Transcript Slide 1

Origins of the Alphabet
Lascaux may be the most beautiful Paleolithic painted cave in the world. It
contains more than 1500 pictures of animals, all of them are 17,000 years old.
17,490 B.C
Cave painting at Lascaux
What is an alphabet ?
An alphabet is
a standardized set of letters
• Do You Know?
• ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
• Although we call it the Latin alphabet, and it has a Greek name, the
alphabet actually has far older origins.
Egypt, Sumeria and the Origins of Writing
Writing began in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
Both writing systems were developed independently, and they
are very different from each other.
Cuneiform. Cuneiform is the system of writing
developed by the ancient Sumerians, between 3500 and
3100 BC. Sumeria was one of the first civilizations to develop
in the world. It resided in the area of what is now Iraq,
between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Their system of
writing consisted of wedge shaped marks made with the edge
of a stylus pressed into clay. The clay would then be baked
so the marks could not be removed. “Cuneiform” is a Greek
word meaning “wedge-shaped.”
Hieroglyphs. The ancient Egyptians, another of the first
civilizations, developed a very different system of writing than
the Sumerians. It was developed about the same time as
cuneiform, but involved tiny pictures or glyphs which were
used to represent words.
The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing.
The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 BC to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt
(see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian
hieroglyphs. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for
example the Greek and Latin alphabets, or were inspired by its design.
Karnak Temple where some of the best preserved writing still exists.
Hieroglyphs emerged from the preliterate artistic traditions of Egypt.
Most hieroglyphic signs are phonetic in nature,
meaning the sign is read independent of its
visual characteristics (according to the rebus
principle where, for example, the picture of an
eye could stand for the English words eye
When the Egyptians began to write, about 3000 BC,
they wrote from the beginning in ink, on papyrus (pahPIE-russ). Papyrus is a plant that grows wild all over
the Nile river valley, which is to say it is very common
in Egypt. You can cut the long stalks and soak them in
water until they rot a little, and then you lay a lot of
these stalks next to each other, and a lot of other stalks
on top, crossways to the first ones, and then you pound
them flat, until all the stalks get mashed into all the
other ones, and you have something a lot like paper.
The Greeks and the Romans also used a
lot of papyrus, all bought in Egypt because
that is where papyrus grows. But it wasn't
cheap! One sheet probably cost about
what $20 is worth today. So when the
Islamic empire learned how to make paper
from rags from the Chinese about 700 AD,
people quickly stopped using papyrus,
even in Egypt.
Proto-Canaanite alphabet
It appeared between 1700-1500BC, sometimes
during Hyksos era.
• Neither of these writing systems
incorporated a true alphabet.
• The majority of symbols were used to identify whole
words, or multiple syllables, unlike our own monosyllabic
alphabet. Because of this they incorporated a far greater
range of symbols in order to write than cultures using an
alphabet
The Phoenicians and the First Alphabet
The developers of the first true
alphabet were the Phoenicians.
The Phoenicians originate from the coast of
the Mediterranean, in what is now Lebanon.
They were a trading and seafaring culture,
and had contact with both the Egyptians and
the Sumerians.
The Phoenicians had closer contact with the
Egyptians than with the Sumerians. For
much of their history they were at times
under Egyptian control. Their writing symbols
developed somewhat from Egyptian
hieroglyphs.
The Phoenician alphabet took several
centuries to develop, but had been fairly well
completed by about 1000 BC, over 2000
years after the development of the first
writing system in Sumeria.
The original Phoenician alphabet consisted of
22 letters, none of which were vowels.
Phoenician alphabet
It became one of the most
widely used writing
systems, and was spread
by traders of Phoenicia
across Europe and the
Middle East, where it
became used for a variety
of languages and spawned
many subsequent scripts.
Many modern writing
systems thought to have
descended from
Phoenician cover much of
the world
The Greek Alphabet
It is from the Greeks that we get our name for
the word “alphabet.” It comes form the first
two letters of their alphabet, Alpha and Beta.
These names actually came from the
Phoenicians; however, whose first two letters
were ‘Aleph and Beth.
Scholars are not quite sure when the Greeks first came into contact with the Phoenician
alphabet; however it seems to have been about 1000 BC. They changed the alphabet some,
both the look of the symbols as well as adding some symbols of their own. For example their
alphabet had an F character, unlike the Phoenicians, although it originally stood for the “w”
sound.” Because different languages use different sounds, the need to create new letters was
common as the alphabet was distributed.
The Greeks were the first to introduce vowels into
the alphabet. While the Phoenicians did have the
letter “aleph” which became “alpha,” it originally
represented a gutteral tone, rather than what we
consider the letter “a.” Within Greece there were
many different alphabets, most of them had about
25 letters and were mostly similar, with some slight
differences.
Early Greek alphabet on pottery in the National Archaeological
Museum of Athens
The most notable change in the Greek alphabet, as
an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet,
Pictograph
Picture-writing of the American Indian
Ideograph
The Latin alphabet
The Etruscan peoples of Italy picked up
the alphabet from the Greeks, in about the
7th Century BC, and from the Etruscans it
ultimately came to the Romans.
During its nearly thousand year history,
the Roman Republic and later the Roman
Empire grew to be the most influential
power in the world, and one of the most
influential empires of history. At its height
the Roman Empire spread from England
to northern Africa, from Spain to
Mesopotamia.
The Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th
Century AD, but its alphabet would
remain. The illiterate barbarians who
conquered the remains of the Roman
Empire would ultimately adopt its alphabet
as they developed their own written
languages.
The lapidary (stone-engraved) capital letters of
Roman Empirean period (from the 1th century BC
to the 5th century AD). Although the Roman
alphabet took many forms, Capitalis Monumentalis
(Roman capitals) have exerted the most influence
on lettering and typographic developrment. Many
versions of these exist, principally on inscriptions.
The most famous example is on the column of
Imperor Trajan in Roman Forum from 114 AD.
There was no word spaces and words were
divided by centerpoints.
Greek letters used in mathematics, science, and engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_letters_used_in_mathematics
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely
used alphabetic writing system in the world today.
Latin alphabet world distribution. The dark green areas shows the countries where
this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the
alphabet co-exists with other scripts.
Changes to the Latin alphabet
There have been some changes in the Latin
alphabet since it was finalized under Roman
authority. Originally the letter C stood for both g
and k. The letter I stood for both i and j. V stood
for both U and V.
The original alphabets did
not have lower case
letters. Lower case letters
came during the Middle
Ages, with the
development of cursive
writing.
Prior to the Middle Ages all
writing was done in PRINT
It was during this time that
the English picked up the
Latin alphabet, and
eventually brought it to us.
The alphabet has undergone many changes in its
thousand years of history, but it has become the most
used alphabet in the world today. It is used all across
Europe and around the world for thousands of different
languages
One reconstruction of 23
letters, equivalent to the
Phoenician alphabet
which evolved from it,
follows. The Latin
descendants are given in
parentheses.
1.
alp "ox" (A)
2.
b bet "house" (B)
3.
g gaml "throwstick" (C, G)
4.
d digg "fish" (D)
5.
h haw / hll "jubilation" (E)
6.
w waw "hook" (F, U, V, W, Y)
7.
z zen /ziqq "manacle" (Z)
8.
ḥ ḥet "courtyard" (H)
9.
ṭ ṭēt ([[]]) "wheel"
10.
y yad "arm" (I, J)
11.
k kap "hand" (K)
12.
l lamd "goad" (L)
13.
m mem "water" (M)
14.
n naḥš "snake" (N)
15.
s samek "fish" (X)
16.
ʻ ʿen "eye" (O)
17.
p piʾt "corner" (P)
18.
ṣ ṣad "plant"
19.
q qup "monkey" (Q)
20.
r raʾs "head" (R)
21.
š/ś šimš "sun, the Uraeus" (S)
22.
t taw "signature" (T)
23.
ġ ġʿen "thread" (Gh)
Arabic
The influence of Arabic has been most
important in Islamic countries.
The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are
indisputably writing are the Oracle bone
script
Neolithic signs
The legend of the creation of chinese characters
According to legend, though, Chinese characters were
invented earlier by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC),
Ancient Khmer script engraved on stone.
Replica of the Ramkhamhaeng
inscription, the oldest inscription
using Thai script
Sanskrit (संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for
short संस्कृतम ् saṃskṛtam) is a classical
language of India
Pali (IAST: Pāḷi) is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect
or prakrit. It is best known as the language of
the earliest extant Buddhist canon