Our alphabet went through a long time of revisions and adaptations before we were able to familiarize ourselves with the well-known set of letters in the English alphabet.
The Proto-Sinaitic was the first-ever alphabet to be used. The script was derived in Canaan, the biblical land of Israel. It was used to describe sound instead of meanings. In addition, as the first Semitic script, the Proto-Sinaitic served as a basis and influenced other languages. It was the precursor to the Phoenician alphabet and became the basis for other languages such as for Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek.
As to how we got the English alphabet, we can trace its origins to the archaic Greek script, which was influenced by the Proto-Sinaitic script. Many of the letters from the ancient script remained in Modern Greek, including some very familiar letters such as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and even Omicron.
The influence of the Greeks, including their culture and their very alphabet, made their way into Latin, which evolved into Roman script. Some of the letters in the Roman script are now used in modern English which was established 500 years after the Roman script’s appearance.
Image credit: Matt Baker, Visual Capitalist