Doh.

I've been waiting for that for nearly 2 and a half hours... ;)

Errr ...

Well, Jonathan is probably asking how, not just whether. Very good questions.

> Has the design of alphabets had any affect on history?

I don't know of any such cases, but certainly the fact that people use different alphabets has had consequences. Perhaps the biggest one is Ataturk's dumping of the Arabic script in favor of the Latin; many people (perhaps most) attribute that (at least partly) to the need of the Turks to make up for WWI.

> Is the deign of an alphabet simply a reflection of the time it were created in?

Do you mean fonts? Alphabets (or more generally writing systems) almost never get designed (except for the highly notable case of Hangul). But their genesis and evolution certainly contain reactions to cultural milieux.

> Has type design ever had a profound affect beyond our profession?

Maybe not "profound", but two cases of the relevance of type come to mind:
1) The Nazi flip-flop concerning blackletter.
2) The recent Bush memo debacle.

hhp

The invention of the alphabet by the Phoenicians and the invention of the mass printing system by Gutenberg changed history. Good alphabet design eased readablity, added charm and grace. Not earth shaking, but not bad.

Changes in the alphabet, such as dropping the long s after the French revolution, the rejection of blackletter in Germany, the complete changes in Turkey and Korea - these follow great events of the day. Design styles tend to relate to the other designs of the day - especially architecture, for some reason.

China not using an alphabet (they had one fairly early) was also important. Using ideograms they could represent many languages, barely understandable to each other. This enabled a unified China. Now with radio and TV I believe everyone is learning Mandarin or 'common tongue' as they call it - and inputing it into computers using the Roman alphabet, with the pin-yin system of romanization.

James evans created a Cree alphabet, and possibly avoided the eventual loss of the Cree and Ojibwa languages.

http://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/special/F10fonds.htm

The invention of the alphabet by the Phoenicians and the invention of the mass printing system by Gutenberg changed history.

The Phoenicians did not invent the alphabet. The ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet into Indo-European use from Semitic sources, and the latter have traditionally been identified with the Phoenicians. There is some scholarship, however, that challenges this tradition, citing evidence that the Greeks adopted the alphabet at an earlier stage, from another Semitic group. In any case, the Phoenicians were only one Semitic group using a variety of an alphabet that had already been in widespread use throughout historical Canaan long before substantial Greek-Phoenician trade. This alphabet is structurally identical to Hebrew. I don't think anyone has identified any particular group as being responsible for the invention of this alphabet, which is not surprising given the small geographic area, the similarity of Semitic languages, and the large amount of trade that took place among the inhabitants of this region.

The idea that the Phoenicians invented the alphabet is a Euro-centric imposition, based on the traditional history of the transmission of the alphabet to the ancient Greeks. There is no reason to suppose, in a Semitic context, that the Phoenician contribution was more important than that of other peoples, including the Jews. The style of Hebrew writing identified as Palae