Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to the proto-alphabet consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Mainly through Phoenician and Aramaic, two closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts used during the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and South Asia.

Some modern authors distinguish between:

• consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called “abjads“, where each symbol usually stands for a consonant.
•  “true alphabets” consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis.

In this sense, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from Greek (by way of Cumae and the Etruscans).

Mesopotamian cuneiform

Proto-Sinaitic

Developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. It has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el Hol and date to perhaps 1850 BCE. The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.

Possible Egyptian prototype
Phoenician
Possible acrophony	ʾalp ox	bet house	gaml throwstick/camel	digg fish/door	haw, hillul jubilation	waw hook	zen, ziqq handcuff	ḥet courtyard/fence	ṭēt wheel	yad arm	kap hand

Possible Egyptian prototype
Phoenician
Possible acrophony	lamd goad	mem water	nun large fish/snake	samek fish	ʿen eye	piʾt bend	ṣad plant	qup monkey/cord of wool	raʾs head	šananuma bow	taw signature

This Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph (the “acrophonic principle”). So, for example, the hieroglyph per (“house” in Egyptian) was used to write the sound [b] in Semitic, because [b] was the first sound in the Semitic word for “house”, bayt. The script was used only sporadically, and retained its pictographic nature, for half a millennium, until adopted for governmental use in Canaan.

Latin alphabet

Main article: History of the Latin alphabet

A tribe known as the Latins, who became known as 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 adopted 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.

C, K, and Q in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the /k/ and /ɡ/ sounds; the Romans soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, where Z had been, to maintain the gematria (the numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries after Alexander the Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the third century BCE, the Romans began to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again in order to write these words. From the Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed Y and Z, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the only time they were used was to write Greek words.

The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity, following Augustine of Canterbury’s mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic wen, which was first used to represent the sound ‘w’ and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to confuse with an actual p, the ‘w’ sound began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the time looked like a v, the double u looked like two v’s, W was placed in the alphabet by V. U developed when people began to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V when the meant the consonant V. J began as a variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century.

Table above shows simplified relationship between various scripts leading to the development of modern lower case of standard Latin alphabet and that of the modern variants:

•  Fraktur (used in Germany until recently)
•  Insular/Gaelic (Ireland).
•  half-uncial and uncial, which derive from Roman cursive and Greek uncial, and Visigothic, Merovingian (Luxeuil variant here) and Beneventan.
• Carolingian script was the basis for blackletter and humanist.
• It should be noted that what is commonly called “gothic writing” is technically called blackletter (here Textualis quadrata) and is completely unrelated to Visigothic script. The letter j is i with a flourish; u and v were the same letter in early scripts and were used depending on their position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts; w is a ligature of vv; in insular the runewynn is used as a w (three other runes in use were the thorn (þ), ʻféʼ (ᚠ) as an abbreviation for cattle/goods and maðr (ᛘ) for man). The letters y and z were very rarely used; þ was written identically to y, so y was dotted to avoid confusion; the dot was adopted for i only after late-Caroline (protgothic); in Benevetan script the macron abbreviation featured a dot above. Lost variants such as r rotunda, ligatures and scribal abbreviation marks are omitted; long s (ſ) is shown when no terminal s (surviving variant) is present.
• Humanist script was the basis for Venetian types which have changed little to this day, such as Times New Roman (a serifed typeface)

Complex derivations and independent alphabets

Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For example, the Manchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia, was also influenced by Korean hangul, which was either independent (the traditional view) or derived from the abugidas of South Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception by Greek. A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs, was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics (an abugida), which is a fusion of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand developed by the missionary James Evans.

Possible independently invented alphabets are:

•  Meroitic alphabet, a 3rd-century BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt
•  Rongorongo script of Easter Island.
• Maldivian script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps other existing alphabets, it derives its letter forms from numerals.
• Korean Hangul, which was created independently in 1443.
• Osmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, and the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations.
• Zhuyin phonetic alphabet derives from Chinese characters.
• Santali alphabet of eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as “danger” and “meeting place”, as well as pictographs invented by its creator. (The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le “swelling” represents e, while en “thresh grain” represents n.)
• In early medieval Ireland, Ogham consisted of tally marks
• monumental inscriptions of the Old Persian Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem to have been created for the occasion.