128 English Grammar Demystifi ed
But fi rst, here’s a bit of history about the alphabet. Thousands of years ago, peo-
ple used drawings to tell their life stories. For example, early drawings, or hiero-
glyphs, were drawn to show that people fought and were brave in war. Other draw-
ings showed the hunting they did. But drawing couldn’t express everything.
For example, these early communicators could easily draw a picture of an ani-
mal, a spear, a fi sh, or a cave. But they couldn’t draw pictures of concepts such as
love, hate, or loyalty. Eventually, they couldn’t remember all the pictures. There
were just too many of them.
Then about 3,500 years ago, the root of the alphabet was fi rst conceived of by the
Semites, who invented twenty-two sound symbols for their language, ancestor of
both Hebrew and Arabic. Before long, the Phoenicians also began to use the same
symbols. Because they were sea merchants who sailed to many parts of the world,
the Phoenicians spread this writing system to people of other nations. The Greeks
added two more letters, and the Romans used the twenty-four alphabet letters.
By the time the Roman Empire reached its peak, the alphabet was established in
the following way. Notice the missing letters:
ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZRomans dominated Europe, so it was logical that the Roman alphabet would become
the standard alphabet throughout Western Europe and eventually throughout the
Wester n world.
The Romans also changed the alphabet a bit and brought it to England. Since
then, people in many countries have used the English alphabet of twenty-six letters.
In fact, from the seventeenth century on, the English alphabet has contained the
same twenty-six letters we use now. This was such a huge accomplishment that
many consider the alphabet to be one of the most important inventions in the history
of the world.
Lowercase letters were introduced in manuscript writing in the Middle Ages.
This change from all capital letters to small letters was infl uenced by the nature of
the writing material—the diffi culty of writing the large, angular letters with a pen
on expensive papyrus, parchment, and later paper. Manuscript writers loved lower-
case letters because they could be written faster. From the reader’s standpoint, it
was much easier to read.
Today, the languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to
begin sentences and to indicate proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have
changed signifi cantly over time, and different languages have varied the rules of
capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns
capitalized; whereas Modern English of the eighteenth century frequently capital-
ized all nouns: