1Hi, Doug. Hi, Jahid.
2I have a question for you.
3Who invented the alphabet?
4Oh, that's a great question.
5Who invented the alphabet?
6I think one of the things that makes this such an interesting question
7is the whole idea that there wasn't always an alphabet.
8Today, we have both speaking and writing,
9so it's tempting to think we've always had both.
10But we haven't always had writing.
11We had speaking first.
12Isn't that interesting?
13Someone had to invent the alphabet.
14Someone had to come up with the very idea of writing.
15Stop and think about that for a second.
16How would your life be different if there were no such thing as writing?
17Just imagine what life would have been like before we had any way to write.
18There would have been no text messages, for sure.
19No writing letters or notes to your friends.
20No books.
21Think about that!
22That would mean no way to learn or share from anyone who wasn't talking right next to you.
23Once writing was invented,
24it must have been mind-blowing for someone to see writing for the first time.
25They might have said, "Wait, wait. We can all speak..."
26"but this here, these are symbols for what we speak?"
27Something written down.
28Something you can hold and take with you.
29That's weird.
30It might have seemed almost like magic.
31Think about it.
32Now, people would be able to send each other messages from faraway places.
33They could even send messages to the future.
34Writing down important stories, memories, or things they'd learned
35to help make sure it wouldn't be forgotten.
36So, who came up with all of this?
37Who invented the alphabet?
38Well, for starters, you might be interested to know that there's not just one way of writing.
39There's not just one alphabet.
40There are actually a lot of different alphabets used by different languages.
41These ways of writing use different symbols than the symbols we use in our alphabet.
42For example, in the Korean alphabet,
43the symbol for the letter S (the "s" sound) looks like this.
44The symbol for the H sound looks like this.
45These are just two examples,
46and you can see how different these are from the symbols used in the alphabet we use in English.
47Or in the way of writing used in many parts of India, called Devanagari,
48the symbol for the "a" sound looks like this.
49The symbol for the "ba" sound looks like this.
50And more.
51In fact, many of these alphabets use not just different symbols but totally different ways of writing.
52For example, in Arabic writing,
53it's always written from right to left,
54the opposite direction that we write when we write in English.
55Or in some languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean,
56it's possible to write not just side to side (which they do)
57but also up and down,
58which sometimes writers in these languages will do.
59You can find a lot of books written that way.
60Some languages, like Chinese, even use a completely different way of writing,
61where many of the symbols aren't sounds at all
62but instead stand for entire words.
63For example, this symbol is the symbol for the word "home."
64Or this one is the symbol for the word "cat."
65Because of the way that Chinese writing uses symbols for words rather than sounds,
66becoming a master of reading and writing in Chinese takes a lot of years.
67It's considered a great accomplishment.
68But what about the alphabet that we use in English?
69How did it get invented, and by whom?
70Well, most historians, the people who study the past,
71think that the credit for inventing the alphabet belongs to an ancient group of people called the Phoenicians.
72It's thought that thousands of years ago,
73the Phoenicians came up with the idea of using symbols to stand for sounds.
74This symbol for the "a" sound.
75This symbol for the "ba" sound. And so on.
76Then another group of people, the ancient Greeks,
77heard of this idea and borrowed it,
78making their own symbols.
79Symbols that were similar but not exactly like the Phoenicians' ones.
80In fact, the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet reveal something interesting.
81The letter for the "a" sound in the Greek alphabet is named Alpha.
82The letter for the "ba" sound in the Greek alphabet is named Beta.
83Alpha, Beta.
84You see why this way of writing started to be called an "alphabet"?
85But these letters of the Greek alphabet still look a little unfamiliar.
86They're not quite like the letters you're used to in English.
87There's one last piece to this story.
88And that's the ancient Romans.
89They took the Greek alphabet and made their own symbols,
90ones that looked more like this.
91Look familiar?
92This is the same alphabet that we use in English.
93Because these exact shapes of the letters we use were created by the ancient Romans,
94sometimes we call our alphabet the Roman alphabet.
95And English definitely isn't the only language to use the Roman alphabet.
96Lots of other languages use this same alphabet to stand for the sounds of their languages,
97including Spanish,
98German,
99French,
100and many more.
101So in summary, our alphabet that we use in English, the Roman alphabet,
102was inspired by the ancient Phoenicians,
103a group of people who invented the first alphabet thousands of years ago.
104But the letters of our alphabet are not the only way of writing.
105You can be on the lookout for some of the world's other alphabets and other ways of writing.
106That's all for this week's question.
107Thanks, Jahid, for asking it!