Curtis Giddens, age 12, of Peoria, Ill., for hip question;‑
How did our alphabet originate?
Our alphabet grew up with the human race and people of many lands helped to develop it, Recorded history began when people learned to write down events, but this first writing was done with pictures. In ancient Egypt there were thousands of standard drawings, each of which stood for an object or an act. Ascribe of these olden days spent years learning to read and write.
These picture words were called hieroglyphs and hieroglyphic writing was used throughout the ancient world until about 3500 years ago. An alphabet: was invented as a sort of shorthand for this cumbersome picture writing about 1500 B.C. We do not know for certain who made this wonderful invention, but scholars have an idea where and why it was made.
It is believed that the ancestor of our alphabet was born when miners from Palestine went to work in turquoise mines just north of the Red Sea. The mines were owned and run by Egyptians, who spoke a different language. The Egyptians were very orderly people and they wanted to keep records of work done in the mines. Instead of teaching their complete language in hieroglyphs, in which each word was represented by a picture, they took a shortcut. They made a simplified sketch of a hiemglyph and gave it a sound. Several of these sketches were put together to show the sounds of a word.
This clever phonetic writing, however, did not solve the language problem. The workers had one for, say, water, the masters had another. It is believed that the Egyptians solved this by showing a lot of their symbols and allowing the workers from Palestine to put their own sounds to them. This, we think, was how the ancestor of our alphabet was born. The result was amazing. The Palestinians learned to write alphabetically.
The Egyptians used their wonderful invention only to meet the needs of the moment and then went back to their cumbersome hiemglyph
The people of Palestine improved on their alphabet by making the letter more and more simple,. We have old records which show that they were using clear script around 1500 B.C. Other peoples, especially the traveling Phoenician merchants of the day, were quick to adopt alphabetic writing. The Greeks learned it from the Phoenicians and by 1000 B.C. alphabetic; writing was used throughout the ancient world.
Scholars have traced back most of our letters to Latin, Greek and Palestinian letters and way back to their remote ancestors, the Egyptian picture‑words. Our letter A is descended from an ancient hieroglyph meaning a bull. Our letter B dates back to an ancient hieroglyph for house. The Greek name for their letter A was alpha and for their letter B was beta ‑ which is how we got our word alphabet.