One script, many descendants
The Greek and Latin alphabets, and with them almost every alphabet in wide use around the Mediterranean and Europe today, can be traced back, through a chain of borrowings, to the script used by the Phoenician cities. The details of each step are not equally certain. Some links are well documented and some are inferences from the shapes of letters, so this article marks the difference as it goes.
The Phoenician script itself had 22 consonant letters and no vowels. What follows is about where it went.
The Greeks and the invention of vowel letters
The Greeks themselves remembered the origin of their letters. Herodotus calls them “Phoenician letters” and credits a legendary figure named Cadmus with bringing them. Whatever one makes of Cadmus, the evidence of the letters supports the idea of a borrowing. The Greek names alpha, beta, gamma and delta are close to the Semitic aleph, bet, gimel and dalet, and they mean nothing in Greek. The shapes and the order of the letters also match.
The earliest known Greek inscriptions date to around the middle of the 8th century BCE, and the contact is generally placed somewhat before that, perhaps in the 9th or 8th century BCE; the exact date and place are debated. Greek traders and Phoenician traders met at sites around the Aegean, Cyprus and the central Mediterranean, so there were many chances for borrowing.
The Greeks made one change of great importance. Greek has vowels that are essential to the meaning of words, and a consonant-only script did not suit it. They took Phoenician letters for sounds that Greek did not use and reassigned them as vowels. Aleph, a glottal consonant that Greek lacked, became alpha for the vowel a. He became epsilon (e), yod became iota (i), and ayin became omicron (o). A form of waw produced upsilon (u). With that step, the Greek alphabet became the first widely used system that wrote vowels and consonants with equal status.
Greek cities then developed regional versions of the alphabet. One of them, the Ionic form of the eastern Aegean, was officially adopted at Athens in 403 BCE and eventually became the standard Greek alphabet, with letters such as omega and eta.
The Etruscans and the Latin alphabet
Greek settlers established colonies in Italy, including one on the island of Ischia (Pithekoussai) and later on the mainland, and the Etruscans of central Italy took the alphabet from a western Greek variety. The Etruscans adapted it to their own language, using it from around the 7th century BCE, and Etruscan inscriptions are among the oldest writing in Italy. The wider story of Etruscan civilization shows how much Greek and eastern culture reached central Italy.
The Romans, in turn, took the alphabet from the Etruscans, with Greek influence as well. Early Latin used about 21 letters. The Romans changed them in various ways: the letter C, which descends from the Greek gamma, came to be used for both k and g until a modified form, G, was introduced, and later the Romans borrowed Y and Z directly from Greek to write Greek words. Letters such as J, U and W are medieval additions, so the Latin alphabet of the Roman period lacked them.
From Latin came the alphabets of most of western and central Europe and, through later history, much of the world. The Greek alphabet, meanwhile, provided the basis for Cyrillic, which was developed in the early Middle Ages for Slavic languages.
Hebrew, Aramaic and the Semitic line
The other branch of the family stayed in the Semitic world. The Hebrew kingdoms used a script closely related to Phoenician, known today as Paleo-Hebrew. The earliest inscriptions in Hebrew are very similar to Phoenician ones, and sometimes scholars find it hard to tell which language a short text is written in.
The Aramaic script, which also grew out of the Phoenician one, took on a larger role. Aramaic became a language of administration in the Assyrian Empire and later in the Persian one, and the Aramaic alphabet spread widely across western Asia. After the Babylonian exile, Jewish communities increasingly used a form of the Aramaic letters, which developed into the “square” script used for Hebrew today. Both scripts appear in finds such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, where some texts use the older Paleo-Hebrew letters for a particular word.
Aramaic also gave rise to Syriac and to the Nabataean script, which is widely regarded as an ancestor of Arabic writing. Some scholars suggest that Aramaic influence reached as far as India and played a part in the scripts of that region, although that connection is debated and less secure.
Phoenician and Punic in the west
Phoenician writing did not vanish when its descendants appeared. In North Africa, Sardinia, Sicily and Spain, the Phoenician script continued in the form known as Punic and, later, Neo-Punic, used for dedications and funerary texts well into the Roman period. Punic speakers were still present in North Africa in late antiquity, and Augustine of Hippo mentions the language in the 4th and 5th centuries CE.
What remains uncertain
Several points deserve caution. The exact date at which the Greeks borrowed the alphabet is argued, with some scholars favouring a date earlier than the 8th century BCE. The way Etruscan and Greek writing influenced each other, and the exact line by which Latin letters formed, includes details still under discussion. And the debate over the very oldest alphabetic writing, in the Sinai and elsewhere, continues, because those texts are short and hard to read.
The broad outline is not in doubt, though: a set of signs invented for spoken Canaanite became, through trade and migration, the base of the Greek and Latin alphabets and of the Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic scripts.