who invented A B C D E F...............Z ????

Question

if u cant name the person, atleast tell the community he belonged to?

Answer 1

The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. By 2700 BCE Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.
The Cumae form was carried over to the Italian peninsula, where it gave way to a variety of alphabets used to inscribe the Italic languages. One of these became the Latin alphabet, which was spread across Europe as the Romans expanded their empire. Even after the fall of the Roman state, the alphabet survived in intellectual and religious works. It eventually became used for the descendant languages of Latin (the Romance languages), and then for the other languages of Europe.

Another notable script is Elder Futhark, and is believed to have evolved out of one of the Old Italic alphabets. Elder Futhark gave rise to a variety of alphabets known collectively as the Runic alphabets. The Runic alphabets were used for Germanic languages from 100 AD to the late Middle Ages. Its usage was mostly restricted to engravings on stone and jewelry, although inscriptions have also been found on bone and wood. These alphabets have since been replaced with the Latin alphabet, except for decorative usage for which the runes remained in use until the 20th century.

The Glagolitic alphabet was the script of the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic, and became the basis of the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet is one of the most widely used modern alphabets, and is notable for its use in Slavic languages and languages formerly part of the Soviet Union, such as the Bulgarian and Russian alphabets. The Glagolitic alphabet is believed to have been created by Saints Cyril and Methodius, while the Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the Bulgarian scholar Clement of Ohrid, who was their disciple. They feature many letters that appear to have been borrowed from or influenced by the Greek alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.

Answer 2

Because it is the commonly accepted calendar, and it would be confusing to change the date scheme. If I want to talk about a time 100 years ago, I would say 1909 simply because that is the commonly accepted date. CE and BCE are used instead of AD and BC, because AD and BC are specific to a particular religion -- I'm sure you can imagine the outrage over changing the dates to Before Muhammad and After Muhammad. What you call the "Christian timeline" is the Gregorian Calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, which made corrections to the Julian Calendar, named after Julius Caesar in 56 BC, which was a reform of the Roman Calendar, a 10 month lunar calendar believed to have been established around 750 BC, and claimed to have been established by Romulus, founder of Rome. One of the issues with calendars (and there are many) is where to start. At the beginning of something, but what? We don't know exactly when the earth formed, for example, so we can't measure the days from that point. So the start date has to be something agreed upon. The Gregorian Calendar was established in the west (Europe) at a time when the church and state were inseparable, and Christianity was widespread. I have little personal doubt that it was a socio-political move to have a calendar centered on the assumed date of the birth of Jesus. Nevertheless, the calendar did need to be revised to account for a better calculation of the passage of time.

Answer 3

I see there's some confusion on this. In short, the Greeks did NOT invent the alphabet, nor did the Phoenicians. The latter DO share a language connection with the inventor, though unfortunately we don't know PRECISELY who those folks were (Sorry!)


Assuming you do indeed mean the alphabet (and its order?) here's how it worked --

The words "alphabet" itself contains a major clue. We take this word from the combination of the first two letter names of the GREEK alphabet (alpha + beta), the system the Romans borrowed from the Greeks THROUGH the Etruscans.

But many of the Greek letter names --including "alpha" and "beta" are odd -- because they mean absolutely NOTHING in Greek! That's because the Greeks borrowed both the letters AND the names from Phoenician traders. In Phoenician these names were "aleph" and "beth" which meant "ox" and "house".

But it was not the Phoenicians themselves who invented the writing system. Rather they are part of a whole group of speakers of "Semitic languages" (a subgroup dubbed "Northwest Semitic languages, which includes Hebrew and Aramaic) living in the ancient "Syro-Palestinian" region. These all shared a writing system that goes back to about 2000 B.C., when it was invented by a Semitic group on the outskirts of Egypt, and very likely was inspired by one PART of the complex Egyptian writing system.

Unfortunately, these folks left no written account of how this all happened. . . though it's reasonable to regard it as something a COMMUNITY developed, not just an individual. (It would likely have been the work of some literate elite, perhaps priests?)

NOW, if you want to know more about the ORDER of the letters -- We've seen that our modern (Latin) order came from the Greek. And the Greek order came from the Phoenicians (10th century BC). Actually, we have some earlier writings from about 1300 B.C. which list the letters in this same order (It is also reflected in the Hebrew Bible -- you can even see it in English Bible headings to the paragraphs of Psalm 119, an "acrostic" poem in which the verses of the first stanza all begin with "aleph", the second with "beth" and so forth.)

Of course, there have been CHANGES in these alphabets. If the original language had a sound not found in the language borrowing the alphabet, that letter might be used for a different sound, or simply dropped.

NEW letters might be invented for Greek sounds not found in Phoenician, etc. In most cases, new letters were simply tacked on at the END of the alphabet. The Semitic alphabet ended with "tau" -- our "T" Thus all the letters after than are later creations or adaptations. In other cases, variations of one original letter would be placed side-by-side (as happened with I-J and U-V-W).

Answer 4

The alphabet was invented by the Phoenecians, a Middle Eastern people.

It was then borrowed by the Greeks for their alphabet.

Then the Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet for Latin.

Then Latin was spread throughout Europe when the Romans conquered much of Europe.

The alphabet originates in the Middle East.
(So do the numbers, which are called "Arabic numerals", but they originally come from India.)

Answer 5

If you are refering to the Alphabet Song....it was based off of 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'. The melody of which was taken from a French song and given English words. Mozart, as mentioned above, is often incorrectly attributed as writing this song as a child. He did, however, write variations of this melody later in life. By the way...Baa Baa Black Sheep also uses this same simple melody. The Alphabet Song was written just before the Civil War.

Answer 6

English is a Latin root language. The history of the alphabet starts in ancient Egypt. The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, as a representation of language developed by Semitic workers in Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been inculcated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets). Most other alphabets in the world today either descended from this one discovery, or were directly inspired by its design, including the Phoenician alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and the Latin alphabet used to write English.

Answer 7

The alphabet originated from the Greek - this is our English interpretation of the letters.

The alphabet song is attributed to Charles Bradlee, music publisher, in Boston, USA in 1835, with the title, "The A.B.C., a German air with variations for the flute with an easy accompaniment for the piano forte". The musical arrangement was attributed to Louis Le Maire (sometimes Lemaire), an 18th century composer.

Answer 8

The Latin Alphabet? It comes from the Greek Alphabet which was developed from the Phoenician Alphabet.

Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Greek_alphabet

Peace.

Answer 9

The English revised the Roman alphabet and then the Latin.

Answer 10

NO ONE PERSON INVENTED THE ALPHABET. IT IS BASED ON THE GREEK ALPHABET WHICH HAS, I THINK, 20 CHARACTERS. AND THE GREEKS HAD SYMBOLS FOR EACH LETTER BUT ENGLISH AND MOST OTHER WESTERN ALPHABETS HAVE MORE SOUNDS NECESSITATING MORE CHARACTERS THUS WE ARRIVED AT 26 CHARACTERS IN THE ENGLISH ALPHABET. THE GREEK SYMBOLS DO NOT LOOK EXACTLY LIKE THEIR ENGLISH COUNTER PARTS, BUT IF YOU STUDY THEM CLOSELY YOU CAN SEE RESEMBLENCES.