Alphabetical Read Online Free

different.
    Alphabets are extraordinarily useful to a group of peoplespeaking the same language, as they can be compressed and combined to indicate almost any sound – and therefore any word – we might want to say, in any combination of phrases, sentences, verses or passages of any length. Inventing alphabets based on the ‘phonetic principle’ or the ‘syllabic principle’ suggests, therefore, some stability on the part of a group of people speaking the same language. But we shouldn’t forget that the Chinese have had an incredible stability in terms of language-use but have not felt it necessary to develop an alphabet. And the Chinese are doing just fine.
    The Sumerians and ancient Egyptians were clearly crucial players in the history of alphabets. Their invention and the widespread use of their writings can be seen in a place like the British Museum today, where their writing tells stories, shows prayers, gives instructions on how to pass on to the land of the dead and much more. However, we cannot know definitively whether their knowledge was picked up by the first people we know for certain are the key source for the alphabet I’m using. Moreover, in telling the story of deciphering old inscriptions like the Rosetta Stone (rather than that of the evolution of the alphabet), it is important to mention that scholars transfer a principle they’ve learned from one script across to another.
    The archaeologist who applied what I’ll call the ‘ibn Wahshiyah–Champollion’ principle of decoding to ancient scripts was a man by the name of Alan Gardiner and he made the breakthrough in 1916 while studying an inscription of symbols from Sinai which he figured did not say, ‘box eye cane cross’ but a word made from the initial letter of the Semitic words for ‘box’, ‘eye’, ‘cane’ and ‘cross’, making, he thought, the word ‘baalat’ or ‘lady’. This piece of writing dates from around 1750 BCE and it was produced by people who are described by scholars as ‘Semites’.
    By the way, if you ever wonder how excited people getdeciphering ancient scripts, you should remember George Smith. Though this young man with no formal education beyond the age of fourteen wasn’t the first person to decipher the cuneiform script of the ancient Sumerians, he was responsible for spotting that they wrote about the Flood before the Old Testament writers did. This eureka moment came in 1872 as he pored over a dusty clay tablet, plucked from the desert sands of Iraq, which constituted all that remained from the library of Nineveh. He was so excited by the discovery that he leaped up, ripped off his clothes and ran round the British Museum.
    In the inscriptions of the Semitic people, scholars see the first certain forebears of the alphabet you’re looking at. It’s possible that they adopted the phonetic principle from the Egyptians, the Sumerians and others, but not certain. It’s possible that they incorporated some of the symbols – possible but not certain.
    Following the Semites, the next group in the family tree that leads to what you are reading now are the Phoenicians who originated in what is modern Lebanon. They are known to have been a highly inventive, active, trading people, working their way all round the Mediterranean and beyond, speaking a language, it’s thought, akin to ancient Hebrew. By about 1000 BCE , they were using a twenty-two-letter alphabet probably inherited from the Semites. Anyone who remembers or knows their Roman history will remember Carthage and the Carthaginians. For some of us, Carthage was an inky word in our Latin exercise books, but it was indeed a real place founded by Phoenicians near to present-day Tunis in Tunisia. We would have hundreds of Phoenician books today if it wasn’t for the fact that the Romans sacked Carthage and burned the Phoenicians’ library. The