Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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In other words, Dewey created a system that functioned for his white male Christian world, but is highly problematic for librarians trying to file, say, books on Islam or feminism today. It seems writing was such a great idea, it just kept being created by humans living in all different parts of the world. Writing was invented in different places The word “alphabet” itself is the compound that came from the Greek language. This characteristic is the perfect embodiment of the origin of the English alphabet and explanation of its essence. Different languages’ elements contributed to shaping English alphabet into the modern commonly accepted standard form that came along since beginning in approximately the 7th century AD till modern 26-letter structure. How Many Letters Are in The Alphabet and What is it Exactly? The Georgian scripts are of uncertain provenance, but appear to be part of the Persian-Aramaic (or perhaps the Greek) family.

What’s more, the three-line message seems to be making a rather good joke. In the Iliad, the epic poem about the Trojan War ascribed to Homer, the aged Greek king Nestor is said to have possessed a large and expensive, precious-metal drinking goblet. The Alphabets of Asia Minor are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet. Sass, Benjamin; Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology; Makhon le-arkheʼologyah ʻa. sh. Sonyah u-Marḳo Nadler (2005). The alphabet at the turn of the millennium: the West Semitic alphabet ca. 1150-850 BCE: the antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian alphabets. Tel-Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology. ISBN 978-965-266-021-3. OCLC 63062039. Phoenician is well prolific in terms of writing systems derived from it, as many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, and consequently Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian scripts are derived from the Greek alphabet, which evolved from Phoenician; the Aramaic alphabet, also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that the Brahmi and subsequent Brahmic scripts of the Indian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed.Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet is derived from Chinese characters. The Santali alphabet of eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as "danger" and "meeting place", as well as pictographs invented by its creator. (The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le "swelling" represents e, while en "thresh grain" represents n.) The Kharosthi script is an Arabic-derived alphasyllabary used in the Indo-Greek Kingdom in the 3rd century BC. The Syriac alphabet is the derived form of Aramaic used in the early Christian period. The Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac. It is in turn an ancestor of the Old Uyghur. [ citation needed] The Manichaean alphabet is a further derivation from Sogdian.

But later and clearer evidence on the uses of writing in the ancient Mediterranean shows that the alphabet was not the sole property of educated elites or bureaucrats. For example, we have hundreds of texts from the first 200 years of Greek alphabetic writing (about 750-550 BCE), but they refer mainly to festive contexts of drinking, dancing, and sex, as well as dedications to gods. There is no evidence for early political, scholarly, or bureaucratic use. Similarly, many of the main teachers and writers of early Latin were slaves. If early Greek writing was for partying and personal offerings, and Latin often the province of the lowest-status individuals, then we cannot assume that ancient Mediterranean alphabetic writing was owned by highly educated writers or uniformly the province of elites. In fact, these Roman letters are still used to write Latin, just like in spells in the Harry Potter books and films. The letters he and ḥēt continue three Proto-Sinaitic letters, ḥasir "courtyard", hillul "jubilation" and ḫayt "thread". The Domesday Book, a summary of land occupancy in England and parts of Wales produced for William the Conqueror in 1086, assessed the values of 13,418 places, organising them first by status, then by geography. They’re magical alphabets called ring letters. Imagine if you had the letter “a” and on its feet you had open circles, and on its top too. It turns out that these ring letters are associated with magical properties, and by the Middle Ages, there's a whole mythology that says these ring letters are actually copied from constellations of stars which shows that the origin of letters was a gift from God, because these are natural signs in the heavens that have been used as the basis of letters.

AMENEMHAT III is one of Egypt’s lesser-known pharaohs. He made pyramids, but not on the scale of Khufu’s at Giza. He commissioned many artworks, but none that survive match the opulence of Tutankhamun’s gold mask. He mounted military expeditions, but not with the success of Thutmose III, who built a vast empire. Still, Amenemhat has one claim to fame. Under his rule, a technology emerged that is more impressive, valuable and pervasive than any of these legacies: the alphabet. a b Humphrey, John William (2006). Ancient technology. Greenwood guides to historic events of the ancient world (illustrateded.). Greenwood Publishing Group. p.219. ISBN 9780313327636 . Retrieved 2009-10-18. c. 1000BCE Death of Ahiram (or Ahirom) of Byblos, whose sarcophagus bears the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet.

Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, The World's Writing Systems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 219–220 Our publication has been reviewed for educational use by Common Sense Education, Internet Scout (University of Wisconsin), Merlot (California State University), OER Commons and the School Library Journal.

L.It was brought to English alphabet thanks to Romans who adopted it from the Phoenicians via Greek alphabet. We care about our planet! We contribute a share of our revenue to remove carbon from the atmosphere. The earliest known alphabetic (or "proto-alphabetic") inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic (or Proto-Canaanite) script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle and Late Bronze Age. The script was not widely used until the rise of Syro-Hittite states in the 13th and 12th centuries BC.