Alphabet

HISTORY

The Chinese attributed the invention of the alphabet to the four-eyed, dragon-faced god T'sang Chien and said he took the pattern of his symbols from nature - the footprints of birds, the marks on the back of a turtle, and so on.

According to Hindu myth, the god Brahma created the alphabet. He wished to write down his teachings on leaves of gold. But as there was no alphabet in existence, he had to invent it. He did so mostly by copying some of the peculiar tracings formed by the seams in the human skull.

The word alphabet is derived from alpha (α) and beta (β), the names of the first two letters of the classical Greek alphabet.

The earliest known alphabet is from Palestine, about 1700 BC.

The Phoenician alphabet, which comprised 22 letters, all consonants came into use in 1200BC. Separate symbols for each sound were invented so that words could be built up out of them.

The model for all Western alphabets was the Etruscan, itself based on the Greek alphabet, which had modified the Phoenician consonantal alphabet by adding vowel letters to it. It was developed in 800BC.

The letters X, Y and Z are at the end of our alphabet simply because the Romans needed to add them in order to pronounce words in Greek once they had conquered that land.

The first man known to have written down, from scratch, a language which is as yet purely oral was the half Greek, half Goth Ulfilas (310-383). In order to translate the Bible from Greek into the Gothic language he devised a new alphabet to capture accurately the sounds of spoken Gothic, using a total of twenty-seven letters adapted from examples in the Greek and Roman alphabets.

The Egyptian alphabet contained more than 700 hieroglyphs.

The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction "and". It often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð's list of letters from 1011.Similarly, & was regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, an example being in M. B. Moore's 1863 book The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. It was pronounced as the Latin 'et' or later in English 'as and.'

The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and elsewhere and as Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea and China was created by scholars during the Joseon Dynasty. It was described in 1446 in a document titled Hunmin Jeong-eum ("The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People"), after which the alphabet itself was named. The publication date of the Hunmin Jeong-eum, October 9, is a national commemorative day in South Korea, which is called Hangul Day.

Hangul is the only alphabet in the word whose creator, invention day and invention principle is known.

Chosŏn'gŭl (top), and Hangul (bottom) By Esneq5874 - Wikipedia

Benjamin Franklin proposed a phonetic alphabet that got rid of the letters C,J, Q, W, X, and Y, but the American public refused to adopt it.

Sequoyah (c.1770–1843), was a Native American polymath of the Cherokee Nation. Impressed by the writing of the European settlers, he independently created the Cherokee syllabary, which he finished in 1821 This was one of the very few times in recorded history that a member of a pre-literate people created an original, effective writing system. After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825.

Sequoyah by Charles Bird King in 1828.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw campaigned for alphabet reform throughout his life. His new alphabet was designed to eliminate inconsistencies in English spelling. Shaw left a large amount of money to promote his new alphabet but it never became popular.

The Latin alphabet, as we know it now, took its final form in around 1700 when I and j become separate letters as did U and V.

LATIN ALPHABET FACTS

The 26 letters of our alphabet can make 403,290,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations.

The five most frequently used letters in the Latin alphabet are, in order, E T A I S. 1 out of every 8 letters written is an e.

The least used letter in the alphabet is Q.

The letter "W" is the only letter in the alphabet that doesn't have just one syllable – it has three.

The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog." uses every letter of the alphabet.

If you try to say the alphabet without moving your lips or tongue every letter will sound the same.

The dot over an “i” is called a “tittle.”

Before the discovery of x-rays or the popularity of xylophones, alphabet books struggled with examples for "X is for...". Some used Greek figures like Xerxes and Xantippe, but others were lazy and just said "X is a letter, like this X".

NON LATIN ALPHABETS

The Arabic alphabet has no capital letters.

The Hawaiian alphabet consists of 10 vowels and eight consonants (including the ‘okina).

There is a Cyrillic letter so rare it is only used in the phrase "many-eyed Seraphim."

The alphabet of the Taa language, also known as !Xóõ, of Botswana has 126 consonants and 83 ‘click’ sounds. Most speakers live in and around the Kalahari desert, with a few hundred in Namibia.

In the Pirahã language, spoken by a tribe in the Amazon jungle, women have only seven consonants at their command, while men have eight.

The Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea has a 12-letter alphabet, the world’s smallest.

The world’s largest alphabet is Cambodian, with 74 letters.