The Human Alphabet

Most inventions, no matter how original and non-obvious they are claimed to be, appear at a closer analysis to be only modifications and combinations of prior inventions, where what is new is always much less than what is old.

The Phoenician alphabet with 22 letters was just a simplification of an older North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters.

Both the North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters (the oldest alphabet from which our alphabetic order A, B, C, D ..., comes) and the South-Semitic alphabet with 29 letters (and a different alphabetic order) come from an older Semitic alphabet, which had been derived from a simplification of the Egyptian consonantic writing system.

The Egyptian writing system has been derived from some older pictographic proto-writing system, a transition that might have been inspired by exposure to the Sumerian writing system, which had similarly been derived from an older proto-writing system used for accounting.

The proto-writing systems, i.e. sets of symbols designating various things, like icons or emojis, could have appeared only after people had discovered how to draw using pigments or how to sculpt or carve hard substrates.

And so on, every invention is based on even earlier inventions, and it is seldom possible to say that one step has been the most important. Normally all the chain of inventions is important and every step has been indispensable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V

> During the Late Middle Ages, two minuscule glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including /u/ and modern /v/. The pointed form ⟨v⟩ was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form ⟨u⟩ was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valour and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed as "haue" and "vpon". The first distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩ is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where ⟨v⟩ preceded ⟨u⟩. By the mid-16th century, the ⟨v⟩ form was used to represent the consonant and ⟨u⟩ the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter ⟨v⟩. ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later.[3] The rounded variant became the modern-day version of ⟨u⟩, and the letter's former pointed form became ⟨v⟩.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W

> The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W" character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter "V" (at the time, not yet distinct from "U").