What is the alphabet

An alphabet is a system of using certain marks, which we call "letters," to stand for particular sounds. There are many different alphabets in the world today, and it has taken thousands of years to develop them. The English alphabet of twenty-six letters is also called the "Roman alphabet," because we got it from the ancient Romans, who had gotten it from the Greeks.

We call it alphabet because the first two letters of the Greek alphabet were called alpha and beta—in others words, calling it the alphabet then was exactly the same as calling it the ABC's today. The simplest way of putting an idea down on paper is to draw a picture, and that is how men first began to write, six thousand years ago or more. Our alphabet has come to us gradually from picture-writing of this sort. The picturewriting from which our alphabet is descended was done in ancient Egypt; it was called hieroglyphic writing. Picturewriting was able to express ideas as well as objects.

For example, a little picture of a man could represent the word "man," but a picture of a man lying on the ground with a spear in him would represent the idea "death." f h e Chinese and even the American Indians developed methods of writing in pictures. But there was not much that could be said this way, and it would have taken hundreds of thousands of pictures to express everything—many more than a person could hope to learn in a lifetime. Out of the early picture-writing came the use of pictures to stand for syllables. Suppose a picture of a pole or stake in the ground were used to represent the word "pole," and a picture of a lamp burning to represent the word "light."  Putting the two together, you would have pole-light, which could mean polite— an idea that could never be expressed by a picture. Using pictures in this way to represent sounds instead of things, men were able to increase the usefulness of their writing by many times.

The Chinese still use this kind of writing in syllables. The trouble is that there are so many different syllables, it takes a scholar years to learn them all. In the Chinese language, there are more than fifty thousand and most of these are being used even today. A Chinese student does not master the writing of his language until he is beyond the age at which an American student may have graduated from college—say, twenty-five years old. In comparison with his thousands of characters, the American schoolboy has to learn only twenty-six letters.

Therefore the next step in the development of the alphabet was to have a symbol, or letter, for each sound that was used in the language being spoken. There are many more sounds that a human being can use than we have in our alphabet, and the alphabets used for other languages have in them certain letters that we do not need in writing the English language. But also we have some letters that they do not need. No alphabet needs more than thirty or forty letters. A child can master these in a year or two. Writing with letters instead of with pictures is more than five thousand years old. Just as we got our alphabet from the Greeks, they got theirs from the Semitic peoples—the Phoenicians and the Jews and other ancient peoples who spoke Semitic languages.

But, like most Oriental peoples, they wrote from right to left. When the Greeks took their alphabet, they changed the direction of writing and wrote from left to right as we do today. In doing this, they turned the letters around. You can see, in the first article in this encyclopedia—the article on the letter A—how we got our present letter by the turning around of the ancient letters. The exact form of our capital letters was developed chiefly by the ancient Romans. Our small letters, and our handwriting, were developed because with them it is possible to write faster.

The English alphabet, like other alphabets that are used throughout the world, is very far from perfect. There are many people who are anxious to change it so that it will be easier to tell how a word should be pronounced the first time you read it. Reading is more difficult when a single letter, such as A, can be pronounced in six different ways. Still, the modern alphabet is one of the greatest works of the human mind, and has been at least as responsible as anything else man has done for the growth of civilization.