THE FOUNDATION OF OUR WRITTEN COMMUNICATION
Can you even begin to imagine how impossible it would be to get along with, work with, and live with other people if there was no other way to communicate with them except for the spoken word? If someone had to be given a task or corrected or supervised, particularly, if that person was at a great distance from you as their leader, how tough would it be to direct their activities or efficiently implement necessary changes to their work efforts. Even with advanced technology, if voice commands were all that worked, it would be most difficult to get much accomplished.
Words, which are comprised of sounds and symbols made up of separate letters form the very basis of our human written communications systems. Such systems allow people connected through any and all different relationships to effectively and quickly communicate locally as well as at great distances.
Letters comprise words, which in turn form sentences and paragraphs, and from there any and all forms of different communications with varying speeds of transmission materialize.
Oh yes, the alphabet truly is the basis of all our communications.
Let us take a good look at when, where, why, and how the alphabet as we know it today came into being…….I assure you that it didn’t just one day appear on the scene as if by magic.
Somewhere around 2,000 B. C. the Egyptian Pharaohs began to discover and realize that they were having major problems communicating with other people from other countries.
With each military victory over their neighboring nations, they captured and enslaved more and more prisoners of war. The problem was that the Egyptians could not give out or pass down written orders or commands to those foreign slaves, because these foreigners could not read their Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Early writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, were extremely cumbersome and very difficult for foreigners to learn.
These systems had thousands of characters, with each symbol representing an idea or word. It usually took many years for an adult to memorize all those symbols. The facts were that only a handful of Egyptians could actually read and write their complicated and convoluted script.
Modern day linguists believe that practically all modern alphabets are derived from the simplified version of hieroglyphics devised by the Egyptians over four thousand years ago so as to enable them to communicate with their slaves.
The civilized development of an alphabet, the writing system used throughout the western world completely changed the manner and way the ancient people communicated.
In the simplified versions of modern day alphabets, each character represented only one single sound. This innovation significantly cut down the number of characters from a few thousand to a few dozen, making it far easier to learn and use the characters. Just imagine how much simpler and easier it became to teach other men and women and even children how to communicate with each other using this reduced alphabet!
The complicated and unruly hieroglyphic language was eventually discarded and forgotten. Sadly academic scholars were not able to translate these hieroglyphic characters until the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799.
The truth is that the alphabet was extremely successful. As time progressed and economic and political institutions and events occurred and changed, the previously captured Egyptian slaves began to migrate back to their home countries. As they did so they took the writing systems that they had learned while in Egypt with them. Consequently the alphabet began to spread across the Near East, becoming the foundation for many different writing systems in the surrounding areas, including both the Hebrew and Arabic languages.
The Phoenicians, an ancient civilization of seaborne traders, were responsible for spreading the alphabet to the many tribes of people they encountered along the Mediterranean coast.
The Greek and Roman alphabets, in turn were based on the ancient Phoenician script.
Today, most Western languages, including English, use the Roman alphabet.
It is interesting to additionally note that several letters in modern day English are direct descendants of ancient Egyptian characters. For instance, the letter B derives from the Egyptian character depicting the floorplan of a house.
Just how complicated does our modern day English language remain? Well, a quick review of the most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words in current usage….among the most of any other language.
WORDS TRULY DO MEAN IMPORTANT THINGS AND ARE TO BE CHOSEN AND USED CORRECTLY.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z = 26 LETTERS
THAT’S THE WAY YOU SPELL IT…..
HERE’S THE WAY YOU YELL IT……..
ENGLISH
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