Since ancient times, people have sought to communicate with each other in order to survive. So tribes, groups of tribes, and then peoples began to form. Our ancestors developed more and more every decade and at one fine moment decided to invent something that would help fix their thoughts on stones, papyri. It's about the alphabet. When did she first appear? How was it developed and formed? And what is the alphabet? Let's figure it out right now.
The first similarity of the alphabet in the generally accepted sense of the word was Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were carved on the inner walls of the tombs of noble representatives of society, as well as inside temples. But these symbols were pictures rather than letters, because many of them depicted specific objects. The basis of written speech in antiquity was the Phoenician alphabet invented about 4000 years ago. The Phoenician alphabet became the basis for the languages of many other peoples,former contemporaries of this civilization: Greeks, Romans and some others.
Why is the alphabet so important? This invention made it possible to systematize the sounds that a person is capable of making and express them in the form of certain symbols that will mean these sounds. Let's summarize what the alphabet is. The alphabet is a set of symbols arranged in a certain order and personifying the sounds pronounced by a person on paper.
In the modern world, each nation has its own alphabet, but some letters may be the same. This trend is especially often observed in neighboring states or in countries whose official languages descended from one common ancestor. So, for example, the alphabets of many European states were formed from the Latin language and related dialects, so you can find many similar letters both in writing and in pronunciation.
An interesting pattern can be traced: in any language there are several times more consonants than vowels. An example of this fact is the alphabet of the English language. It has 26 letters, of which only 6 can be sung, that is, denoting vowel sounds.
Many people are wondering why most of the peoples of East, Southeast and Central Asia, knowing what the alphabet is, did not make their own or an analogue based on the already existing alphabet? The answer is simple - since ancient times, their writing system was based on hieroglyphs, each of which meant a certain word or expression. But these symbols differ significantly from those used by the Egyptians several thousand years ago. Their signs were mostly pictures that had a certain meaning. The hieroglyphs of modern peoples are compositions of lines of different thicknesses and lengths, but they are not drawings.
So, the history of letters and symbols goes back hundreds of years. It illustrates all the changes that preceded the development of writing, and talks about the emergence of ancient languages from which modern alphabets were formed. Therefore, knowing what the alphabet is, you can discover the history of your own alphabet and your people as a whole.
