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 letters he and ḥēt continue three Proto-Sinaitic letters, ḥasir "courtyard", hillul "jubilation" and ḫayt "thread". The Phoenician and Aramaic alphabets, like their Egyptian prototype, represented only consonants, a system called an abjad. The Aramaic alphabet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE, to become the official script of the Persian Empire, appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia except India:D.Experts argue that this letter was inspired by Egyptian hieroglyph denoting “door” and it was later developed in Semitic letter Dalet that, in turn, was borrowed by Greek and Latin alphabets.

M.Its original source is Egyptian hieroglyph that represented concept of “water”. The current appearance did not chance since Roman rule. He'd been to university there and was hired in his early 20s to create a catalogue. He hadn't travelled. He didn't know much about libraries.Discovery of Egyptian Inscriptions Indicates an Earlier Date for Origin of the Alphabet" . Retrieved 20 April 2017. Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (January/February 2000): 21. Later, the Greeks kept (approximately) the Phoenician names, albeit they didn't mean anything to them other than the letters themselves; on the other hand, the Latins (and presumably the Etruscans from whom they borrowed a variant of the Western Greek alphabet) and the Orthodox Slavs (at least when naming the Cyrillic letters, which came to them from the Greek by way of the Glagolitic) based their names purely on the letters' sounds. The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. When people think about different alphabets they'll say, “Like Arabic? That can’t be the same as our alphabet, right?” They are confusing alphabet and script. Script is the different letter forms. If you think about Cyrillic writing for Russian, that’s a script. But the sequence of letters, the names of letters, and what we call the powers of letters – that is, the sound that’s associated with them – are the same across all alphabetic scripts.

the letter name nūn is a word for "fish", but the glyph is presumably from the depiction of a snake, which would point to an original name נחש "snake". There was a time when inhabitants of the British Isles used the runic alphabet called futhorc. It was brought to these lands by Germanic tribes who conquered and mostly assimilated locals. Those tribes are now known as Anglo-Saxons and they also utilized many features that remained in medieval Britain since the Roman rule that ended in the 5th century AD. Old EnglishK.Another letter that proves multiple sources of English language origin as it came from the Semitic letter Kaf, which, in turn, originated from Egyptian hieroglyph standing for “hand”. It appeared in English through Latin alphabet that utilized Greek letter Kappa. 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?

In 1905, a couple of Egyptologists, Sir William and Hilda Flinders Petrie, who were married, first excavated the temple, documenting thousands of votive offerings there. The pair also discovered curious signs on the side of a mine, and began to notice them elsewhere, on walls and small statues. Some signs were clearly related to hieroglyphs, yet they were simpler than the beautiful pictorial Egyptian script on the temple walls. The Petries recognized the signs as an alphabet, though decoding the letters would take another decade, and tracing the source of the invention far longer. Davidson, Lucy (18 March 2022). "How the Phoenician Alphabet Revolutionised Language". History Hit. United Kingdom . Retrieved 1 July 2022. By the 8th century B.C., the Phoenician alphabet had spread to Greece, where it was refined and enhanced to record the Greek language. Some Phoenician characters were kept, and others were removed, but the paramount innovation was the use of letters to represent vowels. Many scholars believe it was this addition—which allowed text to be read and pronounced without ambiguity—that marked the creation of the first “true” alphabet.

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The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found as graffiti in the Wadi el Hol and date to perhaps 1850 BCE. [12] The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.



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