The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

The first alphabet
How it all began

Imagine yourself back when you were learning the alphabet for the very first time. Twenty-six different letters—you probably thought you’d never be able to remember them all. But have you ever wondered where those strange shapes came from in the first place?

The very earliest writing in the world started in the area now known as Iraq in about 4000 BC. It’s called cuneiform, which means “wedge-shaped.” You know when you play with putty or clay, and you dig your fingernails into it to make shapes? Cuneiform was a bit like that—it was a way of writing by pressing wedges into soft clay to make signs for words and sounds. It looked like this:

In ancient Egypt they did something a bit different. They carved or drew little pictures to show sounds or ideas. This kind of writing is called hieroglyphs, which means “holy writing” because it was mostly used by priests. Here’s an example of a hieroglyph:

Can you guess what the word means? (I’ll give you a hint—look at the very last picture. Meow!)

But neither cuneiform nor hieroglyphs were really alphabets. In an alphabet like ours, the signs or letters are supposed to stand only for sounds. To write the word cat, we use three letters to show those three sounds: c a t. But in writing systems like cuneiform and hieroglyphs, only some of the signs stood for sounds, while others stood for ideas or whole words, and sometimes these were combined (like the word for cat above—the first three pictures stand for sounds, while the last picture sums up the whole word). That sort of writing is a lot more complicated to write and to remember than an alphabet—in cuneiform alone there were about 1,500 different combinations!

The Phoenicians, who lived north of Egypt as far up as modern-day Lebanon and Syria, are said to be the first people who used an actual alphabet. It looked like this:

The first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet were called “aleph” and “beth.” (Get it? Aleph-beth—Alphabet!) There were 22 letters, all consonants. Ys, thts rght, jst cnsnnts . . . The first letter, aleph, was not actually an A as we know it, but a funny sort of glugging sound in the throat. (Okay, you can stop glugging now.)

Anyway, because it made life simpler and writing quicker and easier, the Phoenician alphabet started to catch on, glug and all. The ancient Hebrew alphabet that most of the Bible was first written in is based on the Phoenician alphabet. The ancient Greeks adopted it too, adding extra letters for the vowels in around 1000 BC. (Phw! Tht ws lcky!) This is what the Greek alphabet looked like:

This alphabet eventually turned into the alphabet for Russian, Bulgarian, and other languages in that part of the world. In Italy, though, the Greek alphabet was adapted by the Etruscans, an amazing ancient people who lived in Italy before even the Romans did. This is how the Etruscans wrote their letters. (Are some of these starting to look familiar?)

The Romans got hold of the Etruscan alphabet, changed it a bit, and used it to write their language, Latin. It’s more or less this Roman alphabet that we use to write English today—and French and Spanish and Italian and lots and lots of other languages as well. In fact, the Roman alphabet is now the most widely used alphabet in the world. Have you ever looked at the names of the fonts on your computer? One of the most popular fonts is called Roman—and now you know why!

So you thought kindergarten was hard . . .

It probably took you a while to learn the 26 letters of the alphabet back when you started school. But actually, you should count yourself lucky. Some languages use alphabets with many more letters than that. Russian, for example, has 33 letters, and the Khmer language of Cambodia has over 70. And in China and Japan, where they write with signs called characters, there are hundreds, even thousands of different shapes to remember. Japanese primary school children are expected to learn about a thousand characters before they can go on to high school!

Okay. But why do we use a Roman alphabet for writing in English? Why don’t we have an English alphabet? Well, that’s exactly what the Word Snoop wondered too, so I waited until it was dark, and then I crept down a few hallways to do some snooping . . .