Where would we be without writing? There’d be no books, magazines, or newspapers. There’d be no instructions for putting together a bike or a VCR. There’d be no birthday or anniversary cards. There’d be no signs on the road to tell us where to go.
WHAT IS WRITING?
Writing is a method of communication. It uses marks that we see and understand. The marks we use to write English are the letters of the alphabet. They stand for sounds.
At a very young age, we memorize the letters of our alphabet and their sounds. Once we have done that, we can combine the marks into words and sentences. Other people can understand them. We can understand what other people have written. We also can write down our thoughts just for ourselves.
HOW DID WRITING BEGIN?
People probably began with picture writing. They didn’t always have an alphabet. In picture writing, a sign stands for an object. For example, a circle might stand for the Sun.
But a picture-writing system is difficult. There are just too many things to represent with pictures. Picture writing requires thousands of signs. In addition, pictures can’t be strung together to sound the way people speak. It’s also hard to express things like opinions and ideas with pictures.
Over time, picture writing developed into a different system. The circle that stood for Sun began to stand for the sound or syllable sun or even son. It could be used to make other words, like sunshine.
This was a good system. There are a lot fewer sounds in a language than there are objects to be represented.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are a kind of picture writing. In time, the pictures came to stand for sounds. This also happened to Chinese and many other languages. Chinese characters started out as pictures and now stand for sounds.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are among the oldest forms of writing. The earliest Egyptian writing we know of dates from about 3200 bc. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia also were writing before 3000 bc.
BIRTH OF THE ALPHABET
After signs got linked to sounds, the next big step in writing was the development of an alphabet. With an alphabet, people no longer had to guess what a picture meant. Without an alphabet, how could they tell if a picture of a bee, for example, meant the insect bee, the verb to be, or the first syllable in another word like believe?
The alphabet developed in the Middle East. The first alphabet we know about was developed by the Phoenicians who lived in what is now Lebanon. Their alphabet had 22 letters.
The Phoenician alphabet did not have letters for vowels (a, e, i, o, u). The Greeks added those letters. Our word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
THE ABCS
An alphabet is a clever set of letters or other symbols. Each letter represents a different sound of a language. These letters can be combined to write all the words of a language.
There are about 50 different alphabets used in the world today. They are different in the way they look and in the sounds their letters stand for. Most alphabets have between 20 and 30 letters. The English language uses the Roman alphabet. It has 26 letters.
Languages with fewer sounds require fewer letters. The sounds of the Hawaiian language, for example, are written using only 12 letters of the Roman alphabet. This alphabet has the fewest letters of any language. Other alphabets, such as Sinhalese, the alphabet of Sri Lanka, have 50 letters or more.
DO ALL LANGUAGES HAVE AN ALPHABET?
Only a few languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, do not use an alphabet.
Like other ancient languages, Chinese began as a pictographic language. Today’s written Chinese still uses thousands of symbols, or characters. To read a newspaper in Chinese, you would need to know from 3,000 to 4,000 characters!