Who Created the Alphabet?
By Jane Sancinito, writing for The Conversation…
A, B, C, D, E, F, G – makes you want to hum the alphabet song. But there’s no real reason why people should learn these letters in this order. There are plenty of ways we could structure the alphabet; the computer keyboard in front of me provides one alternative. Plenty of other alphabets exist too, as well as languages that don’t use alphabets at all.
So why did we end up with this one – and who’s responsible for it?
As a historian, I love “why” questions. I often like them a lot more than “who” questions, because it’s actually really rare for a single person to change the world. Instead, most of history’s biggest innovations come from teamwork, collaboration and groups figuring out how to make life better, easier and more fun.
What is a letter?
The alphabet is a perfect example of this process. Our ABCs, known as the Latin alphabet, are the result of millions of people over thousands of years slowly working together and ultimately agreeing on which letters to use and under what circumstances.
To figure out why they settled on the version we have today, you first need to understand what a letter is and what an alphabet is. Then, you can trace your way back to the very first examples of both.
Letters are symbols, just like emojis or crosswalk signs. Letters are shapes that we – the users – associate with a sound in a particular language.
But many letters change sound completely when they appear in a different language. The English “H,” for example, makes a “ha” sound, but the same symbol “H” is pronounced as “en” in Russian; in the Cyrillic alphabet, “H” makes a “n” sound.
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