The journey . . .

My topic:

My topic was to look at:
- why the original alphabet evolved
- how it evolved
- how it changed over time
- how it spread beyond the original area of use
- who was using it and
- why they were using it.


Briefly, the original alphabet seems to have evolved as a simpler option to what had gone before. With heiroglyphics there were so many symbols to remember whereas the alphabet reduced those to twenty something characters. Not only did it make it easier to use, it made it accessible to a broader part of the population.

It changed over time primarily when a different spoken language adopted it. With a different spoken language, often there were differences in sounds and perhaps some letters were redundant or others not represented at all.

To look at the alphabet, you really have to take a step back and look at the history of writing itself and why people started to write, and then the practicalities of that.

Writing seems to have started to record things, in order to be more accurate rather than relying on memory. It might have been to keep accounts, or maybe to record the law. Usually it was also used to record the praises of the ruler of the time. Religion and often later literature came into it. Early written forms, eg heiroglyphics, became so complex that usually they could only be written by specially trained scribes, who because of their skills had high level positions in society. With simplifying it to an alphabet it made it more accessible to more people. Some have said it democratized writing. It also made it far more practical and practicality won out! The elites weren't able to hold their privileged status as narrowly as they had previously.

It spread as part of trade, and then political and military conquests and later with religion.

In its political spread, sometimes the success of a society for a lengthy period was to some extent related to having an easy to write language. Written language helped the Roman Empire keep tabs and control of its farflung parts. Without one written language this would have been far more difficult.

What was written on and what was used for that and its effects on written language is another interesting aspect of the alphabet's development. Cuneiform on clay tablets seems to have arisen because in Mesopotamia or Iraq there was lots of clay around and it was therefore a convenient medium. When there wasn't a plentiful supply of clay, other mediums like stone or papyrus or skins were used. The writing implement also had an affect, as in India, where a metal stylus writing on palm leaf resulted in rounded letters.


Resources:

Wikipedia was a useful resource to get an overview and start with and although it has question marks about its reliability, I didn't come across anything from texts or other internet sources that seemed to contradict it.

Of the texts, I found Gnanadesikan (2009) very useful in covering a variety of countries and civilisations in one text. She was also easier to read than some texts that were heavily technical about linguistics.

Apart from that I found Sacks (2003) interesting because in covering individual letters, he gave an understanding of the evolution of the alphabet. I came across two editions of his work, one with colored illustrations and one with none. The stories of individual letters, their inclusion and how their shape changed as writing went from right to left or left to right and shapes were reversed. Or top down or even bottom up, and sometimes how a letter was written might be totally turned around, or became redundant in one spoken language but was picked up for another sound or reclaimed in a later version as with 'g'. It wasn't a sound in Etruscan but was in Latin and seemingly reclaimed as a result of trading contacts with the Greeks and awareness of their written language.



Overall:

It's been fascinating and I'd like to read more. Some of the material is quite technical with links to linguistics and used technical linguistic terms, and as a result was somewhat off putting. But with the more readable material, I was inclined to get involved in reading rather than skimming, and so not researching other possible material out there!

I think I've covered most of the brief to a greater or lesser extent.

Along the way I've become a little familiar with blogs, though I would still like to know how to post videos on the side panel! And I would like to do more with layout, and so want to try another blog space to see if that is possible.



Bibliography:

Ager, S 2010, Ge'ez script, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm
Ager, S 2010, Old English/Anglo-Saxon (Englisc), viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm
Alphabets 1998, viewed 13 April 2010, www.omniglot.com/writing/alphabets.htm
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 7: Old Hebrew to Greek and Aramaic, 17 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
ancienthebreworg, A History of Hebrew Part 8: The Proto-Sinaitic Alphabet, 19 July 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
Baron, NS 2001, Alphabet to Email: how written English evolved and where its heading, Routledge, London
Baugh, AC & Cable, T 2002, A History of the English Language, Routledge, London
Benner J 2007, The Ugarit Alphabet, Ancient Hebrew Research Centre, viewed 13 April 2010, http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/22_alphabet.html
Brookfield, K 1993, Writing, Dorling Kindersley Limited, London
Comrie, B, Matthew, S & Polinsky, M 2003, The Atlas of Languages: The origin and development of languages throughout the world, Quarto Inc, London
Crystal, D 1997, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
DjArnousSyr, The first alphabet in history was found in Ugarit, Syria, 27 October 2008, viewed 26 April 2010
eHow, History Question: Who invented the alphabet? 22 May 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
Firmage, RA 1993, The Alphabet Abecedarium: some notes on letters, Bloomsbury, London
Gnanadesikan, A 2009, The Writing Revolution: cuneiform to the internet, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, England
Gnomon 2004, The Development of the Western Alphabet, viewed 13 April 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890
Goldwasser, O 2010, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs, Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02 Mar/Apr 2010, viewed 20 April 2010, www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=2&ArticleID=6
In Our Time: The Alphabet 2003, [radio program], BBC Radio 4, 18 December, viewed 13 April 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054950
Jean, G 1987, Writing; The Story of Alphabets and Scripts, New Horizons, London
Lo, L 2010, Ethiopic, viewed 25 May 2010, http://www.ancientscripts.com/ethiopic.html
Pryst, J n.d., Phoenicia, viewed 17 April 2010, http://www.ancientopedia.com/phoenicia/
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet, Arrow Books, London
Sacks, D 2003, The Alphabet, Hutchinson, London
teachertubeWriting, The History of Alphabet, 29 September 2009, viewed 26 April 2010
Sesame Street, Sesame Street: The Alphabet with Elmo, 21 May 2009, viewed 16 May 2010
Ugaritic 2010, viewed 17 April 2010, http://ancientscripts.com/ugaritic.html
Woodard, R 1997, Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer: a linguistic interpretation of the origin of the Greek alphabet and the continuity of Ancient Greek literacy, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Woodard, R (ed) 2008, The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia, Cambridge University Press, Leiden