Why The Alphabet Is The Way It Is [Archive]

Furtherman

09-19-2006, 09:16 AM

<a href="http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/35550" target="_blank">I did a quick search and found this:</a>This exact question is answered in the book "Imponderables: The Solution to the Mysteries of Everyday Life" by David Feldman. It's a rather long, messy answer, spanning 5 different cultures. I'm not going to type the whole thing out(sorry), but I will try to give a summary. THE EGYPTIANS The Egyptians had 5 distinct stages of writing, with the last stage being very close to the alphabet as it is today. However, even with the advent of letter sounds, they still clung to the first 3 stages. 1. Hieroglyphs as pictures of things: "horse" is a picture of a horse. Every single word needs it's own character, and abstract concenpts cannot be represented. 2. Idea Pictures: a leg can mean not only leg, but running or fast 3. Sound Pictures: One symbol was now used to describe a sound that existed in words of a spoken language rather than a graphic description of the word signified. 4. Syllable Pictures: The same syllable hieroglyph can now appear in many different words. 5. Letter sounds: One symbol now took the place of one letter in a word. They eventually whitted the redundant letters down to 25. THE UGARITS Although the Phoenicians are widely hailed as the inventors of the alphabet, it's now that that it originated in the city of Ugarit in northwest Syria. A tablet was found that has Ugaritic letters displayed opposite a column of known Babylonian syllabic signs, proving that the Ugarits conciously order their alphabets. Although the phonetics of the Ugaritic alphabet were identical to that of the Phoenicians, the actual script was different from the later Phoenician alphabet and the earlier Egyptian and Semetic languages. THE PHOENICIANS Although the Phoenician alphabet probably developed about the same time as the Ugarits, they are much more important because they spread their alphabet throughout much of the world. They were traders who used their alphabet to track inventories, standardize accounting procedures, etc; they left no literature or books behind. They carried their alphabet to most of the major Mediterranian ports by 1000 BC. They had totally dropped out picture sounds and kept only the symbols that signified sounds. The Phoenician's work "aleph" meant "ox," and the letter "a" was made to look like a ox's head. The ox, the most important animal of the time, was the basis for the first letter of most European and Semetic languages, including later, English. They also had no vowels. THE GREEKS The Greeks took their favorite elements from the Semetic and Phoenician languges. They took 16 consonants from the Phoenician language and addes five vowels: alpha, epsilon, upsilon, iota, omikron. Alpha became the first letter of the Greek alphabet. They was not taken from the Phoenician aleph, which was a consonant, but from the Hebrew language, where aleph also happened to mean ox. The first letters of the Hebrew alphabet are "aleph, beth, gemel, dalth," which mean "ox, house, camel, door." The Greek equivilants are alpha, beta, gamma, delta. The Greeks needed vowels to express the sounds they made in their language. The Phoenicians did not have them, and though the Hebrew language did inclufe some vowel sounds,, they were used erratically and sporadically. So the Greeks took Hebrew consonants that had no use in speaking Greek(like aleph) and converted them into vowels. By adding a few consonants of their own, they ended up with 24 letter alphabet. They had no c or v, and some of their letters stood for different sounds than they do now. However, the order was pretty much the same as it is today, with a few exceptions(z was 6th letters). THE ROMANS The Romans were ruled by the Greek speaking Etruscans. Before their declin,e the Romans adopted the Greek alphabet and made changes. They esta