Alphabet

Alphabet

The twenty-six-letter alphabet used by English-speaking cultures is called the Roman or Latin alphabet, for it was during the Roman Empire that it came to resemble the alphabet we use today. However, the Roman alphabet actually has its roots in ancient Egyptian picture-writing, in which a symbol would be used to denote an entire word (just as the symbols "+" and "$" stand for "plus" and "dollar" in the modern alphabet). Eventually the Egyptians found their hieroglyphics too limiting, and they added new symbols to represent the syllables within words: for example, the word "water" has two syllables, and would thus be represented by two symbols ("wa" and "ter"). By combining the syllabic symbols, words and sentences could be formed. Sometime before 1000 b.c., the Semitic people of Syria and Palestine developed their own alphabet, borrowing largely from the Egyptians. By this time, though, the Egyptian alphabet had grown to several hundred symbols and was difficult to learn. The Semites replaced all of the Egyptian pictures with symbols of their own, simultaneously eliminating all syllabic symbols containing more than one consonant. In the Semitic alphabet, "water" would be written using the symbols WA, TE, and RE (one symbol for each consonant). This made the alphabet, which was composed of approximately thirty symbols, much less cumbersome. The problem with the Semitic alphabet, however, was that it did not distinguish between different vowels; the same symbol was used for WA, WE, and WO, instead of three different symbols. The Semitic alphabet was used for only a few generations before it, too, was modified--this time by the Phoenicians. By eliminating a few more consonants, they reduced the number of symbols to twenty-two. While the Phoenician alphabet was not too different from that of the Semites, it had a greater impact upon the world; this was due, primarily, to the importance of the Phoenician city of Byblos, a major trading port. Thousands of merchants would pass through Byblos, spreading the new language throughout the Mediterranean. The name of this city was later immortalized as the root for the words biblia (Latin, meaning "book") and bible. Though many cultures adopted (and adapted) the Phoenician alphabet, none did so with such lasting impact as the Greeks. At first, the Greek alphabet was nearly identical to the Phoenician, with only minor changes. However, sometime around 800 b.c., the Greeks dropped three of the Phoenician symbols and replaced the remaining letters with symbols of their own. They also changed the direction of their writing, so that words and sentences were read from left-to-right.

The most important change made by the Greeks was the addition of six new symbols. In the Phoenician alphabet, these symbols had been considered "weak consonants" that were occasionally used to distinguish between similar-sounding consonants. The Greek language, however, did not utilize these particular sounds, and so the symbols were made into the vowels a, e, u, long e, and i. Once the vowels had been established it was no longer necessary to have the other symbols represent consonant-vowel pairs: instead of using WA TE RE to spell " water," the Greeks could use one symbol for each consonant and one for each vowel. This twenty-four-letter alphabet was the first to contain individual vowels and consonants. The Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans, who moved to Italy around 700 b.c. They taught the alphabet to the Romans, who modified it even further, dropping the symbols for z, x, and th (x and z were added again at a later time, along with y, and placed at the end of the alphabet). Many historians consider the Roman alphabet to have been completed by 114 a.d., though the letters j and w were not added until the middle ages. The Romans were also instrumental in the development of the style in which the alphabet was written. At first, all letters were capitalized and squarish; however, Roman stonecutters who were required to carve long inscriptions into marble, began to round the edges, making them easier to carve. They also added serifs--little curling strokes at the top and bottom of many letters--so that each letter did not end quite so abruptly (serifs also enabled stonecutters to more easily conceal their mistakes). Eventually, a smaller version of capital letters called unicals began to be used in less formal situations, and eventually evolved into a run-together style called cursive. Meanwhile, scribes, in an effort to conserve paper, had developed the smaller version of capital letters now known as lower case. Although the Roman alphabet has been used to represent the English language for hundreds of years, it is not the ideal system for that language. For example, the letter e can be short, as in pet; long, as in deep; or silent, as in late. The Roman alphabet also does not contain symbols for the th, sh, or qu sounds commonly used in the English language. In addition to the Roman, there are several other major groups of alphabet systems used in the world. The Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit alphabets all evolved from the Aramaic alphabet, which was, in turn, developed from the early Phoenician system. The alphabets used by Russians, Serbs, Poles, and other Slavic cultures are derived from the Cyrillic alphabet developed by Saint Cyril (c.827-869) and Saint Methodius (c. 825-884), who were both Christian missionaries. The Chinese language--used by more people than any other--is still written using thousands of pictures, and is the only major system that does not use an alphabetical system; Japanese, based upon the Chinese alphabet, uses both pictures and syllabic symbols.