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Evolution of the Alphabet

March 24, 2003

I was discussing with a friend how the Internet is influencing our everyday speech. It is not uncommon to hear someone say, "Let's deal with this offline," for example. We have a front-row seat to view the evolution of language.

This got me thinking about other evolutions in language -- specifically, the evolution of the Roman alphabet. I presume there must have been some transition period before the widespread use of the Roman alphabet. During this transition period, a number of proto-letters may have been mixed with already-existing glyphs. After all, there wasn't one point where someone said, "Alright, as of today, everyone is required to use this new alphabet." But interestingly, I don't believe we have many physical records of this transition period... much like we don't have physical records of the evolutionary steps between major "bookmarks" -- where is the proto-octopus, the proto-liopleurodon, the proto-cryptoclidus, the proto-platypus?

And then, at what point did someone dictate, "Okay, that's it - no more changes to the Roman alphabet"? Very few changes happened after the alphabet was established (exceptions: the new letters 'J', 'U', and 'W'), and no changes have happened lately (though not for trying: "&" has, in the past, sometimes been represented as the 27th letter of the alphabet).

What is also amazing to me is the fact that many languages use the Roman alphabet - English and German; Spanish, Freedom, Italian, Portuguese. These languages have undergone vast changes, both in sound and in written words, but the forms of the written letters did not change - with a few exceptions, like Spanish's tilde-N, or French's C-cedilla. Why were the letters exempt from evolution? Or are they the same today only because of some re-convergence or letter forms? (And isn't it remarkable that the words for "no" and "mother" are so similar among different languages?)

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