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

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

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

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The date of 1050 BC is conventional, the oldest known inscriptions are from the 10th century BC; the predecessor scripts used in the Syro-Hittite kingdoms of the 13th to 12th centuries BC is classified as "Proto-Canaanite". Greek travellers shared their alphabet with the people living there who made a new mix of the Greek alphabet, which the Greeks adopted. 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. An impressive list of English dialects represents almost every part of the world so that English alphabet is used not only in Standard English, also known as Received Pronunciation and which is used when you need certified legal translation services, but in multiple variations of this language as well. The major forms of English native dialects are North American English, Canadian English, and Australian English. Many countries that experienced strong influence from Great Britain or the United States’ side developed specific and somewhat unique dialects, such as Indian English, Hiberno-English dialects, or Philippine English. Usually, the differences are observed not in the number of letters in the alphabet but on pronunciation level as well as vocabulary and grammar.

Writing wasn’t just invented once by a single person. Many different ancient societies invented writing at different times and places. 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.O.It did not change its original shape much since the original Egyptian hieroglyph looked like the eye and denoted the same concept. Sometime during the second millennium B.C. (estimated between 1850 and 1700 B.C.), a group of Semitic-speaking people adapted a subset of Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the sounds of their language. This Proto-Sinaitic script is often considered the first alphabetic writing system, where unique symbols stood for single consonants (vowels were omitted). Written from right to left and spread by Phoenician maritime merchants who occupied part of modern Lebanon, Syria and Israel, this consonantal alphabet—also known as an abjad—consisted of 22 symbols simple enough for ordinary traders to learn and draw, making its use much more accessible and widespread. E.Similarly to many other letters, it came into English through Latin alphabet that adopted Greek letter Epsilon, originating from Semitic. Original Egyptian hieroglyph that served as the source had a form of a man with raised hands. Currently, letter E is the most used letter in English which any of document translation companiescan tell you for sure. Most of us learn the alphabet at kindergarten, singing our way from 'A for apple' through to 'Z for zebra' without ever stopping to wonder why the letters are arranged in that particular sequence.

The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic, is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off (due to political divisions) into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew, Syriac, and Nabataean, the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of the Arabic alphabet. The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the Second Temple period, from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from the Qumran Caves, such as the " Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll" dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC. Humans began to communicate using speech some 50,000 years ago but writing has only been a part of the human story for the last 5,000 years. 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. By the Middle Ages in the West, punctuation starts to be fully developed. The great Malcolm Parkes, a wonderful medievalist, wrote a book called “Pause and Effect,” that has a lot of the scholarship on those transformations. We could have a whole philosophical discussion about this - punctuation doesn't really have semantic value, but it has structural import that becomes meaning-producing. According to a 1904 theory by Theodor Nöldeke, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script. [ dubious – discuss] This includes:

Reference

Now, however, excavations at the inland city of Idalion on Cyprus by Dr. Maria Hadjicosti of the Department of Antiquities have finally brought to light a large archive of Phoenician texts, preserved because they were written not on perishable materials but on fragments of marble, stone, and pottery. These texts are now being studied in Nicosia by Professor Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo of the Sapienza University of Rome and Dr. José Ángel Zamora López of the Spanish National Research Agency, who have published their preliminary findings in Italian in the latest issue of the journal Semitica et Classica. The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, [20] which were deciphered by Champollion in the early 19th century. 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.)



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