Childrens Illustrated Encyclopedia

20

When people first began to Write, they did not use an alphabet. instead, they drew

small pictures to represent the objects they were writing about. this is called picture

writing, and it was very slow because there was a different picture for every word. an

alphabet does not contain pictures. instead, it is a collection of letters or symbols

that represent sounds. each sound is just part of one word. Joining the letters

together forms a whole word. the human voice can make about 35 different

sounds in speech. so alphabets need at most 35 letters to write any word,

and most alphabets manage with fewer. the phoenicians, who

lived about 3,000 years ago in the Middle eastern country

now called syria, developed the first modern alphabet. the

ancient greeks adapted the phoenician alphabet, and later

the romans improved it. the roman alphabet

is now used widely

throughout the world.

roMan alphabet

the alphabet used in english and other european

languages is based on the roman alphabet, which had

23 letters. this alphabet is also used in some southeast

asian languages, such as Vietnamese and indonesian.

Modern alphabets

the roman alphabet is only one

of the world’s alphabets. Many other

languages use different symbols to

represent similar sounds, and the

words may be written and read quite

differently from the roman alphabet.

Japanese readers start on the right side of

the page and read to the left, or start at the

top and read down the page.

Bird

syMbols and accents

in addition to letters, writers use punctuation

marks such as a period to show where a sentence

ends. some languages, such as french, also use

accents—marks that show how to pronounce the

word. the sloping acute accent over the e in café

makes it sound like the a in day.

rosetta stone

the ancient egyptians used

a system of picture writing called

hieroglyphics. the meaning of this

writing was forgotten 1,600 years

ago, so nobody was able to read

egyptian documents until 1799

when some french soldiers made

a remarkable discovery. near

alexandria, egypt, they found

a stone with an inscription on it.

the words were carved in

hieroglyphics and in greek. Using

their knowledge of greek, scholars

were able to discover what the

hieroglyphics meant.

Hindi (India)

In every alphabet, letters have

a special order that does not

change. Dictionaries, phone

books, and many other

books are arranged in

alphabetical order

so that it is easy

to find a word

or a name.

The Romans did

not have the letter

W. For J they used

I, and for U they

used V.

Chinese piCtograms

in traditional chinese writing, symbols

called pictograms are used to represent ideas.

there is a different character for every word.

Alphabets

Greek

capital and sMall letters

the first roman alphabet had only

capital letters. small letters started to

appear after the 8th century. in english,

capital letters are used at the beginning

of a sentence, and for the first letter of a

name. capital letters are also used when

words are abbreviated, or shortened,

to their first letters, such as Un for

United nations.

Find out more

babylonians

bronze age

egypt, ancient

languages

phoenicians

Writers and poets

Ancient

Romans used

certain letters

for numbers. For

example, C is 100.

In traditional

printing, raised

lead letters are

used to print the

words on paper.

Cyrillic (Russian)

Horse Tre e Sun

cUneiforM

More than 5,000 years ago in

Mesopotamia (now part of iraq,

syria, turkey, and iran), a form of

writing called cuneiform developed.

it started off as picture writing, but

later letters began to represent

sounds. the Mesopotamians did

not have paper; instead they

wrote on damp clay using

wedge-shaped pens.

cuneiform means

“wedge-shaped.”

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