Can anyone tell me how the english or any alphabet came into being ?

Question

Sensible answers only please !!! ABCD.... CHANGE PLACES !!!

Answer 1

The very order of our alphabet (the LATIN alphabet) --and even the expression "alphabet" gives evidence of its ancient roots. The basic order, with surprisingly few changes goes back through Latin, through Greek to Phoenician and the earliest alphabets invented by speakers of "Northwest Semitic" languages (the group that includes Hebrew).

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Fuller answer (hang on!):

The LATIN letters were derived from a form of the GREEK alphabet, and the term "alphabet" is based on the first two letters of the Greek alphabet --"alpha" and "beta" (so the idea of the word is the same as "a-b-c's").

But these Greek names are rather odd --meaningless, in fact! Why? That's because the Greeks borrowed a number of the NAMES for their letters from the source of the letters themselves, the seafaring traders of Phoenicia. The Phoenicians did not invent this system, but were part of a cluster of related "Semitic" languages centered in the regions later called Syria & Palestine. The letter-names are derived from actual words which BEGAN with the sound that letter is used to represent (e.g., "aleph", meaning "ox", "beth" meaning "house").

We can actually still see much of the original Semitic order of the letters in the Latin alphabet, and even more in the Greek. As Greek (and later languages) needed to represent some diferent sounds they adapted some of the Semitic letters, esp. for marking VOWELS (which the Semitic alphabet did not do). They also sometimes added NEW letters, most often at the end, after "T" (called "tau"), the final letter in the Semitic alphabets.

By the way, the order of the Semitic alphabet can be traced quite far back. Our earliest proven examples of the letters in the basic order used to this day are clay tablets that list the letters in order (perhaps for training scribes?) from the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit (where they spoke a Semitic language scholars call "Ugaritic"). These show us that this order existed by at least 1300 BC. (with some additional letters for sounds that were no longer found in later languages like Phoenician, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic).

(A few centuries later we find reflections of this order in the Bible. The clearest examples are "acrostic" poetic passages in which succeeding verses or sets of verses begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Psalm 119 is the most well-known example of this practice, and many English Bibles even mark the successive stanzas as "Aleph" "Beth", etc. )

As for where these Semitic peoples came up with this whole writing system -- Many believe the inventors of the alphabet were speakers of a Semitic language living in or near Egypt early in the 2nd millenium B.C. So it is possible that the IDEA for an alphabet owed something to a part of the system of Egyptians hieroglyphics that was used for writing foreign words. But unfortunately, all evidence of how this might have happened, is lost to us, including the development of the specific order of the letters (just a memory tool? or did the words used have some special associations?)

(Others argue that, since the Semitic alphabet did not mark vowels, what they invented was really a simplified "syllabary" -- each symbol standing for a consonant PLUS vowel -- not so very different from the syllabary writing system used in Mesopotamia [oldest known writing system] by about 3000 B.C. The Greeks then turned it into a "real alphabet" by using some of the symbols for vowels. In any case, it WAS simple, and was the root of ALL of our alphabets!)

Answer 2

Our alphabet started with the Phoenicians, then the Greeks, then the Romans. After the fall of the Roman empire Latin mixed with the native languages of Europe. This is how English, Spanish, Italian, etc came into being. English was mixed with the Germanic language.

Answer 3

According to beliefs the alphabets came to be when man first started learing how to talk. Early man invented symbols that sounded like the letters and sounds the were making then. For example the a used to be an upward line and a downward line to represent the rising and falling nasely sound of the letter a. Various symbols popped up and from there on out they were augmented and slowly turned into the many different looking alphabets we have today. Ealy man simply took the sounds they had learned to communicate with and related them to a symbols that reminded them of that and it transformed. Taht is how the alphabets have come to be today.

Answer 4

Cyrillic Alphabet came into being when the Byzantine emperor sent missionarries to spread Christian faith to Slavic tribes. Those missionaries developed an alphabet and translated parts of the Gospels into the local Slavic dialect.

Answer 5

Our alphabet was descended from the Roman alphabet. They wrote without spaces between the words, makingitatoughthingtoread. Writing appearing similar to ours had appearedby the time of Charlemagne (9th century) and his scribe, Alcuin, added the innovation of lower case letters. There was a dude named William Caxton (early renaissance times) who formalised the spelling of the English language. Before than spelling was arbitrary and creative. That's it, in a nutshell.

Answer 6

Think bruhaha got most of it correct for your reference.

English was later classed as the official trade language in most regions of the world when the trade caravans and merchant ships started going further. It was hard to teach a group of natives your language after all when a lot of conquer and colonize and then loses to another empire and so on are going on. So,eventually one single language was made the main language for trade and while doing the math.

Answer 7

Alphabets came from symbols & phoenatic sounds.. Originally sign language was prevelent. Physical signs & phoenatic sounds, got down to writing, out of necessity, for long distance communication. This then got transformed to allphabets.

Answer 8

The first alphabet is believed to have originated in Mesopotamia (Iraq).
The present day English alphabet is based on the ancient greek alphabet (alpha, beta , gamma, delta and so on)

Answer 9

see info on runes. the alphabet started as pictures representing basic concepts such as food, fire, water, wind, deer, etc.