Friday, April 19, 2013

who invented english alphabet



1.  The modern English alphabet is based on the Latin/Roman alphabet, which in turn was developed from western Greek called Cumaean, by the Romans. This traces a lineage through Phoenician, Proto-Canaanite and Proto-Sinaitic back to Egyptian heiroglyphics, which were developed by the earliest peoples in Egypt, probably with influence by Cuneiform (the oldest written language).


2.  The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs which are called uniliterals, to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names. But the Egyptians never used these "letters" by themselves; they were always mixed in with pictograms, symbols representing whole words.

The first purely phonetic alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians, sometime before 1050 BCE.
The letters in the English alphabet are a mix of ancient rune characters and various Greek and Latin characters. It took over 1500 years to arrive at our modern English alphabet.

Early Christian leaders in Old English times tried to forbid using runes because they were of pagan origin, but the characters fit the language, so they were used anyway. Greek and Latin contributed more letters than any other source.


3.  The alphabet was invented by Phoenicians, and then Greeks invented vowels... Greek alphabet was a little different from ours, which is Latin alphabet... Phoenicians were the first to write in an alphabet made of letters and not of syllables, but they didn't have vowels, and ancient Greeks introduced them. However the alphabet was invented by Phoenicians, but our alphabet is latin alphabet.

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