Figure 19 The development of the Greek alphabet from Phoenician script.
Source: Reproduced with permission from Oxford University Press from P. T. Daniels and W. Bright
(eds.), The World’s Writing Systems (New York and Oxford 1996), Table 21.1, p. 262.
The result of this is that there is a fundamental conceptual difference between the Greek alphabet and the
West Semitic writing system from which it is derived. The fourth character in the Phoenician signary, for
example, can represent any one of the syllables da, de, di, do, or du, whereas the fourth character of the
Greek (and English) alphabet represents only that which the syllables da, de, di, do, and du have in
common. In other words, the Greek letter delta stands for something that cannot be pronounced
independently and can only be defined in abstract terms. The Greek alphabet is analytical, in a way that
Linear B and the Phoenician script are not, in the sense that it reduces the sounds of the spoken language
to its elements, beyond which it cannot be further reduced. In fact, “elements” (stoicheia) is the word the
Greeks used to refer to the letters of the alphabet, the same word they used to refer to the material
elements of the physical world. (The English word “element” derives from a Latin word whose
etymology is obscure, but some scholars contend that it originates from the names of the letters l, m, n.)
We should not infer from this that the Greeks were somehow especially “analytical,” or that they were
inherently more analytical than people who happen to use a syllabary to represent their language; such a
claim would be essentially meaningless. When we speak of the alphabet as a Greek invention that does
not mean that it was invented by “the Greeks.” Rather, the invention resulted from the action of an
individual or series of individuals who made seemingly minor adjustments in order to accommodate an