Who Devised The First Alphabet?

Idea that the Egyptians made up the first alphabet have now been disregarded. The hieroglyphs tell a story but don't make up words. The earliest contender for the title seems to be the ancestors of the Phoenicians in the second millennium BC.
According to Professor Cyrus Gordon, the Phoenicians appear to have beaten modern linguistic science by 4,000 years. Linguists work by a principal called phonemic which maintains that all languages can be broken up into distinctive sounds. These vary, language to language, between 25 and 35. English has 44. This means that with a symbol for each sound then an entire language can be expressed with about 30 of them.
It is still not clear whether it was a deliberate act or an accident. If it were deliberate why not place the vowels alongside similar sounding consonants? I might have arisen as Gordon suggests originally as a notation system that had nothing to do with sounds. In the Hebrew alphabet a numerical value was attributed to letters and was valued as much as the sounds.

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