where do letter and numbers come from and how come they shaped the way they are?

Question

like example why S has to be a squiggly line.......you get me

Answer 1

Letter writing started with the Babylonians. However there are three major Civilations that took letter writing even further.
Primarily the Phoenicians, the Ancient Greeks and the Romans.

The Phoenicians were a society of people who traded objects along the Mediterranean Sea costal countries using sailboats. They invented a type of purple dye that only very rich people could afford. The Phoenicians needed to keep accounting records of their transactions. They were using the Egyptian and other writing systems and found it too difficult and time consuming. So they invented a form of letter writing. Their letters started with the symbol for the Ox, called aleph. the symbol represented the sound of the letter A. They had letters or symbols rather, that represented just the sound that the letter made, not an ideas or concepts like the Egyptians used. The Egyptians used pictographs that reprensented ideas. The Egyptian Pictographs could also represent a sound instead of just an idea, so it got too confusing. The Phoenicians were forced to create the first system of writing that didn't use pictographs. Instead, each symbol only represented sounds you make with your mouth.

Over a few hundred years, the Greeks took the Phoenician letters and changed them. The Greeks took aleph and made it into the letter 'a' , and they made other modifications to the Phoenicain letters.

Over another few hundred years or even thousand years later, the Romans changed the Greek letters even more. The Romans only used the captial letters A,B,D, and so on.

The letter S is actually sigma
the letter A is the ox , apleph
the letter B is house, ( I think)
The letter M is mu
The letter N is nu
The letter L is lamda.

So actually the Phoenicians created the idea of only using letters, but the Romans are the ones who created the Alpha Bet ( Aleph, Beta)

And the Romans, as you probably know, were the most powerful society in the world for well over hundreds and hundres of years. The Romans forced countries around Europe to learn the Roman language and the Roman Alpha Bet. The countries that were greately impacted by Rome were : Italy, France, Spain (these are known as the Romance Languages, not becaue they're pretty, but because of the almighty Romans)
Also, Germany, England and Russia, Greece, and pretty much every European country had to adopt the Roman system.
This is why all these countries have such similar alpha bets.
And the modern American alpha bet is directly taken from the Roman Letters.

Now numbers were different. The Roman system is what people used in Europe for thousands of years. But along came a mathematician named Fibonacci. He proposed that we stop using the Roman numerals and used the Arabic numerals instead. He pointed out that it was less confusing to do math using the Ariabic numbers. But it wasn't until a couple hundred years after he died that Europeans adopted the Arabic number system.
Just as a bit of trivia, Isaac Newton and Liebinez, the two men who invented Calculus, were using the Roman numerals to do all their math work. Man! talk about hard work!

Answer 2

That's a HUGE questions and goes waaay back. Check out the book The Goddess vs the Alphabet by Leonard Schlain. It's fascinating and will tell you lots about the origins of alphabets and the written word.

Answer 3

hey..............i can answer 4 the numbers but abt letters i am not sure........numbers got their origin with angels ..........for eg. 1 has one angle at the top 2has two angle one at the top and two below the line three had three angel and so on if u write the no. with the help of a straight line ...................i hope ur query 4 no. been solved and 4 the letters lets both of us look 4 answers.........