INTRODUCTION: Pre-Alphabetic Writing

The History of the Alphabet

INTRODUCTION: Pre-Alphabetic Writing

? the alphabet is everywhere you look in modern Western life

? which makes it hard to remember that it was once invented by someone somewhere

? but it's not even as organic as counting in tens

? writing in the West began with cuneiform and hieroglyphic pictographs

? better, ideograms ? cf. modern ideograms: $, &, ?, ?

? what happened to ideographic writing?

The History of the Alphabet

INTRODUCTION: Pre-Alphabetic Writing

? Chinese writing is based on ideograms

? hard to learn at first, so it takes Chinese students much longer to learn how to write than Western students

? they're essentially learning a new language, since writing is not based on spoken Chinese

? but our alphabetic system is also at times a "new language"

? especially when spelling is unrelated to spoken English, e.g. knight

The History of the Alphabet

INTRODUCTION: Pre-Alphabetic Writing

? theme of this "capstone" lecture: why and how did the alphabet develop?

? where did it originate and who invented it? ? can modern alphabetic writing be fixed?

The History of the Alphabet

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

? data suggest that the modern alphabet can be traced back, at least in part, to Egyptian hieroglyphics

? because of a similarity in letter shapes between some hieroglyphs and early alphabetic signs

The History of the Alphabet

Egyptian Hieroglyphics

? translator of hieroglyphics: Jean Fran?ois Champollion, 1822

? used names to decipher hieroglyphic symbols

? worked on the assumption that at least some of the symbols were phonetic

? i.e. hieroglyphs were a mix of ideograms and phonetic signs

? his work revealed the history of Egypt and writing!

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