For the first time, a writing system was developed that could record the true sound of the words spoken in that language. The English word "alphabet" actually is derived from alpha and beta, which are letters number one and two in the ancient Greek alphabet....
Volume 2 of 2. Aryan Alphabets. An account of the origin and development of letters. The writing of these volume was undertaken with the intention of compiling a brief account of recent discoveries as to the origin of the alphabet, and its subsequent developments. Contents: Greek alphabet; al...
The Roman alphabet, with its 26 letters, became the standard for Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. Latin, through its influence on the development of languages across Europe, spread the Roman alphabet far and wide. The spread of Christianity further accelerated the ad...
The letters we use also were used to form Latin words during the time of the Roman Empire more than 2,000 years ago. But our alphabet is even older than the Roman Empire.Linguists, those specially trained language scientists, trace most of our alphabetic characters back to the Canaanites,...
The script was spread by the Phoenicians, whose Thalassocracy allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek, ...
It was what today we call an abjad, which just means that the letters represent only consonants rather than either full syllables (a syllabary) or both consonants and vowels (an alphabet like we use for English). Ancient inscriptions and preserved scrolls show different variations on a common ...
Before the IPA, in 1886, the first version of the IPA chart was formed. It was based on the Roman alphabet, but in order to make it usable for other languages as well, the values attributed to certain symbols were allowed to be different depending on the language. For instance, the “...
The History of the Alphabet explores the history of the letters which make up the modern English alphabet. The series is presented by Kevin Stroud and explores the evolution of the alphabet from its ancient origins to its modern usage. The series traces the development of the alphabet from nort...
Afewyearslater,BraillewenttoaspecialschoolfortheblindinParis.Therehelearned5.(recognize)thetwenty-sixlettersofthealphabetby6. (feel)themwithhisfingers.Braillehadawishthathewouldfindabettersystemofreadingfortheblindsomeday. Oneday,afriendofBraillesreadhimanarticleaboutnightwriting,a7.(write)systemofdotsanddas...
tells the story of ‘how we moved from the arrival of the alphabet around 2000 BCE to the slow unfolding of alphabetical order as a sorting tool some three thousand years later’. It is a welcome exploration of an area that has received relatively little attention compared to the alphabet ...