The syllabic orientation to the study of writing systems leads to a five-way typology, which is useful in investigating the historical development of writing. The five types of writing system are: logosyllabary, syllabary, abjad; alphabet; and abugida. While some or all of the modern-day West African syllabaries may have come about by stimulus diffusion, this is unlikely in the extreme for syllabaries like the Caroline Islands and the Alaska. The first alphabet was that for Greek, and the Greek alphabet influenced Western Civilization. The names of the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta, provide the word alphabet. Abjad is an Arabic word containing the first four letters of the Arabic script. In an abugida, each letter represents a consonant followed by the vowel /a/or an individual vowel. The branch of scholarship that has been concerned with writing systems is philology, the study of texts in all their complexity.
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