Edith Meldrum, age 9, of Beaconsfield, Province Quebec, Canada, for her question:

How did the alphabet get started?

The alphabet got started long ago and far away. Nobody wrote down the exact details. How could they? They had to invent all the letters and make words from them before they could write anything at all. And this took a very, very long time because the alphabet was invented in easy stages. Experts have found some old writings and these give us a few hints about how things happened. It seems that the first people who tried to write used pictures instead of words.

This was a sensible idea. When a person wanted to send a note about a boat trip, he drew a picture of a boat on the water. If he wanted to mention a snake, he could draw a squiggly snake. In time the pictures were simplified into just plain lines. For example, perhaps the squiggly snake became an S shaped letter. When they used it in a word, they gave it a snakey S sound. Every letter has a different story and many changes were made. But at last the old pictures were changed to letters    and the letters were used to build words.