Into the origins of Western language alphabets Quiz

Answer: Sumerian

Sumerian ("native tongue") of Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia (today's southeastern Iraq) from 4000 BC and their first use of a writing system was registered in the city of Uruk and Jamdat Nasr (3300 BC).

The Sumerian writing system is classified as logophonetic, meaning that its signs represent both meaningful words (morphemes) and sounds. Wet clay tablets were the medium used to register commercial transactions and later laws. Five millennia later, the Hebrew word Ha'kak means both to engrave and to legislate.

The spoken Sumerian language virtually died by the 18th century BC, but its writing system was in use until 100 CE. Thus, Sumerian died at the age of 4000.

Answer: Akkadian

Akkadian language developed from Sumeric and was named after the city of Akkad (close to today's Baghdad) with the rise of the Akkadian dynasty. It was also spoken by Assyrians and Babylonians.

Since the Sumerian and Akkadian spoken languages are very different, the Sumerian signs were adopted for their sound rather than meaning and became more syllabic (usually consonant + vowel). At this point in time, our writing system have "only" 800 signs.

Answer: Egypt

Stone carved inscriptions, dated to 1800 BC, were found in Wadi el-Hol, Quena (along the Nile), by John and Deborah Darnell.

The second group of inscriptions, which are carved graffiti, was found in the Sinai peninsula (in Serabit el-Khadim) by William F. Petrie and is dated to 1500 BC.

Both locations are considered to be on important commercial paths, suggesting the critical role of trading in cultural development.

Answer: Names of real world objects

Presumably translated from the hieroglyphic script system through the Proto-Sinaitic, the element names of several Semitic alphabets are related to the shapes of objects that were represented by the Phoenician alphabet.

For example, the letters named Daleth and Kaph had the shape of a "Delet" and a "Kaph" (a door and a hand in Hebrew), respectively. This graphical correspondence was preserved only partially in Hebrew.

Answer: Proto-Sinaitic

The people living in today's Sinai area were conquered by the Egyptians, from whom they adopted 30 signs to represent the sounds of their own Semitic language. It spread to Canaan (it is also known as Proto-Canaanite) and developed into Phoenician after 500 years.

Curiously, we know almost nothing about the people that created the first pure consonantal alphabet and consequently reduced the number of signs to a manageable number.

Answer: Phoenician

The Phoenician people were marine merchants who needed an instrument to write spoken languages, and ended up spreading their alphabet as far as Ireland. As is the case today, differently-spoken languages were written using the same set of elements.

Greek, the oldest (spoken) language in use today, has a documented history of 3,500 years. It is also one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages, matched only by the Anatolian languages and Vedic Sanskrit.

Answer: They introduced the written vowels, as previous alphabets had only consonants

The Phoenician alphabet, like all Semitic alphabets, is an abjad (consonantary) alphabet. Abjad (derived from the first 4 elements of Arabic) alphabets are those alphabets in which consonants ("things that sound along"), but not vowels, have representations.

In semi-abjad alphabets, like Hebrew and Arabic, vowels exist in the form of characters and Nikud (dots), and their use is optional.

The Greeks added vowel symbols to accompany consonants, thus generating a pronounceable unit, reducing the need to learn the pronunciation of each and every word.

Answer: Arabic

Arabic, a Central Semitic language, is closely related to Aramaic and Hebrew and has the largest number of speakers among the Semitic family (>200 million).

The first inscriptions (the Hasaean) in (spoken) Arabic language were written in a variant of the epigraphic South Arabic musand (related to today's Ethiopian), not the Nabataean, the ancestor of modern Arabic alphabet. Thanks to the spread of Islam, non-Semitic languages, like Persian and Urdu, adopted the Arabic alphabet.

Answer: Aramaic

The Aramaic language, the language spoken by Jesus and today by the Assyrians, used the "cursive" Phoenician alphabet before creating a variation of it, introducing the "square" style. In turn, variations on the Aramaic alphabet created the (old) Hebrew and Nabataen alphabets.

The adoption of the Aramaic alphabet, and consequently the Aramaic spoken language, led to the virtual extinction of Hebrew language from daily use; it remained as a literary and liturgical language. Also, the Hebrew alphabet was used to write, in Aramaic language, the Daniel and Ezra books of the Hebrew Bible and the 400-600 AD Jewish oral laws known as the Talmud.

On the other hand, the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet forced the use of a few characters also as vowels (like "aleph" and "yodh" for "a" and "e", respectively), as not all Hebrew sounds were represented (Greek vowels were not used as consonants). The "Nikud" system to represent vowels is a 9th century CE invention.

Answer: Starting horizontally in one direction, than turning at the end of the line and reversing direction

In hieroglyphs, the elements "face" the beginning of the line, so the reader must consider in which direction the "bird", for example, is looking. But the boustrophedon ("ox-turning") direction is not an Egyptian exclusivity. It was one of the possibilities (among dextroverse and sintroverse) of writing Greek before the adoption of the modern dextroverse in the 5th century BC.

In contrast, traditional Chinese has been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page. The only top-to-bottom, left-to-right script is the Mongolian, actually an adaptation of a Semitic direction to the Chinese style. Several scripts in Indonesia and Philippines are written with lines away from the writer, from bottom to top.