История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 34 стр.

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Because vowel sounds generally distinguish grammatical rather than lexical

meaning, some Semitic writing systems never developed any device for

representing them. Nonetheless, ignoring the vowels does result in an orthography

that is far from explicit or complete; many ambiguities in decoding remain.

The transition from consonantal writing to alphabetic writing, writing with

full representation of both consonants and vowels, occurred when the Semitic

script was adapted to the Greek language. This occurred about 1000–900 BC.

Scholars have traditionally considered the Greek invention as a stroke of genius.

While not minimizing the significance of the Greek invention, it is now recognized

that the invention of the alphabet was, in fact, the rather straightforward

consequence of applying a script invented for representing one kind of language to

a quite different kind.

The letters used by the Greeks to represent consonantal sounds were

borrowed rather directly from the Semitic script. What was distinctive was that the

Greeks used six of the Semitic letters, those that represented sounds that did not

occur in Greek, to represent vowel sounds. Greek, like English, is an Indo-

European language that uses vowel distinctions to make lexical contrasts.

Moreover, words may consist simply of vowels, words may begin with vowels,

and words with adjacent vowels are not uncommon. Such forms are rare in Semitic

languages in which simple consonant-vowel syllable structures predominate and in

which vowel differences usually mark only grammatical inflections.

The Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet (along with many Greek words

and much of Greek culture) to form the Roman, or Latin, alphabet. Written

“learned” Latin was the language of state and of scholarship in Europe until the

end of the Middle Ages. Further developments of the alphabet resulted from

changes in the phonology of Latin and of the Romance languages that evolved

from it. For English, the differentiation of all the 26 letters was completed only in

the 19th century.

While the invention of logographic writing, the later invention of the

principle of phonetization, the analysis of syllables into a consonantal writing