writing system where each symbol represents a single phoneme (consonant or vowel)
origin: Proto-Sinaitic script (~1800 BCE) -> Phoenician (~1050 BCE) -> Greek (~800 BCE)
the Greek innovation: adding vowel letters to a consonant-only Phoenician system
major alphabets: Latin (most widely used), Cyrillic (Slavic languages), Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian
abjads (Arabic, Hebrew) write consonants only; vowels are optional diacritics
alphabetic literacy requires learning ~20-40 symbols, far fewer than logographic systems
the Iron Age saw alphabets spread across the Mediterranean and Near East
enabled mass literacy, democratic governance, philosophy, and science
digital encoding: ASCII (128 characters), then Unicode for all writing systems