Alphabet

ROLCAM · Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 12:57 pm Post subject: Alphabet

Alphabet is the series of letters used in writing a language. The name means exactly what the term ABC 's means as a name for the 26 letters of our alphabet. The word comes from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet.

Most books, magazines, and newspapers are printed in the 26-letter alphabet called Roman. But the Romans did not invent it. They put finishing touches on a system that had been growing for thousands of years. See the articles on each letter of the English alphabet in The World Book Encyclopedia.

The earliest writing

In early times, people could communicate with one another only by speaking or by making gestures. They had no way to keep records of important events, unless they memorized the story of a great battle or important happening. They had no way to send messages over long distances unless they passed them from one person to the next by word of mouth, or had one person memorize the message and then deliver it.

The first stage in writing came when people learned to draw pictures to express their ideas. In ideography, each picture conveyed an idea. Ideography enabled even people who did not speak the same language to communicate with each other. Then people learned logography, expressing ideas indirectly by using signs to stand for the words of the idea. Instead of drawing pictures of five sheep to show a herd of five animals, a person could draw one sign for the numeral "five" and one for "sheep." Gradually people learned to use a syllabic system, in which a sign that stood for one word could be used not only for that word but also for any phonetic combination that sounded like that word. This is what we call rebus writing (see REBUS). If we used rebus writing in English, we could draw a sign for the word "bee" followed by a sign for the word "leaf" to stand for the word "belief." Finally, people developed alphabets in which individual signs stood for particular sounds. Today, most written languages in the world use alphabetic writing systems. For more information, see WRITING.

The earliest alphabets

The Egyptians used a system of several hundred signs that stood for full words or for syllables. They could write the word nefer, or good, with a single sign for the whole word, or with three signs, for the sounds n, f, and r. These signs specified the consonants in syllables, but not the vowels. Egyptian writing, which developed around 3000 B.C., was formally a picture writing, and structurally a word and syllabic writing.

The Semites, who lived in Syria and Palestine, knew something of the Egyptian writing system. They worked out an alphabetic writing about 1500 B.C. They used signs to show the consonants of syllables, just as the Egyptians did. The Semites seem to have adapted some of the pictures from Egyptian hieroglyphics, but they used these symbols for sounds in their own language. The oldest known Semitic alphabets have been found in Syria and at a Semitic outpost in the Sinai peninsula.

The Phoenicians, who lived along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, developed a system of 22 signs about 1000 B.C. Their alphabet was structurally related to Semitic and Egyptian, with signs for consonant sounds, not vowel sounds. Early Phoenician writing consists partly of pictographic forms, which they may have borrowed from older pictographic systems, and partly of geometric or diagrammatic signs that they invented. Historians find it difficult to trace the formal relations between Semitic and Phoenician signs, because Phoenician has both pictographic and diagrammatic signs, and because so little is known of the ancient systems used in Syria and Palestine.

The Cypriots, the people of the island of Cyprus, developed an alphabet of their own. Starting with an unknown word-syllable system, they worked out an alphabet of 56 signs, each standing for an initial consonant and a different vowel. The next step was to create separate signs for vowels and consonants.

The Greeks came in contact with Phoenician traders, and learned from them the idea of writing individual sounds of the language. Sometime during the period before 800 B.C., they borrowed Phoenician symbols and modified them to form the Greek alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet included more consonants than the Greeks needed for their language, so they used the extra signs for vowel sounds. In this way, the Greeks improved on both Phoenician and Cypriot ideas, because they could combine individual letters for both consonants and vowels to spell any word they wanted.

The Greeks took over the Phoenician names for their signs, and in most cases the signs themselves. The first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph, meaning ox, became alpha in Greek. The second letter, beth, meaning house, became beta in Greek. The Greeks later modified the shapes of these letters, adding and dropping some letters, to form the 24-letter Greek alphabet of today.

The Roman alphabet

The Etruscans moved to central Italy from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean region sometime after 1000 B.C. They carried the Greek alphabet with them. The Romans learned the alphabet from the Etruscans, and gave it much the same form we use today. The early Roman alphabet had about 20 letters, and gradually gained 3 more.

Capital letters were the only forms used for hundreds of years. Many people consider the Roman alphabet perfected by A.D. 114. That year, sculptors carved the inscriptions on a memorial column built to honor the emperor Trajan. The style of lettering they used is considered one of the most beautiful in the world.

Carving letters in stone is not an easy job, and Roman stonecutters rounded or squared, simplified, and polished their letters. They developed the beautiful thick-and-thin strokes we use today. They also added serifs (little finishing strokes) at the tops and bottoms of many letters. The practical reason for serifs was that the carvers found it difficult to end wide strokes without ugly blunt lines. And if a chisel slipped while squaring off an end, they could not erase the mistake. But serifs also added a touch of strength and grace to Roman lettering, and are still used today.

Small letters gradually developed from capitals. Scribes who copied books often used uncials (rounded letters) that were easier to form than some capitals. True lower-case letters developed later, when scribes saved space in books by using the smaller letters.

The alphabet today is not well suited to writing words in English. It does not have a separate character for every distinctive sound in English, and it has several characters with more than one sound. Many other languages written with Roman letters use accent marks to show changes in sounds. Linguists use an almost perfect alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has more than 80 characters (see PHONETICS).

Other systems of writing

Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Sanskrit and many alphabets used in various parts of India, developed from the Phoenician system. Arabic and Hebrew were influenced by the Aramaic alphabet and vocabulary.

The Cyrillic alphabet. In the 800's, Saints Cyril and Methodius, two brothers, invented the Glagolithic alphabet while serving as missionaries among the Slavic peoples. They based this alphabet on Greek and on a Slavic language called Macedo-Bulgarian. About 900, the Glagolithic alphabet was modified into the Cyrillic alphabet, which was named for Cyril, the more literary of the brothers. Missionaries from Constantinople (now Istanbul) carried the Cyrillic alphabet with them when they converted the Russians, Serbs, Bulgars, and other Slavic peoples. Missionaries from Rome used the Roman alphabet when they converted the Poles and Czechs. They made spelling changes and used accent marks for special sounds. Serbs and Croats speak Serbo-Croatian. But Serbs write with the Cyrillic or the Roman alphabet, and Croats use the Roman alphabet.

Chinese is the only major language that does not have an alphabetical system of writing. Chinese has thousands of characters that stand for words. Most characters are derived from pictographs of objects. Others are combinations of pictographs used to form abstract words. Still others have no pictographic background at all. Some Chinese characters can be used to express the syllables of proper names or foreign words.

Japanese is based on Chinese, but the characters represent either syllables or words. Most of the Japanese characters are taken directly from Chinese, because Japanese scholars copied the forms, as well as the structure, of the Chinese language.
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Roland Camilleri

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Sydney , Australia.

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