Alphabets were confined to special purposes such as writing rare words or transliterating foreign names. Some historians believe that the idea of an alphabet-based writing system was conceived only once in human history – by some unknown predecessors of the Phoenicians, who then spread it throughout the Mediterranean – so that every alphabet-based writing system that has ever existed is either descended from or inspired by that Phoenician one. But even the Phoenician system had no vowels, which diminished some of the advantages I have mentioned. The Greeks added vowels.
