Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present

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The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul [a] ( English: / ˈ h ɑː n ɡ uː l/ HAHN-gool; [1] Korean: 한글) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl ( 조선글) in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. [2] [3] [4] The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them, and they are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features; similarly, the vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a featural writing system. [5] [6] [7] It has been described as a syllabic alphabet as it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems, although it is not necessarily an abugida. [6] [8] The late 16th century, however, saw a revival of the Korean alphabet as gasa and sijo poetry flourished. In the 17th century, the Korean alphabet novels became a major genre. [28] However, the use of the Korean alphabet had gone without orthographical standardization for so long that spelling had become quite irregular. [25] Songangasa, a collection of poems by Jeong Cheol, printed in 1768. Phoenician colonization allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. In Greece, the script was modified to add the vowels, giving rise to the first true alphabet. The Greeks took letters which did not represent sounds that existed in Greek and changed them to represent the vowels. This marks the creation of a "true" alphabet, with both vowels and consonants as explicit symbols in a single script. In its early years, there were many variants of the Greek alphabet, a situation which caused many different alphabets to evolve from it. Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. " First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21. What’s more, the three-line message seems to be making a rather good joke. In the Iliad, the epic poem about the Trojan War ascribed to Homer, the aged Greek king Nestor is said to have possessed a large and expensive, precious-metal drinking goblet.

Barry B. Powell, Homer and Origin of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Alphabet, Hebrew". Encyclopaedia Judaica (CD-ROM Edition Version 1.0). Ed. Cecil Roth. Keter Publishing House. ISBN 965-07-0665-8 The Alphabets of Asia Minor are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet. The problem at the core of the Dewey system is, says Flanders, that it is "hugely value-laden". More stories from Late Night Live: Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986.

The shape of he continues hillul "jubilation" but the name means "window". [ citation needed] see: He (letter)#Origins. Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms. New York: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1995. P.It looked completely differently in Semitic and its current form was developed much later by Romans. Greek letter Pi that represents the same sound is more similar to modern Cyrillic alphabet. Q. Came from the Etruscans language via Roman adaptation. Another document published in 1446 and titled Hunminjeong'eum Haerye ( Hunminjeong'eum Explanation and Examples) was discovered in 1940. This document explains that the design of the consonant letters is based on articulatory phonetics and the design of the vowel letters is based on the principles of yin and yang and vowel harmony. [24] Opposition [ edit ]

Some Rights Reserved (2009-2023) under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license unless otherwise noted. First, is there any connection between the Egyptian and West Semitic sound values of the early alphabet’s sign inventory? No. The alphabet was derived from the Egyptian sign inventory on a strictly visual basis, with no reference to the Egyptian sound values. This is clear from a comparison between the sound values of each of the 26 probable original alphabetic signs and their Egyptian sources. In no case do they attempt to represent the same sound.

King Yeonsangun banned the study and publication of the Korean alphabet in 1504, after a document criticizing the king was published. [26] Similarly, King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of Eonmun, a governmental institution related to Hangul research, in 1506. [27] Revival [ edit ] Most of us learn the alphabet at kindergarten, singing our way from 'A for apple' through to 'Z for zebra' without ever stopping to wonder why the letters are arranged in that particular sequence. According to Herodotus, [16] the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet— phoinikeia grammata, "Phoenician letters"—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet. Herodotus claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. Writing wasn’t just invented once by a single person. Many different ancient societies invented writing at different times and places.

Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. there are languages for which an alphabet is not an ideal writing system. The Semitic abjads really do fit the structure of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic very well, [more] than an alphabet would [...], since the spelling ensures that each root looks the same through its plethora of inflections and derivations." Peter Daniels, The World's Writing Systems, p. 27. Louise Pryke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Partners The Runic alphabet is derived from Italic, the Cyrillic alphabet from medieval Greek. The Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic scripts are derived from Aramaic (the latter as a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean). Ge'ez is from South Arabian. Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek or Chalcidian, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia Minor (also called Asian Greece i.e. present-day aegean Turkey). The Athenians ( c. 400 BCE) adopted that latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. After first writing right to left, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left. Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon to left-to-right writing.

According to a 1904 theory by Theodor Nöldeke, some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script. [ dubious – discuss] This includes: Joel M. Hoffman, In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, 2004, ISBN 0-8147-3654-8. Humans began to communicate using speech some 50,000 years ago but writing has only been a part of the human story for the last 5,000 years. Han'gŭl in the McCune–Reischauer system, is often capitalized and rendered without the diacritics when used as an English word, Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries.