Thanks!

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo141943...

From the book's "Chapter 7. Modern Archaeology -- Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place"

"We can now describe the origin of the alphabet chronologically and geographically with some degree of reliability. The basic outlines are these: The alphabet was formed in the context of cultural exchanges between Semitic-speaking people from the Levant and communities in Egypt after or around 1800 BCE. The earliest evidence is dated to Wadi el- Hol, a site in Egypt just west of the Nile, north of Luxor. Later inscriptions in the Sinai and throughout the Fertile Crescent show the gradual distribution and evolution of alphabetic writing, with most evidence dating from the fourteenth century BCE and after."

Regarding "how much do we really care what various scholars in the 16th Century made up about the history of the alphabet?" we should, if we're interested in knowing the context in which various claims, which pop up even today, appeared for the first time. The context often explains the motivation which resulted in specific "made up" narrations, some still (often unfortunately) influencing our lives.

English spelling becomes a lot more rational [1] when you understand that you are spelling words largely according to Middle English. Sound changes that occur after that are largely not reflected in English spelling.

As for why English doesn't use diacritics, well, my hypothesis is that Middle English just didn't need them. Per the Wikipedia article on Middle English phonology, there's 5 short vowels + unstressed vowel + 7 long vowels + diphthonging with /j/ or /w/. With just 5 short vowels, it's possible to write every one with the 5 basic vowels of Latin script, and the long vowels and diphthongs can be written with paired vowels, using different vowels for the extra long vowel sounds (cf. ee versus ea)--no need for diacritics, even if it is a little clumsy.

The Great Vowel Shift came along and fucked up all the long vowels, and separate changes caused "a" to break into 2-3 sounds (crowding into the "o" sound, as well), leaving us with clearly multiple sounds for the same short "a" and "long" vowel spellings that bare little to no resemblance to their corresponding pronunciations. Some of the sounds (in particular, ee and ea) merged into one sound as part of the Great Vowel Shift, too.

[1] The other thing that ruins English spelling is a proclivity to borrow foreign words with foreign pronunciation and foreign spellings (even if it's not written in Latin script!), so to some extent, you have to play a guessing game as to etymology to work out spelling. But ignoring those cases, you can actually pretty reliably work out the pronunciation of most English words by effectively applying the (mostly regular) phonological changes from Middle English.

It’s a fascinating subject.

I think a lot of the English peculiarities with spelling come from it adopting other vocabulary without enforcing a change to English orthography onto it, so we end up with a crazy mix of Germanic, French, Latin, Greek and other language spelling conventions. Also English speakers were perhaps more willing to coin Latin/Greek terms for new objects than other languages - contrast ‘television’ from Greek and Latin in English, with Fernseher (literally far-looker) in German.

With respect to dialectical marks, I’m not sure why English in general doesn’t use them (although some might argue we do if we spell words café or naïve), but they don’t seem to be ‘fashionable’ in related languages - Dutch doesn’t seem to use them either, and in German they feel somewhat optional - ä, ö and ü can be replaced with ae, oe and ue respectively (e.g. where the accented forms aren’t available) and ß can be replaced with ss. Indeed correct alphabetical sorting of German demands this.

I don't have a definite answer on why some writing systems decide to use diacritics why other don't. I'm not sure there is a single reason for English.

But I think a bit of historical context would help. Many European languages derive from Latin, and most other were influenced and borrowed its alphabet. Latin didn't have diacritics, despite having pronunciation accents. E.g. "mania" could mean "mănia" (madness) or "mānia" (a kind of spirit). With time, many short vowels disappeared or changed, e.g. "orphănus" became "orphenin" then "orphelin" in French. I suppose that, for languages that are mostly an evolution of Latin, introducing diacritics was a way to mark words that were different from Latin words. It was even more useful because Latin was the written standard (a moving standard across centuries).

By the way, French and English are languages were you can't be sure of the pronunciation of a word you've never seen. Some studies have shown that other languages are much more efficient to read and write. For instance, Spanish readers barely slow down when reading a text that contains rare words, while English readers stumble. I remember stumbling when I first encountered "antienne" in my native language, or "recipe" and "gaol" in English.

IIRC Benjamin Franklin tried to make use of diacritics in his (U.S.) newspaper, and it didn't fly.

English could use a spelling simplification, but it's not going to happen -- it's too late and there's too much inertia in the current way of doing things.

Also, FYI, the circumflex in ê in French isn't there to change how e is pronounced but to denote that after the e there used to be an s that has been dropped, and that's how it always is for the circumflex accent in French. Sure, être is not pronounced the same as it would be were it written as etre, but I think that's accidental and not really the essence of the circumflex accent in French.

My personal pet peeve with the English language is the placement of symbols at the end of a sentence which change the inflection of the sentence? Oh that was a question, I guess you didn't know until you got to the very end of the sentence! Yes I was shouting that whole time, I guess you didn't know.

I find oh so irritating when reading books and not knowing the inflection of the characters speech until the END of the sentence. I much prefer how other languages put a symbol at the start and end of the sentence. Grumble grumble.

Don't quote me on this, but I vaguely recall an explanation years ago, that the one-two punch of Norman French and the Great Vowel Shift arriving were enough for spelling and pronounciation to permanently decouple in English speakers' minds

But people don't read letter by letter to recognize a word. The vast majority of readers are fluent and are seeing a word for the 1000th time. Optimizing for foreign learners instead of native adults seems wrong.

Words vary in pronunciation across time and across regions and dialects. I would assume those words "used to" (which doesn't sound like it has a 'd') sound like they were written. So what would you do, rewrite the dictionary every couple centuries for zero gain?

It's hard to know for absolutely certain, but a lot of it might be because diacritics would just make English even harder to read/write. By the invention of printing, English was a very confusing mess of the germanic and romantic languages and there was no absolute agreement on pronunciation. Plus, we were in the middle of the great vowel shift, so slapping diacritics on letters would have been a fools errand since they wouldn't sound like that diacritic says they do. English's lax pronunciation, linguistic changes during the middle ages, and strong romantic language influence, would make it even more confusing to create solid rules on diacritic usage, especially as many people would still be illiterate, and English was an "easier" language than the very complex Latin.

If you think of english spelling as highly conservative (it is) and only casually connected to pronunciation (an overstatement, but true) the spelling isn't so bad. The conservatism preserves meaning which is lost in languages like German where spelling is periodically "reformed", severing spelling from a word's historical semantics.

You could just as well consider words like "debt", "lead" or "Wycombe" to be kanjis, and nobody complains about their disconnect from pronunciation.

English's lack of them greatly assisted alphabets like RADIX-50 for earlier computers. Typewriters, too.

It would be nice if word processors had a feature to translate documents to International Phonetic Alphabet. Your second paragraph would be:

səʊ waɪ dʌznt ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ juːz ðɛm? ɪts klɪə ðə ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ niːdz ðɛm wɪð wɜːdz sʌʧ æz θruː, ˈθʌrə ænd θɔːt wɪʧ ɑː kənˈfjuːzɪŋ ɪˈnʌf fɔː ˈneɪtɪv ˈspiːkəz lɛt əˈləʊn ðəʊz ˈlɜːnɪŋ ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ æz ə ˈsɛkənd ˈlæŋɡwɪʤ. ænd haʊ əˈbaʊt ˌɪnkənˈsɪstᵊnsiz sʌʧ æz ðə vɜːb tuː liːd ænd ðə ˈmɛtᵊl Pb liːd, ɔːr ˈʌðə streɪnʤ 'gh' wɜːdz sʌʧ æz kɒf?

German is frustrating for its underuse of diacritics - e.g. tetragraph "tsch" representing a single sound, similar for "sch". In Czech, these are č and š respectively. Polish has similar issues, resulting in the infamous "spilled letters" orthography.

A little nitpick,there are 5 "forms" for 'e' in French, you forgot ë it is used in words like Noël and België

I wonder if the dot above 'i's and 'j's are in some sense a diacritic or like "1/2 of one"

> For instance, in French the letter 'e' can take four forms—without accent, grave è, acute/aigu é, circumflex ê. This makes the letter much more flexible and greatly assists with pronunciation.

The circumflex is not related to pronunciation; it tells you that in the historical form of the word an S followed the vowel. The other three are just three different French vowels. It's an odd conflation of concerns.

> Similarly, proper nouns such as Wycombe, Warwick, etc. defy logic when it comes to pronunciation and would greatly benefit from diacritical marks.

Same problem; diacritical marks aren't what you want there. What's happening is that the spelling has changed more slowly than the pronunciation. You don't want to disambiguate the pronunciation of Warwick (between what and what?), what you want is to realize that the spelling isn't trying to tell you how it's pronounced. It's telling you how it used to be pronounced. (Though, in that case, it's not at all difficult to predict the modern pronunciation.)

Economy of printing press blocks, and diacritics wouldn't be enough to cover the wide variety of pronunciations, which is inconsistent in English, as highlighted by Wycombe and Warwick. Diacritics wouldn't save those names.

My theory is that one needs a good reason to cross the ocean. Life has to be better on the other side. It is a selection process. You get people who's hands and feet tend to follow their thoughts as opposed to writing them down.

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Correct, the Phoenicians gave it to the Greeks who used vowel letters for the first time... though the Romans mostly inherited theirs from the Etruscans (who got it from the Phoenicians too). That led to some oddities when the Romans conquered the Greeks and started merging the diverged alphabets.

Nevertheless... some letters like aleph/alpha/A survive with and nearly identical orthography. The Phoenicians wrote it sideways compared to Latin - IIRC it was the horns of a bull and represented the first sound of the Phoenician word for cattle.

I find it quite interesting that a writing system having that higher level of abstraction was invented so early. Most early systems were pictograph/ideograph or syllabic AFAIK. Taking the leap to breaking words into syllables then syllables into sounds reduces the orthography to a compact set of symbols with relatively simple rules that is still capable of expressing an entire language.

>>Remarkably, two recent discoveries from around 1500 BCE do show scribes using the alphabet. But these exceptions prove the rule, because these scribes used alphabetic writing just as sloppily or playfully as its other users did. In an obscure ostrakon from Thebes and a handful of looted cuneiform tablets we find surprising confirmation that even professional writers used it unprofessionally.

Perhaps they were early physicians?

It's interesting how people in this space study twins, and I wonder sometimes if that isn't more on the nose than we give it credit for.

Twins likely created the first languages - who does the first person genetically capable of speech talk to, except someone genetically and environmentally identical? Likely had the first verbal families, and then verbal tribes. Written secret codes might have started the same way, and ended up either being tribal or trade secrets. Success leads to imitation. Partial success leads to theft, or acquisition.

There's a theory that the original words arose via a mechanism essentially analogous to onomatopoeia. But unlike literal onomatopoeia as in "cuckoo", it's a lot harder (and required a genius according to some philosophers like Otto Weininger [1]) to come up with just the sound that when uttered in the presence of other cavemen will correctly evoke such abstract ideas as bigness, smallness, heaviness, lightness, etc.

The idea that there's something about (say) the sound "big" that makes it especially suitable for expressing the idea of bigness seems pretty plausible to me. I tried this experiment on my friend. I spoke out loud the Chinese words for big and small in a random order and ask him to guess which means big and which means small. He immediately guessed correctly. I'm pretty sure that if you can find a Chinese person who's never learnt English and try a similar experiment on them with (the sounds of the English words) "big" and "small" the result will be similar.

[1] "Cannot the whole of human history (naturally in the sense of the history of the mind and not, for example, the history of wars) best be understood through the appearance of a genius, the inspirations emanating from him, and the imitation of what a genius has done by more pithecoid creatures? Take house-building, agriculture, and above all language! Every word was first created by one individual, by an individual above the average, and the same is still the case today (with the sole exception of the names for new technical inventions, which must be ignored in this context). How else should it have been created? The primal words were “onomatopoeic” and they incorporated without the will of the speaker, through the sheer intensity of the specific excitement, something similar to the cause of the excitement, while all the other words were originally tropes, as it were, second-order onomatopoeias, metaphors, similes: all prose was once poetry. Thus most geniuses have remained unknown."

“Remember how easy it was to learn your ABC's? Thank the Phoenicians – they invented them.” -Dame Judi Dench, Spaceship Earth

Nova documentaries:

* The First Alphabet

* How Writing Changed the World

While the Greeks have invented the most significant improvement of the writing system, after that when some Semitic people have simplified the Egyptian writing system by eliminating all the multi-consonant signs, any discussion about the Greek alphabet cannot omit the fact that they did not invent the alphabet, but they have only improved the Phoenician alphabet, by reusing signs corresponding to consonants not used in Greek to write the Greek vowels.

This was a huge advance, but it cannot be named as "inventing the alphabet".

The Japanese. They're the first known group to explicitly represent Emoji, unlike the older Latin derived systems which could only represent emotion through character combinations and thus were lame rather than complete.

The Rosetta Stone is from c. 200 BCE, issued by the Ptolemies in Egypt, ruling after Alexander had conquered Egypt. The first examples of writing in an ancient ancestor of our alphabet writing in Western Semitic are from c. ~1500 BCE where they were using Egyptian hieroglyphs as a model. People were writing in descendants of that alphabet for more than a thousand years when the Rosetta Stone was carved, the Greek script derived from Phoenician which evolved from West Semitic, while the hieroglyphs on the same stone were the model for West Semitic writing a thousand years before.

I was about to write that I was under the impression it came from ancient Egypt, via the Near East and into Greece.

If you're trying to make a point about sacred writings being the first texts, you may want to consider Linear B and cuneiform, some of the oldest texts of the Mediterranean and which are almost exclusively inventory lists. While we have things like the epic of Gilgamesh preserved in baked tablets, this is the exception to the rule. For the vast majority of these most ancient texts, tabulation was the main use of writing: how many animals were sacrificed, how many sheaves of wheat were in storage, how much fruit a plot of land could produce, etc. As for sacred writings: Many religions were hesitant to commit their wisdom to writing - one reason why so much of Greco-Roman religion is unknown to us. The Oral Torah was supposedly passed on for centuries until the destruction of the temple and fragmentation of the Jews necessitated the writing down of this knowledge. Heck, Homeric poetry (the hymns as well as the epics) was not written down until centuries of oral development had gone on; not because writing had not been invented, but because it was not used for literary material.

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar hell. That's the last thing we need here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37708558.

Edit: we've had to warn you about this specifically once before, as well as several other past warnings about breaking the site guidelines. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on? We have to ban accounts that won't, and I don't want to ban you.

odd thing to be snarky about. organized religious practices coevolved with agricultural societies. I don't think this is that scandalous?

That seems completely impossible, regardless of the ages of any surviving inscriptions.

The reason is that the initial North-West Semitic alphabet had 27 consonants, whose order is known from the Ugaritic alphabet derived from it.

The Phoenicians have merged 5 pairs of consonants (KHA with HOTA, SHIN with THANNA, DHAL with ZETA, ZU with SADE and AIN with GHAIN), and they have kept only one letter from each pair, the result being a simplified alphabet with only 22 consonants.

There is no doubt that all the other later North-West Semitic alphabets have been derived from the Phoenician alphabet and not from any earlier Semitic alphabet, because all of them have started only with the restricted set of 22 letters, even if their languages had more consonants than 22, so the Phoenician letters were too few for writing all the sounds of those languages.

Because of this mismatch between the Phoenician alphabet and the sound inventory of the languages, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic have been forced initially to use a single letter for multiple sounds, which has been corrected later by inventing various diacritic signs to distinguish the multiple meanings of a letter, like in the Hebrew SHIN and SIN (which are distinguished by adding a dot to the letter, in different positions).

If the Hebrew alphabet had been older than the Phoenician, it would have included more than 22 letters, e.g. by having distinct letters for SHIN and SIN (whose pronunciations were different from the modern pronunciations, which have merged SIN with SAMEKH).

Given that neither of them “came first” in the topic of inventing the alphabet, what does it matter if Hebrew or Phoenician preceded each other?

Why do you think that?