Essay On The Alphabet

One of the first things we learn at school is our ABC’s, but do we ever learn where the alphabet originates? It is known as the Latin alphabet, so why has it got a Greek name? Plus it was not invented by the Greeks. Where does it originate from?

Egypt, Samaria and the Origins of Writing

It seems that writing originated in Mesopotamia and also ancient Egypt, where both were developed independent of each other, and they are notably very different.

Hieroglyphs.

The ancient Egyptians created a very different system of writing than the Sumerians, although it was developed around the same time as cuneiform. However, it consisted of tiny pictures or glyphs, which were used to represent words. As writing was developed and became more widespread, simpler glyphs developed giving us hieratic and demotic scripts, but these are not technically hieroglyphs, but were easier to use on papyrus. Few Egyptians were able to read hieroglyphs by the 4th century.

Cuneiform.

This is the writing system that was developed by the ancient Sumerians, between 3500 and 3100 BC. The Sumerians were one of the first developing civilizations in the world, and could be found living between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the area we now know as Iraq. Their system of writing was made up of wedge shaped marks that were formed using the edge of a stylus being pressed into the clay. The clay was then heated so the imprints could not be destroyed and could be used later.

“Cuneiform” is a Greek word meaning “wedge-shaped.” By the 2nd century AD, the script had disappeared and all knowledge on how to read it lost until people began to decipher it in the 19th century, with successful completion of this in the 1850’s. It is estimated that up to two million cuneiform tab...

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... letters came into use during the Middle Ages, with the popularity of cursive writing. Previous to the Middle Ages writing was only done in print, and it was during this time that the English picked up the Latin alphabet, and eventually brought it to us. Languages that use the Latin script today usually use capital letters to start paragraphs, sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over the years, and other languages have various rules for this.

The alphabet has undergone multiple alterations in its thousand years of history, but it is now the most used alphabet used today. It is used all across Europe and around the world for thousands of different languages, including, of course, our own. Over time the alphabet we use today has lost a few special characters, but remains quite similar to the version of the Roman alphabet we inherited.