Becky Loraas, age 14, of Duluth, Minn., for her question:
WHO STARTED THE ALPHABET?
Our alphabet is one of our most valuable possessions. We need it to use the telephone book, to write notes, to read directions, books and newspapers. We inherited it from a long line of ancestors dating back into earliest history. Knowing how letters of the alphabet were created is both interesting and useful.
History began when our ancestors discovered writing and reading. Then they could record their daily happenings and report the passing of historic events. The great invention was born when people began to settle in a few widely separated fertile valleys. Each community seems to have invented its own method of writing. The Egyptians by the Nile made an early start, perhaps 6,000 years ago. Some of our letters descended from their first attempts at writing.
The early methods were different but almost everywhere the basic idea was the same. The alphabet progressed from pictures to letters. The first writings were picturegrams. An ox was a simple sketch of a four legged animal with horns on his head. In time, the pictures were simplified to sketchy hieroglyphs. The hieroglyph for the ox was just a square with two horns. But neither pictures nor hieroglyphs could be used for abstract words.
It took ages to figure how this could be done. But finally the hieroglyphs were used as letters, each one with a sound of its own. Its sound was the first sound of the word it once represented. For example, the ox symbol would be the first sound of the word ox. Several different phonetic symbols could be strung together to sound out those impossible abstract words.
It took ages to figure how this could be done. But finally the hieroglyphs were used as letters, each one with a sound of its own. Its sound was the first sound of the word it once represented. For example, the ox symbol would be the first sound of the word ox. Several different phonetic symbols could be strung together to sound out those impossible abstract words.
The phonetic symbols that descended from ancient pictures became letters. The ox letter was borrowed and modified by the Greeks and later by the Romans. Finally it became our letter A.
Each of Ipur letters has its own ancient story to tell. You can trace back their separate histories in an encyclopaedia in the library.
In addition to the English alphabet which we use, other much used alphabets include the Arabic, German, Greek, Hebrew and Russian. It took our ancestors countless generations to figure out the basic plot and refine the details from pictures to letters. And they had to use whatever writing materials were available. Some used wooden sticks to make marks on tablets of clay while others wrote on animal skins. The Egyptians made a sort of paper from the papyrus reeds that grew by the Nile.