- 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