Who invented the first alphabet? (Proto-Sinaitic)

Discover the origins of Proto-Sinaitic, one of the world’s earliest alphabets! Uncover the fascinating history of its creation, the mysterious people behind it, and its pivotal role in shaping modern writing systems. From ancient inscriptions to groundbreaking theories, this video explores who might have invented Proto-Sinaitic and why it remains a key piece of linguistic history

#protosinaitic #ancientcivilizations #ancienthistory #sinai #alphabet #alphabets #writingsystems #canaanites #ancientegypt

[sachacendra]

Two things you didn't mention and that's important for this discussion :
1. a collection of egyptian hieroglyphs were themselves used to write individual sounds, among the other hieroglyphs that were used to write entire words or multiple sounds. Some of them
were pretty much identical to the proto-sinaitic letters but just had different values.

2. an inscription was discovered, older than those in the sinai in Egypt near the nile

So the question is not if they had Egyptian influence, it's to what extent.

Another interesting thing is that similar influence happened between the Mesopotamians and Hittite where the Hittite adopted cuneiform mostly for their phonetic values. Same thing between the Minoans linear and the Greek linear. But in this case it gave forth to syllabaries instead of alphabet. The consonantal roots of Afro-asiatic languages (semitic, kemetic etc.) is pretty much the main reason why the proto-sinaitic people made an alphabe instead of a syllabary. Given how rare languages with such roots are amongst world languages (outside of Afro-asiatic languages there are like one such example in North America) it's quite the happy accident that one of this language invented writing and then another one loaned their system to simplify it.

[Caution]

Thank you so much for covering this! Much appreciated. :-)

[ultrapictin]

So apparently the miners invented the alphabet and Thoth still gets the credit unreal.

[brunoslago]

Really good video! I'm a history major and had never heard anything about the origins of alphabets

[yarayaredaze]

It's an easy question. I invented the first alphabet. I even named it after myself. Alfonso Phabet.

[plvmbvm]

This isn't rigorous scientific inquiry, but it is a bit of common sense:

In the modern day, we have emojis and memes that have taken on meanings or implications pretty different from their origins. For example: 🍆

In any version of this story, there must have been two forces at play; one of them was the innovators changing the use of the emoji (or hieroglyph), and the other was the adopters. Leaving out the fact that people had to find it useful fails to tell the whole story.

For this reason I find it harder to believe the idea that any person or handful of people were responsible for creating the alphabet; I'd rather think that many people found it more useful to use hieroglyphs phonetically, and eventually that standardized into a script.

[yeshua]

If it doesn’t start with aleph and bet (A, B) then it’s not the alphabet.

[LPArabia]

Who knew that exploiting minors would lead to the greatest invention of humanity?