Uncommon
History of the alphabet
Alphabetic writing is a writing system in which graphemes (called letters) generally correspond to individual sounds in a language (phonemes). This distinguishes it from writing systems that use symbols to represent syllables or whole words. The oldest known traces of alphabetic writing have been dated back to the 2nd millennium BC among a community of West Semitic laborers in the Sinai Peninsula. Exposed to the idea of writing through the complex system of Egyptian hieroglyphs used for the Egyptian language, their script instead wrote their native Canaanite language. It has been conjectured that the community selected a small number of the hieroglyphs commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own language. Other examples of earliest known alphabetic writing include "group writing" found in pyramids in Egypt or yet still the systematically-used Ugaritic alphabet in which the oldest known ABC was written. Alphabetic writing spread...
Open boosters, collect cards and trade them. Free to play.
Play for free