if the alpahbet was originated by the Greeks, who decided which letters made what words?

Answer 1

It looks like people are misunderstanding your question. I hope I have this right. I think you are asking WHY the letter the Greeks called "aleph" was used for the a- SOUND. Why did they use THIS symbol, shaped this way, to represent this specific sound?

Well the answer, as others have noted, starts with the fact that it was NOT the Greeks who originally invented the signs/letters. They just borrowed them. It was the Phoenicians who spread their own form of the alphabet around the Mediterranean.

Now the Phoenician alphabet is one form of the alphabet used by various Semitic groups in the area from Syria to Sinai, perhaps as early as 2000 B.C., And we have a pretty good idea of how the earliest alphabet signs were invented.

Basically it worked like this. To represent a sound, they would draw a simple picture of something whose name STARTED with that sound. And that word would be the name by which they called that letter. This is not always clear in later versions of the alphabet because some of these names were later changed/simplified, and the pictures were also adapted to be easier to draw/write (so that they don't necessarily look like the original object).

So, for instance, their first letter was "aleph", a word meaning "ox" -- so the symbol of an ox-head was used to represent the sound with which "aleph" began.

When the Greeks borrowed the alphabet they actually began by borrowing (and adapting) the Phoenician symbols, sounds and many of the Semitic NAMES, even though these did not mean anything in Greek! So for "aleph" they said "alpha", which isn't a word at all. BUT "alpha" DOES begin with the "a" sound that this Greek letter was being used to represent.

(Since the sounds of Greek do not exactly match those of Phoenician, the Greeks would often take one of the borrowed letters and use it for a DIFFERENT sound in Greek. So by the end, the Greek letters have NOTHING to do with the original words and often nothing to do with the sounds that the letters had originally represented.)

Answer 2

Words were around long before the alphabet. The Greek alphabet was just one way of writing down the ideas - each letter stood for a sound, and by "hearing" the letters as you read them, you can hear the words in your head. We still have the same basic idea, except now we have letters that make more than one sound (like "a"), and some sounds that take more than one letter (like "sh"). In China, the people solved the writing problem a different way - pictures represented ideas, instead of sounds. Just two ways of making language stay on paper :-)

Answer 3

"According to legends recounted by Herodotus, the (Greek)alphabet was first introduced to Greece by a Phoenician named Cadmus, who also figures in other Greek mythology."

The Greek alphabet does not seem to have originated from ideograms.

Words existed before alphabets. Letters are just the visual representation of the sounds in the word. The sound associated with a given letter or symbol changes constantly.

Answer 4

The Greeks didn't invent the alphabet. They borrowed and adapted the idea of and alphabet from the Phoenicians, who lived in the eastern Mediterranean.

Answer 5

it was originated by the pheonicians and from them the grek and arab and jewish alphabets originated.the greek alphabet is origin of all western alphabet. the pheonecians are the ancestors of the people of syria and lebanon today.they occupied spain for 800 years until 1492 then were exiled to north africa , where i live now . so i am proud.

Answer 6

words probly started out as ideology,,,,basically each letter represented a complete idea....then was probly shortened and changed gradually

Answer 7

the alphabet was actually invented by the Mesopotamian people but that people was destroyed and their knowledge was lost.

Answer 8

Growled Happy New Year to you, too!

Answer 9

Good question...

Answer 10

some dude who is dead