Phoenician

Phoenician is not the first alphabet — it is the one that travelled. Around 1050 BCE the scribes of the Levantine coast pared the older Proto-Sinaitic signs down to twenty-two clean, linear letters, each standing for a single consonant. Because it was compact, learnable, and carried on the trade routes of a seafaring people, it became the alphabet the rest of the world borrowed.

It is an abjad: only consonants are written, and the reader supplies the vowels from context. For a Semitic language, whose meaning lives in the consonantal root, this is efficient rather than deficient — 𐤔𐤂𐤈 (k-t-b) frames a whole family of words about writing.

No one has spoken Phoenician for two thousand years — yet you are reading it now. Every letter in this sentence is a Phoenician consonant, four times redrawn.

The export happened twice. The Greeks took the abjad and re-purposed the letters they had no use for — the ones for consonants absent from Greek — into signs for vowels, producing the first full alphabet, ancestor of Latin and Cyrillic. Aramaic took the eastern road, and from it descend Hebrew square script, Arabic, and — by a route the Institute records as contested, not resolved — perhaps Brahmi and the scripts of India. See the descent diagram in the Hall of Lineages.

Each letter began as a stylised picture and was named for a word that picture depicted; the letter's sound is that word's first sound. Acrophony — "sound of the tip." The ox's head 𐤀 was ʾālep, "ox," and stood for the glottal stop. Rotate it, and you are looking at the letter A.