Alphabet Explained 🔠 Origin of Every Letter🔤

An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) representing phonemes, units of sounds that distinguish words, of certain spoken languages. 

Every Letter of our Alphabet Has a Story to Tell. 

Join me for an    A to Z     of    A to Z.
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https://youtu.be/CYqqFqoLnnk

𐦃    The Egyptian hieroglyphics that became our letters
🏛    Why W is called "double U"
🇫🇷    Why do the French call Y a "Greek I"?
💤   Is it ZEE or ZED??
✏️   How I and J were the same for the Romans
🤔   Why we can easily confuse U and V

 

==CHAPTERS==
00:00   Introduction
00:43   The birth of the alphabet
01:25   Hieroglyphics: A & B
04:13   C, E, K, M, N, O & R
06:04   L, S, D & Q - Early Semitic
09:23   F, U, V & Y - Ypsilon
10:35   W - double U
11:34   I & J - Latin double
13:08   G, H, P, T & X
14:29   Z - zed or zee?

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Comments

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I'm no linguist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but

The reason so many of these characters seem to flip horizontally, is, I believe, because some of those ancient languages could be written both left-to-right, and right-to-left. So instead of starting over on a new line when you get to the end of one like we do now, they would continue on the next line going the other way. And when this was done, they also wrote the characters backwards (probably so you could tell which way to read them). And the backward version of those characters just stuck.

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5:38 In Hebrew, the letter that makes the "R" sound is called "Reish", which derives from the word "Rosh" meaning head. My correct prediction was therefore not unexpected. And at 6:42, that letter looks like the Hebrew "Shin", which makes the "S/Sh" sound. Besides A and B, the English letters D, I/J, and M, correspond to the Hebrew letters "Dalet", "Yud", and "Mem", which come from the words Delet (door), Yad (hand), and Mayim (water). It's really amazing to see traces of older languages especially ones that I can speak or have knowledge about in the English language / Latin alphabet! 

===LINKS===
A is for Ox by Lyn Davies: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho...
(Thanks to those who suggested I read it)
Weird plurals in English: https://youtu.be/3rhxeDInKu8
Lost letters of the alphabet: https://youtu.be/wJxKyh9e5_A

An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) representing phonemes, units of sounds that distinguish words, of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.

The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-Sinaitic script, which developed into the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, abjads, and abugidas, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula in modern-day Egypt. It was created by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values of the Canaanite languages.

Peter T. Daniels distinguishes an abugida, a set of graphemes that represent consonantal base letters that diacritics modify to represent vowels, like in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts, an abjad, in which letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, and an alphabet, a set of graphemes that represent both consonants and vowels. In this narrow sense of the word, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was based on the earlier Phoenician abjad.

Of the dozens of alphabets in use today, the most popular is the Latin alphabet, which is most commonly used in Europe and North America. Although, it has influence and use worldwide. Languages often use extra letters or diacritical marks to make up for differences. The alphabet was originally derived from an archaic version of the Greek alphabet, called Euboean, which was used in the Greek colonies in Italy. The influence of which spread to other alphabets such as Latin, but also Etruscan as well.

Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of letters. This makes them useful for purposes of collation, which allows words to be sorted in a specific order, commonly known as the alphabetical order. It also means that their letters can be used as an alternative method of "numbering" ordered items; in such contexts as numbered lists and number placements.

There are also names for letters in some languages. This is known as acrophony; It's present in some modern scripts, such as Greek, and many Semitic scripts, such as; Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. It was used in some ancient alphabets, such as in Phoenician. However, this system is not present in all languages, such as the Latin alphabet, which adds a vowel after a character for each letter. Some systems also used to have this system but later on abandoned it for a system similar to Latin, such as Cyrillic.

 

Alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet with corresponding Latin letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

               

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