The History of the Alphabet, beginning from the Middle Bronze Age 15th century BC to Canaanite-Phoenician 14th c. BC continued from a series of modifed glyphs and unknown symbols. |  |
Various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch (Faliscan and members of the Sabellian group, including Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene, and other Indo-European branches such as Venetic and Messapic) originally used the alphabet. Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, North Picene, and South Picene all derive from an Etruscan form of the alphabet. The Germanic runic alphabet was most likely derived from one of these alphabets in about the 2nd century.
Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European (predominantly Italic) and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC. Cumaean, in turn showed strong similarities to the Phoenician alphabet, lending support to theories of Phoenician influence in the West-Central Mediterranean region, whether the process of adaptation from the Greek alphabet took place in Italy from the first colony of Greeks , the city of Cumae, or in Greece/Asia Minor. It was in any case a Western Greek alphabet.
700 BC- 21 of the 26 archaic Etruscan letters were adopted for Old Latin, either directly from the Cumae alphabet, or via archaic Etruscan forms, compared to the classical Etruscan alphabet retaining B, D, K, O, Q, X but dropping Θ, Ś, Φ, Ψ, F (Etruscan U is Latin V, Etruscan V is Latin F): ABCDEFZHIKLMNOPQRSTVX
700 BC- The earliest Etruscan abecedarium, the Masiliana tablet read right to left.which dates to c. 700 BC, lists 26 letters corresponding to contemporary forms of the Greek alphabet which retained san and qoppa but which had not yet developed omega.
700-500 BC- The "Alphabet of Lugano" was used to record Lepontic inscriptions, among the oldest testimonies of any Celtic language, in use from the 7th to the 5th centuries BC. The alphabet has 17 letters, derived from the archaic Etruscan alphabet:
AEIKLMNOPRSTΘUVXZ