THE ALPHABET
ONE-SIGN ONE-SOUND
WRITING SYSTEM
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THE ALPHABET
ONE-SIGN ONE-SOUND
WRITING SYSTEM
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Here’s something different. Beer drinkers helped originate the alphabet. Sounds pretty incredible, doesn’t it? Well, Jack Kilman seems to believe it to be so. He says in his website, The Scriptorium, that “written language was the product of an agrarian society” that had cultivated grain. This grain was then used for the production of beer, and these ancient people needed to keep track of their beer. Therefore, a formal method of recordkeeping was required. However, though this thought seems amusing, he is probably correct in saying that the need for a writing system must have originated with “the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to more permanent agrarian encampments when it became necessary to count one’s property, whether it be parcels of land, animals, or measures of grain or to transfer that property to another individual or another settlement.” Since that shift occurred, it appeared that the development of the alphabet became inevitable.
The first system of writing/recordkeeping seems to have appeared about 9000 years ago with the discovery of incised “counting tokens.” These may have been stones that had pictures or symbols carved into them. Many years later, between the years of 4100 to 3800 BCE, these tokens began to change into pieces of clay that were impressed or inscribed with pictures of land, grain, or cattle. These clay tokens were used to identify one’s ownership of whatever piece of property appeared on the token. Later, in approximately 3100 BCE, the Egyptian syllabic system that used hieroglyphs developed. These hieroglyphs included pictures that eventually represented the first sound in that word. That symbol could then be used over and over without referring to the literal meaning of the picture. This use of a picture to represent a sound is called “acrophony,” and it was the first step in the development of an actual alphabet.
The next step was how the Egyptian system affected the writing system of the Sinaitic people in approximately 1700 BCE when Sinai came under Egyptian rule. It is here where the early Semitic scripts used the acrophonic principle. This Semitic system is called the Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite system, which also uses pictures to represent consonant sounds. Additionally, the Sinaitic people incorporated about thirty Egyptian signs. However, the Proto-Sinaitic system is just a precursor for a bigger jump in alphabet history. From this system evolved the Phoenician alphabet, which is the grandfather of many alphabets, including the Latin/Roman alphabet which is used today.
The Phoenician alphabet appeared as early as the fifteenth century BCE and includes 22 letters, none of which are vowels. And it is thought that the Phoenicians created this alphabet because they needed an efficient method of recordkeeping to help keep track of their business transactions while traveling from place to place to sell their wares. Later, around 1000 BCE, this alphabet was introduced to the Greeks, who adopted and later altered it. The Greek alphabet has 24 letters that include symbols for vowels. This was an improvement in comparison to the Phoenician alphabet, and it later influenced the Etruscan, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabets (Click on Latin to see the evolution of the Latin alphabet's symbols from the Phoenician era to current day.), and once Rome had a coordinated alphabet, it spread throughout the world, since the Roman empire was vast. This spread has certainly influenced and affected the English language, since this is the alphabet that is used today.
Bibliography
Bett, Steve. “The Alphabet.” Alfabets, Spelling & Pronunciation. 9 June 2005.
<http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/vangogh/555/Spell/alfabet-abbr.html>.
“Evolution of Alphabets.” Robert Fradkin. 2000. Dept. of Asian and East European
Languages, University of Maryland. 10 June 2005.
<http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/latin.html>.
Kilmon, Jack. “The History of Writing.” The Scriptorium. 8 June 2005.
<http://www.historian.net/hxwrite.htm>.
“The Phoenician Alphabet.” A Bequest Unearth, Phoenicia, Encyclopedia Phoeniciana. 2005.
8 June 2005. <http://www.phoenicia.org/alphabet.html>.
“Proto-Sinaitic.” Ancient Scripts.com. 8 June 2005.
<http://www.ancientscripts.com/protosinaitic.html>.