Who invented the alphabet?

Question

I was thinking about it the other day, and the alphabet is a great invention. Who invented it. Someone told me it was the latin alphabet, so maybe in mexico or brazil? Does someone own the copyright cuz they could make alot of money off it since everyone uses it everyday.

Answer 1

It is true that the form of the alphabet we use, along with most of Europe, is the "Latin" alphabet. But it had nothing at all to do with South America. In fact, the Romans, who first used these specific letters, did NOT invent the system. It actually goes back several stages before them.

It goes like this:
the ancient Romans borrowed from the Etruscans
who borrowed from the Greeks
who borrowed it from Phoenician merchants
who inherited it, along with many other Semitic-language groups in and around Syria-Palestine (including the Hebrews).

The earliest forms of this SEMITIC alphabet go back to almost 2000 B.C. We think that it was first used by Semitic people on the borders of Egypt (in the Sinai Penninsula, perhaps) under the rule and influence of the Egyptians. The best guess may be that they took inspiration from ONE part of the complex Egyptian system (hieroglyhpics) -- specifically, a set of signs developed from writing foreign names.

By the way, the very NAME "alphabet" points to its origins. We get that word from the Greek letters "alpha" and "beta" -- the first two letters of their alphabet. But these names meant NOTHING IN Greek. Rather, the Greeks borrowed many of the letter names from the Phoenicians along with the letters. The first two letters of the Semitic alphabet were "aleph" and "beth", which mean "ox" and "house". The SOUND that these letters represent is the first sound in those words.

Actually, you can pick up many English dictionary and find as the first entry under each letter a history of that letter, its names, etc., and you may also find a chart showing how the ancient Semitic letters gradually changed to the shapes we recognize in the Latin alphabet.

Answer 2

Who Invented The First Alphabet

Answer 3

Who Invented The Alphabet

Answer 4

I think that you are a little behind in the school.
In the first term, which alphabet ? The Latin, the Greek, the Cyrillic, the Arabic, the Chinese or which one ?
Many people have been involved in it for a very loooong time.
We might begin with the Egyptians, who used a symbolic writing, but became extinct.
Then came the Sumerians, with a writing on clay tablets made with symbols like |||, ¯.
Later the Greek made their alphabet, from which came the Latin one, and the Cyrillic, used by the Russians and the Bulgarians .
Now, regarding the Latin alphabet ( the one we use in most of the world ), the Romans, 20 centuries ago, dominated most of Europe, and therefore, that is the alphabet that languages from European origin use.
Thus, it was the Romans, 25 centuries ago, who invented our alphabet. Sorry. It wasn't Mexico nor Brazil.
About the Arabian , the Chinese, Farsi writings I don't have much information. Sorry.
I can say, nevertheless, that the Chinese writing ( used also by the Japanese, with some modifications ) does not represent letters, but words. In Chinese, words are very short, and thus, they can be represented by these characters.
No, when the alphabet ( the one we use nowadays in the USA ) was invented, nobody used copyright. They were better times

Answer 5

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RE:
Who invented the alphabet?
I was thinking about it the other day, and the alphabet is a great invention. Who invented it. Someone told me it was the latin alphabet, so maybe in mexico or brazil? Does someone own the copyright cuz they could make alot of money off it since everyone uses it everyday.

Answer 6

Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, which contained only consonants, and combined it with Aramaic signs, which were used in order to transcribe the Greek vowel sounds: A (alpha), E (epsilon), O (omirkon) and Y (upsilon). I (iota) was an innovation. The result was the Greek alphabet from which Latin, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian alphabets derive.

Answer 7

The ancient Egyptians had an alphabet that consisted of 24 letters.

Answer 8

it is diferent in many countries as you now it and diferent in other languages with a few diferences, nobody invented it it is based on latin and greek alphabet, then each language took the letters they needed according to the thing that controls the languages, well that's what i think

Answer 9

some smart ****