Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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The Korean language reform of 1446: the origin, background, and Early History of the Korean Alphabet, Gari Keith Ledyard. Of the 29 consonant phonemes commonly reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, seven are missing: the interdental fricatives ḏ, ṯ, ṱ, the voiceless lateral fricatives ś, ṣ́, the voiced uvular fricative ġ, and the distinction between uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives ḫ, ḥ, in Canaanite merged in ḥet.

The ancient Greeks didn’t invent the alphabet, though they may be credited with inventing an alphabet – a new form of alphabetic writing, one that added signs for vowels to signs for consonants. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception by Greek. If this was the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of Korea's relationship with Ming China after the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and of the literati's contempt for the Mongols.Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet 22. The Georgian scripts are of uncertain provenance, but appear to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family. South Korea uses Choe's traditional names, most of which follow the format of letter + i + eu + letter. A feature that appears only in the script of the Southwest, vowels are repeated after each syllabic signs. The Greeks used for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which weren't used in Greek speech.

Two variants of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of writing: the Aramaic alphabet and the Greek alphabet. However, Ledyard believes 古 gǔ may be a pun on 蒙古 Měnggǔ "Mongol", and that 古篆 is an abbreviation of 蒙古篆字 "Mongol Seal Script", that is, the formal variant of the 'Phags-pa alphabet written to look like the Chinese seal script. Some borrowed runic letters such as thorn (þ) or wynn (ƿ) were replaced by digraphs that are not included as separate letters or turned into specific ones that did not exist before, such as “th” and “w” sounds respectively. A number of Indonesian Cia-Cia speakers who visited Seoul generated large media attention in South Korea, and they were greeted on their arrival by Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul. The double consonant ㅆ was written alone (without a vowel) when it occurred between nouns, and the nominative particle 가 was introduced after vowels, replacing 이.

If the vowels are dropped from English sentences, while the consonants remain in their correct position with respect to the other consonants, literate, native English speakers can usually still understand it. The date of 1050 BC is conventional, the oldest known inscriptions are from the 10th century BC; the predecessor scripts used in the Syro-Hittite kingdoms of the 13th to 12th centuries BC is classified as "Proto-Canaanite". The ㄹ in the final consonant cluster is generally lost in pronunciation, however when followed by the subject marker 이, the ㄹ is revived and the ㅁ takes the place of the blank consonant ㅇ. In the Iliad, the epic poem about the Trojan War ascribed to Homer, the aged Greek king Nestor is said to have possessed a large and expensive, precious-metal drinking goblet.

The sound values also changed significantly, both at the initial creation of new alphabets and from gradual pronunciation changes which did not immediately lead to spelling changes. Another letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations was ㅱ, which transcribed the Chinese initial 微. It should be clear to any reader that in the total picture, that ['Phags-pa script's] role was quite limited . Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. This upset the long-standing status of literacy as an exclusive achievement of royal and religious elites, scribes who used their monopoly on information to control the common population.

The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single individual conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian.

He points out that while it is easy to derive ㅁ from ㅂ by removing the top, it is not clear how to derive ㅂ from ㅁ in the traditional account, since the shape of ㅂ is not analogous to those of the other plosives. The Hangul-only column, third from the left ( 나랏말ᄊᆞ미), has pitch-accent diacritics to the left of the syllable blocks.

Consonants in the Korean alphabet can be combined into one of 11 consonant clusters, which always appear in the final position in a syllable block. The aleph, he, heth (originally an /h/, but later long /e/), yod, 'ayin, and waw became the Greek vowels alpha, epsilon, eta, iota, omicron, and upsilon. Han'gŭl in the McCune–Reischauer system, is often capitalized and rendered without the diacritics when used as an English word, Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries. Usually, the differences are observed not in the number of letters in the alphabet but on pronunciation level as well as vocabulary and grammar.