Alphabet Soup

"'There's the alphabet, a Phoenician invention.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), pp. 229-331 AT p. 251.

"...when the Greeks became literate again after their Dark Age it would be by borrowing the ancestral alphabet from the Phoenicians. The Romans would get it from the Greeks and then pass their version down to Western civilization..."
-SM Stirling, Against The Tide of Years (New York, 1999), Chapter One, p. 8.

In Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, Western civilization is followed by Technic civilization, speaking Anglic and, for trading purposes, League Latin. Meanwhile, we use Roman letters and Arabic numerals. L Sprague de Camp's time traveler, Martin Padway, introduces Arabic numerals to the Romans just as Stirling's William Walker introduces the Roman alphabet to the ancestors of the Greeks. Anderson's Time Patrol will speak Temporal and use post-Arabic numerals. We are comparing four fictitious timelines here, two by Anderson and one each by de Camp and Stirling.

The Phoenicians invented the alphabet in which each written letter represents a sound, not an image, idea or entire word. Apparently:

Roman letters developed from Greek which developed from Phoenician;
some words can be transliterated from Greek into English, e.g., the letters iota, delta, epsilon and alpha correspond to i, d, e and a, "idea."

By writing about time travel to ancient periods, Anderson and Stirling engage with issues like the evolution of language.