What is the alphabet, its meaning and history

Since ancient times, people have sought to communicate with each other in order to survive. Thus began to form tribes, groups of tribes, and then peoples. With each decade, our ancestors developed more and more and at one point decided to invent something that would help fix their thoughts on stones and papyri. It's about the alphabet. When did it first appear? How was it developed and made up? And what is the alphabet? We'll figure it out right now.

The first resemblance of the alphabet in the conventional sense of the word was the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were carved on the inner walls of the tombs of notable representatives of society, as well as inside the temples. But these symbols were more of a picture than letters, because many of them depicted specific objects. The basis of written speech in antiquity was the Phoenician alphabet invented approximately 4000 years ago. The Phoenician alphabet became the basis for the languages of many other peoples who were contemporaries of this civilization: Greeks, Romans and some others.

Why is the alphabet so important? This invention has made it possible to systematize sounds that a person is able to publish, and express them in the form of certain symbols, which these sounds will mean. Let us summarize what an alphabet is. The alphabet is a set of symbols arranged in a certain order and personifying the sounds pronounced by a person on paper.

In the modern world, each nation has its own alphabet, but some letters may coincide. This trend is especially often observed in neighboring countries or in countries whose official languages originated from one common ancestor. So, for example, the alphabets of many European states were formed from the Latin language and related adverbs, so they can find a lot of similarities both in writing and in pronunciation of letters.

There is an interesting regularity: in any language, consonants are several times larger than vowels. An example of this fact is the English alphabet. There are 26 letters in it, of which only 6 can be sung, that is, designating vowel sounds.

Many people wonder why most of the peoples of Eastern, Southeast and Central Asia, knowing what an alphabet is, have not made up their own or analogue based on the existing alphabet? The answer is simple - since ancient times their system of writing was built on hieroglyphs, each of which meant some specific word or expression. But these symbols are significantly different from those used by the Egyptians a few thousand years ago. Their signs were mostly pictures, which had a definite meaning. Hieroglyphs of modern nations are compositions of lines of different thickness and length, but they are not drawings.

So, the history of letters and symbols is many hundreds of years old. It illustrates all the changes that preceded the development of writing, and talks about the emergence of ancient languages, from which modern alphabets were formed. Therefore, knowing what an alphabet is, you can discover the history of your own alphabet and your people as a whole.