A tribe known as the Latins, who became the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BCE in central Italy, and the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the seventh century. In adopting writing from these two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted the Etruscan letter F, pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag lines, was curved to make the modern S. To represent the G sound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan, the Gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters G, J, U, W, Y, and Z, as well as some other differences.

Unlike the historical archives Josephus reports at Tyre, the material preserved at Idalion is almost all administrative, sets of accounts relating to palace bureaucracy and the organization of agriculture. It sheds dramatic new light on the life, culture, economy, and political relations of Phoenician-speakers on the island of Cyprus. More broadly, these lists of figures, products, and their recipients are slowly building up, for the first time, a picture of the day to day workings of a Phoenician palace economy. There are also intriguing glimpses of personal life: a fragment of a letter, and some texts about religious and social rituals that situate the small world of Idalion in a wider Levantine context, and demonstrate the vitality of cultural links between different areas in the eastern Mediterranean. Yigael Yadin (1963) went to great lengths to prove that there was actual battle equipment similar to some of the original letter forms named for weapons (samek, zayin). [31] The first letter in Arabic [script] is the alif, and that is the same as the alef [in Hebrew] which is the same as the “a.” The letters look really different. Part of that has to do with the way that the letter forms are made, what the technologies were, and so forth, and also, modifications over time. But there is only one alphabet.An impressive list of English dialects represents almost every part of the world so that English alphabet is used not only in Standard English, also known as Received Pronunciation and which is used when you need certified legal translation services, but in multiple variations of this language as well. The major forms of English native dialects are North American English, Canadian English, and Australian English. Many countries that experienced strong influence from Great Britain or the United States’ side developed specific and somewhat unique dialects, such as Indian English, Hiberno-English dialects, or Philippine English. Usually, the differences are observed not in the number of letters in the alphabet but on pronunciation level as well as vocabulary and grammar. Phoenician colonization allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it. Daniélou, Alain (2003). A Brief History of India. Simon and Schuster. pp.52–53. ISBN 9781594777943. The new documents were found in a fortified palace complex on Idalion’s western acropolis, and they all date to the fifth and fourth centuries, a period in which Idalion was under the power of the Phoenician-speaking kingdom of Kition to its south. This explains why the vast majority of the texts found, more than 700, are written in Phoenician, though there are also around 30 in Cypro-Syllabic, the main script used on Cyprus in this period. These documents aren’t easy to study: while they may be written on durable materials, they are found in fragments, the ink is often poorly preserved, and the unusual cursive handwriting is hard to read. The texts also preserve a large number of previously unknown letter forms, words, and schematic formulas. Nonetheless, the preliminary work of decoding is now complete.

Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. By the 8th century B.C., the Phoenician alphabet had spread to Greece, where it was refined and enhanced to record the Greek language. Some Phoenician characters were kept, and others were removed, but the paramount innovation was the use of letters to represent vowels. Many scholars believe it was this addition—which allowed text to be read and pronounced without ambiguity—that marked the creation of the first “true” alphabet.

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Second is whether the early alphabet was systematized and taught carefully, or casually and chaotically transmitted—a script of scribes or of the people. Some time ago, in line with Goldwasser’s arguments, I argued (first in a 2004 article, then a few years later in my book, The Invention of Hebrew) that the alphabet showed no sign of scribal transmission in its first 500 years. It was, as Goldwasser says, a “script of the poor,” until it was adopted by scribes and rulers in a special new way—as a symbol of local culture and belonging. Does this hold up?