Evolution of Alphabets

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant. This is Clark calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Clark. Welcome to the program.

Hello, Clark. What can we do for you?

Well, hi, Martha.

Hi.

I got to comparing some Greek symbols or letters that we use here in all our math and engineering firm I’m associated with.

And usually I can translate from Greek to English equivalent and vice versa.

But I noticed that the order of these alphabets is considerably different.

Why is the order of the letters so different in one than in the other?

You know, Clark, I would say that they’re not really that different.

I know the appearance of the letters is really quite different.

But, you know, there’s actually a skeleton that they hang on.

You know, the first two letters are alpha and beta in Greek, which, of course, give us the word alphabet, right?

And then in the middle, you have the sounds for K-L-M-N-O-P.

And shortly after that, the S and the T sound.

So I think once you get familiar with the letters, you can see a resemblance there, which makes perfect sense since most, actually the vast majority of alphabets in the world sprang from a common ancestor.

Greek ends in omega.

Right.

Instead of zeta.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, there are a few differences.

And in English, we tacked on a few extra letters, particularly at the end there.

But what I’m saying is that there’s this basic framework, which is actually pretty miraculous.

Grant, I love the story of how the alphabet came to be.

Right. We’re talking about 1500, 1600 B.C.

We’ve got the first written records of this particular script.

We know roughly how it was pronounced.

We can see the letter forms, and then we can follow the transformation of these letter forms in the written record up to today, to this very minute, and see how they changed bit by bit in the hands of different scribes.

Sometimes the alphabet changed according to the language that it was being borrowed into.

Well, yeah, and that’s what’s really crazy is that it seems to have started by Semitic people living in Egypt.

They couldn’t read hieroglyphics, which was representing words by symbols.

And so you’d have to learn hundreds and hundreds of symbols of hieroglyphics.

But the genius that these people had was to come up with symbols that symbolized the sounds in their language, not individual words.

And so that was transferred to, for example, the Phoenicians living on the coast of Lebanon and part of Syria.

What I’m saying is that it’s so mind-blowing that, for example, the Greeks looked at the Phoenicians, who had a completely different language, a Semitic language, and they thought, wow, we can use those symbols for sounds in our language, our language which is completely different from yours.

And so, again…

So there’s a little bit of transposition, a little bit of altering every time it was borrowed, right?

Yeah. Yeah, but from language to language, that’s what’s so dazzling about it.

And some of the letters have not changed all that much. They really haven’t.

So you can see the differences, Clark, but we’re focusing on the similarities between these different generations of characters.

Yeah, and Clark, I will tell you there’s a really helpful website.

It’s by Professor Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland.

If you go to his website, he’s got these fantastic representations of slides of an early alphabet, and then you see it morphing into later alphabets.

It’s really fascinating.

That used to be the first page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I think.

It is a child that always showed the evolution of the individual letters.

Oh, I loved that page in dictionaries.

I still do.

It’s still one of my favorite things.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

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