Keegan James Massingill
Behan 6th period
Latin Research Paper Rough Draft
02 May 2018
How the alphabet originated
The alphabet originated from many different languages and cultures and has changed a lot over the generations that is has been past down from. The alphabet dates back over four thousand years and has more characters than just the normal A-Z. The roots of the Alphabet started out with Latin letters and hieroglyphics. Some languages used pictures or symbols, also known as glyphs, to communicate without sound. Need a thesis.
The Greeks and Phoenicians were the first developers of the alphabetic glyphs, but then it was later adopted by the Latins, who used it and mixed it with Etruscan characters, including F and S. But G, J, V, U, W, Y, and Z did not exist within their alphabet. By the time the Romans adopted it, J, U, V, and W were the only letters
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Accented letters [ÀáÊëĨȉØȏŲṻ] were used to change the pronunciation of a certain letter in a syllable of a word. The French word “déjà vu” uses accents over vowels to change the pronunciation and sound of the word. In Latin, the Macron [ ¯ ] (Or macron combined with another accent [ǟḕṓ]) is a common way of writing words. For example, excūsātiōnēs, meaning excuse, uses multiple macrons [also known as long marks] to indicate how the vowels should be pronounced.
The way that the alphabet was arranged dates back to its very roots. In the 1920s, archaeologists found a dozen stone slabs with alphabetic writing on them in Syria that are from the fourteenth century BC. They preserve the order of the Ugaritic alphabet. "Northern Semitic order" is related to the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets and features bits and pieces of an order similar to the order we use today. As the alphabet traveled around the world, those who adopted it did very little to change the basic order. The Phoenician alphabet (900 B.C.) looked more like Egyptian
Cuneiform was the first ever form of writing. The Sumerians were the main inventors of this writing. The symbol as we know them now consist of lines and wedges. One of the
John McWhorter, the author of The Power of Babel, gives a brief history of human languages. The title is from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The story tells of the people had only one language and decided to build a tower. Then, God gives them different languages. As a result, the event was the derivation of different cultures and languages. Through McWhorter’s view of how languages derived from the past 150,000 years, he states that the one original language transformed into six thousand new languages. The book has seven chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter is “The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones” discusses the question, “What happened to the first language?”( McWhorter 16). The second chapter is “The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages.” Then, The third chapter
The need for writing in Uruk was drastically different than that of the Egyptians, however. As evidenced at the archaeological site of Hierakonpolis, the Egyptian sy...
Egyptian hieroglyphs were carved in stone, and later hieratic script was written on papyrus. However, Olmec glyphs was discovered on cylinders. Hence, Egyptians and Olmec had different types of writing, and different places to write.
civilization. They started the Olympic games. Greeks come up with the idea of an alphabet
Still, there are many other writing systems of numerous lost civilizations that have yet to be deciphered. Until then, we can only make well thought inferences, and educated guesses until the next Rosetta Stone is unearthed. Works Cited 1. What is the difference between a. and a. Budge, Sir E. A. Wallis. Egyptian Language- Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
82).” According to Walter Ong, the act of communication through writing heightens ones consciousness and begins to change the way in which the writer thinks. This in turn facilitates the development of increasingly sophisticated technological advancements. Early pictographs were typically monotone and very simplistic in nature. However, as the technology evolved, humankind developed multi-hued writing media that improved the visual accuracy of the images created and subsequently improved the complexity of the message delivered. Essentially more visual detail equals a more complex symbology and abstraction. Some major milestones in the evolution of communication technology include the simplification of earlier literal depictions in the late Paleolithic era, the development of the first “alphabets” as quasi-abstract symbols representing the basic sounds of spoken language. These early alphabets were extremely complex and cumbersome until the Phoenicians developed a “totally abstract and alphabetical system of twenty-two simple phonetic signs, replacing the formidable complexity of cuneiform and hieroglyphs (Higgins, 2003).” The inhabitants of Greece and Rome adopted this system of writing which was in effect by 1500 B.C. and later developed what we know as the
It was no longer enough for the 26 letters of the alphabet to function only as phonetic symbols. The industrial age transformed these signs into abstract visual forms projecting a variety of shapes to be consumed by the public eye.
The first symbol pictures "gal," or "great," and the second pictures "lu," or "man." Eventually, this pictorial writing developed into a more abstract series of wedges and hooks. These wedges and hooks are the original cuneiform and represented in Sumerian entire words (this is called ideographic and the word symbols are called ideograms, which means "concept writing"); the Semites who adopted this writing, however, spoke an entirely different language, in fact, a language as different from Sumerian as English is different from Japanese. In order to adapt this foreign writing to a Semitic language, the Akkadians converted it in part to a syllabic writing system; individual signs represent entire syllables. However, in addition to syllable symbols, some cuneiform symbols are ideograms ("picture words") representing an entire word; these ideograms might also, in other contexts, be simply syllables. For instance, in Assyrian, the cuneiform for the syllable "ki" is written.
In chapter one of History begins at Sumer, Kramer states how the “Sumerian school was a direct outgrowth of the invention and development of the cuneiform system” (p.3) Essentially, the Sumerian’s were the first complex society to introduce a form of writing. It is a known fact that in modern America the people do not communicate writing by forms and variations of pictographs, but with an alphabetical system. The alphabet that is used today has evolved from what the ancient Sumerians had invented at the end of the third millennium B.C. However, the alphabet is only a stepping-stone to one of the many connections Kramer states is similar between modern times and the ancient Sumerians. According to History begins at Sumer, their writing system was a bridge to their school system. The original goal of the Sumerian school was to train the scribes. Yet, the Sumerian school was also the center of creative writing. The Sumerian school therefore, in a sense, ...
The Mediterranean Sea has spawned many civilizations through history. The Phoenicians, which originated around 1200 BCE, is one example. Despite the rather small size of this civilization, its impact on our world has been considerable. Being a seafaring nation, the Phoenicians established colonies all over the Mediterranean area, including the present-day cities of Carthage and Tripoli. As notable traders, they shared cultures with many nations, which allowed their invention of the alphabet to spread throughout Eurasia. The Phoenician Empire continued to evolve until its eventual incorporation into the Persian and Macedonian Empires, around 400 BCE.
When writing, hieroglyphs are separated into three main groups: ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives. The ideograms were hieroglyphs used either to directly represent the object pictured, such as a picture of a building representing a building, or they were used to represent something closely related to the symbol, such as a picture of walking legs representing movement. The second type, phonograms, were used to phonetically sound out words. This is similar to a language such as English where each symbol represents a sound instead of an object, and multiple hieroglyphs would be used to together to form words which could be completely unrelated to the pictures drawn. This could lead to a lot of confusion as most hieroglyphs could be used as ideograms or as phonograms. This is why there was a third type, determinatives. Determinatives were generally hieroglyphs that were added after a set of phonograms to show that they should be read phonetically instead of as ideograms. The determinative itself was not sounded out when read, but they were used to show where a word ended and also help with the meaning of the word. For example a symbol of walking legs used as the determinative would show the word had something to do with movement or travel (Allen,
The Italic languages, as its name suggest, come from the ancient Indo-European languages that were spoken in Italy. The most prominent of these languages is Latin, which mostly gave rise to many of the surviving Italic languages in the modern age. Latin began as a local language among others and it was not anticipated to dominate among its sister languages (Fortson 245). It was originally spoken among a tribe that worked on agricultural settlements named Latini, whose origins were in a region called Latium. Latium was located on the western coast and spread out centrall...
Now here is some information of background of the Gurmukhi alphabet. The Gurmukhi alphabet is an alphabet that was established a...