second millennium BC. It was relatively easy to learn, as it consisted of only 22 separate characters, in
contrast, for example, to the approximately 90 characters of the Linear B syllabary. And it is, in effect,
itself an abbreviated syllabary. So, for example, while Linear B had a different symbol to represent each
of the following syllables: da, de, di, do, du, the Phoenician script used only one symbol to represent any
one of them. That symbol was a triangular-shaped character that seems to have originated as a pictogram
for the Phoenician word for “door,” dlt, with the asterisks marking the place of the vowels, which were
not represented in the Phoenician script. Compare the Hebrew word for “door,” daleth. (We know the
nature of the vowels in the Hebrew form of the word, which was written using a system of writing almost
identical with the Phoenician, because marks were introduced at a later time that indicated the
vocalization of Hebrew texts.) That symbol was adopted by the Greeks and is the origin of the triangular-
shaped Greek letter delta, whose name also betrays its Semitic origin. The other characters of the
Phoenician script were adopted by the Greeks in the same way.
The Greek language, however, is not well suited to being represented by a system of writing that is
fundamentally syllabic in nature, and so the Greek borrowers made some slight alterations to the system
that they adopted. These changes, however, transformed the system into something that was no longer
syllabic in nature, and with the Greek script we are justified in speaking for the first time of a truly
alphabetic system of writing (figure 19). It may seem paradoxical to refer to the Greek system of writing
as the first alphabet, particularly since the very name “alphabet” encodes the debt that the Greek alphabet
owes to the Semitic system of writing, the first two characters of which are (in their Hebrew form)
“aleph” and “bet.” What is more, it looks as though the first of those characters, the original of the Greek
letter alpha, is itself a vowel. In fact, the first character of the Semitic signary is not a vowel; it is a glottal
stop, the sound that an inhabitant of, for example, Glasgow makes to separate the two syllables of the
word “little,” or “glottal,” which he or she pronounces without any t-sound. The ancient Greek language
had no glottal stop and so, when the Greeks adopted the first character of the Phoenician script, they seem
to have ignored the initial sound andtook the sound which it represented to be the a-sound, which follows
the glottal stop in the name of the character. Similar adjustments were made in the case of a few other
characters that the Phoenicians used to represent sounds that happened either not to exist or not to be at all
prominent in the Greek language.