First, an appetizer: a couple pathologies for you:
- Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
- Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia
Next, the main course: Alphabet soup!
Let's use the source of all known true and factually verified
knowledge, Wikipedia, one of the greatest accomplishments of the
21st century, to explore the alphabet.
Alphabet!
An alphabet is a way to represent the sounds of a language.
Typically, an alphabet uses one symbol for each phoneme in a
language.
What's a phoneme? the smallest unit of sound that can differentiate
meaning. So take cat, bat, rat, tat, sat, fat, gnat, pat, zat, dat,
gat, chat, that, shat, hat, at, yat, jat, mat, nat, vat, and lat,
all of which are, arguably, words in English. The difference between
them in every case is just one phoneme.
We have, I think, 44 phonemes in English. Other languages have very
different phonemes than English. Hawaiian may have as few as 13, but
it depends how you count them.
But that's a digression: back to the alphabet. A perfect alphabet
would have one symbol for each phoneme. Ours is not perfect, but
it's the one we have.
- Where did our alphabet come from?
- first ur-beginnings of an alphabet occurred in Egypt! sort
of. Some hieroglyphics are called 'uniliteral
signs'
- Then some Semitic Canaanite folk decided to talk to their
god(s) with symbols, and they adapted the Egyptian uniliterals
into something more like an alphabet, the Proto-Sinaitic
Script (scroll to the bottom for the symbols)
- Then the Greeks adapted those symbols to make the Greek
Alphabet, which, lucky you, you will be learning for
next class. It is the first alphabet that had symbols for both
consonants and vowels, and so is called by some the first true
alphabet.
- Then the Greeks went off and founded colonies in Italy and
the Etruscans borrowed the alphabet from them to form the Etruscan
Alphabet.
- And finally, the Romans took that Etruscan alphabet and made
it into the Latin
Alphabet.
- We use that Latin alphabet, with a few changes, but the
whole thing is long past due for a thorough overhaul.
- Other alphabets exist:
- The Aramaic alphabet is another branch of the
Egyptian-Proto-Sinaitic alphabet and it gave rise to most of
the modern Middle Eastern writing systems: it's an abjad (no
vowel signs, only consonants) rather than a 'true' alphabet.
- Korean has a great one, called Hangul, which is completely
independent, I think, of ours.
- Bopomofu was used for Chinese sometimes.
Alphabets are fantastic tech!