September is Read a New Book Month. Books are magical, transporting the reader into other worlds, times, careers, and situations they would never otherwise experience. But books wouldn’t be possible without a way to convey this magic.

The First Alphabet

A book is full of words. Hundreds or thousands of words. Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs made recording words difficult because they used lots of complex characters. Because of this, only a few, well-trained people were literate. Then, almost 4,000 years ago, a Semitic people working in Egypt created the first alphabet. This North Semitic alphabet contained only 22 letters. Its phonetic nature—each letter representing only one sound—helped change the world. This alphabet concept spread to the Canaanites, the Hebrews, and the Phoenicians.

The Phoenicians lived on the Mediterranean’s east coast. Adaptions of their 22-letter alphabet swept quickly to people living around them, as well as to parts of North Africa and Southern Europe. Its simplicity adapted easily to various other languages, meaning anyone could learn how to read and write. This brought change to civilizations’ social structures because, until this point, information had been exclusively controlled by royalty and scribes.

DYK the Phoenician alphabet became one of the most widely used writing systems thanks to their merchants’ maritime trading culture?

 

DYK the oldest surviving written story is considered to be The Epic of Gilgamesh? Set in ancient Mesopotamia, this mythological-style tale (epic poem) is about the historical King of Uruk’s adventures as he reigned over his Sumerian city-state sometime between 2700-2500 BCE.

Greek Alphabet

Established in about 1000 BCE, the Greek alphabet added two new letters to the Phoenician’s original 22. All European alphabets descend from it. In fact, the word alphabet came from the Latin word alphabetum, which came from the Greek word “alphabētos.” This word was created by putting the first two letters of the Greek alphabet—alpha and beta—together. The names of these letters came from the Phoenician alphabet’s first two letters.

DYK an ox’s head represented the Phoenician’s “aleph” (A) while a house represented “beth” (B)?

Latin Alphabet

Over the centuries, the Greek alphabet evolved into the Etruscan alphabet and then the Latin alphabet. With the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Latin alphabet and language spread west into Europe. (The eastern part of the empire continued to use the Greek alphabet.) Even as Latin gave way to new languages, the Latin alphabet, with only slight modifications, continued to be used in the writing of these new languages.

Today’s Alphabets

The English alphabet has 26 letters. The Italian alphabet contains only 21 but adds the missing five English (“foreign”) letters for a total of 26, too. The Spanish alphabet officially contains 27 letters, but with the addition of what some people see as “different” letters (i.e., “ch,” “rr,” etc.) and the deletion of others (i.e., “k” and “w”), the number of letters can be anywhere between 25-30. The German alphabet contains the English’s 26 letters, but adds three German umlauts (Ä, Ö, Ü) and one ligature (ß). It should be noted that though these languages share many of the same letters, the way these letters are pronounced is often different in each language.

Books

The form a book takes has changed over time. It evolved from clay tablets to papyrus to modern paper to digital. But while a book’s form continues to change, its purpose—using words to convey entertainment or knowledge—hasn’t changed. Regardless of the alphabet or language used to create the words, a book’s job of conveying information remains unchanged and timeless.