 42-line bible. It is important because he invented lower and upper case letters and called them cast letters, so he placed smaller letters on lower case on the other hand upper case letters he placed on upper case. Historic period manuscripts were usually done and produced by a team of scribes and illustrators although the whole 'Lindisfarne Gospels was done by only one man. In this gospel he produced a lot of colourful and unique pages and gave it sense of design. His amazing skills are evident in every page of each gospel.