The History of the Alphabet

The History of the Alphabet

  • Submitted By: achapm
  • Date Submitted: 09/16/2011 8:10 PM
  • Category: History Other
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The History of the Alphabets

The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. The first alphabet being called "abjads", were categorized from single symbols to single phonemes, but not all were translated from phoneme to a symbol. It emerged around 2000 B.C. in Ancient Egypt, and it represented of language developed by the Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been written into Egyptian hieroglyphs for nearly a million years. Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one discovery, or were inspired by design, including the Phoenician alphabet and the Greek alphabet. In 1000 B.C. the evolution of some other alphabets occurred from Canaanites, Aramaic, South Semitic and Greeks Aramaic became the basis of Middle Eastern nations like Arabic, Hebrew and Indian. Later the Greek alphabet formed Modern Greek, Cyrillic and Etruscan. Cyrillic became the script for eastern European Nations including Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia. Etruscan evolved into Latin which was used in the Roman Empire. The Latin spread in whole Europe because of Roman conquest. The word alphabet itself has the origin from the Late Latin Alphabetum which in turn originates from the Ancient Greek Alphabetos, alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Though the history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt, there are traces that many other countries like Arabia, Mangolia significantly contributed to the growth of alphabet.

There are five great systems of picture writing invented independently

The Egyptian

The Cuneiform

The Chinese

The Mexican

The Hittite

Cuneiform is an ancient form of writing named for the shape of its word signs. It is the earliest known form of writing or picture script. Writing was first written with scratching signs on damp clay with a pointed stick or reed. The clay was written on while moist and left to dry in the sun afterwards. People found it was easier and quicker to...

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