An alphabet is a system of utilizing certain marks, which we call “letters,” to face for particular sounds. There are various different alphabets on the planet right this moment, and it has taken thousands of years to develop them. The English alphabet of twenty-six letters can also be referred to as the “Roman alphabet,” as a result of we acquired it from the traditional Romans, who had gotten it from the Greeks.
We name it alphabet as a result of the primary letters of the Greek alphabet have been called alpha and beta-in others words, calling it the alphabet then was exactly the same as calling it the ABC’s today. The simplest manner of placing an idea down on paper is to draw an image, and that is how males first started to write down, six thousand years ago or more. Our alphabet has come to us regularly from picture-writing yt:crop=16:9 (visit the following website page) of this sort. The picture writing from which our alphabet is descended was accomplished in historic Egypt; it was known as hieroglyphic writing. Image writing was capable of categorical concepts as well as objects.
For example, slightly picture of a person could represent the word “man,” however a picture of a man lying on the bottom with a spear in him would represent the thought “death.” f h e Chinese and even the American Indians developed methods of writing in pictures. But there was not a lot that may very well be stated this manner, and it will have taken lots of of hundreds of pictures to express all the pieces-many more than an individual could hope to learn in a lifetime. Out of the early image-writing got here the use of footage to stand for syllables. Suppose an image of a pole or stake within the ground had been used to signify the phrase “pole,” and an image of a lamp burning to represent the phrase “light.” Placing the two collectively, you would have pole-light, which might imply polite- an idea that would never be expressed by a picture. Using photos on this approach to characterize sounds instead of issues, men had been capable of improve the usefulness of their writing by many times.
The Chinese language nonetheless use this sort of writing in syllables. The difficulty is that there are such a lot of different syllables, it takes a scholar years to study them all. Within the Chinese language, there are greater than fifty thousand and most of these are getting used even today. A Chinese language scholar does not grasp the writing of his language till he’s beyond the age at which an American scholar might have graduated from school-say, twenty-five years old. As compared together with his 1000’s of characters, the American schoolboy has to be taught solely twenty-six letters.
Therefore the following step within the development of the alphabet was to have a symbol, or letter, for every sound that was used in the language being spoken. There are lots of more sounds that a human being can use than we have now in our alphabet, and the alphabets used for different languages have in them sure letters that we don’t need in writing the English language. But in addition we have some letters that they do not need. No alphabet wants greater than thirty or forty letters. A baby can master these in a 12 months or two. Writing with letters as a substitute of with photos is greater than five thousand years old. Simply as we obtained our alphabet from the Greeks, they got theirs from the Semitic peoples-the Phoenicians and the Jews and other historic peoples who spoke Semitic languages.
However, like most Oriental peoples, they wrote from proper to left. When the Greeks took their alphabet, they changed the direction of writing and wrote from left to right as we do today. In doing this, they turned the letters around. You may see, in the first article in this encyclopedia-the article on the letter A-how we obtained our current letter by the turning round of the ancient letters. The precise type of our capital letters was developed chiefly by the traditional Romans. Our small letters, and our handwriting, have been developed as a result of with them it’s potential to put in writing faster.
