Writing is awesome, itâs easy to take it
for granted, but if (for instance) I couldnât write my videos out first and had to basically
improvise all my lines, it would basically look like [uh⊠x10], never mind the fact
that, you know, barely any modern human civilization would exist. The most widely used writing system in the
world these days (in fact the one Iâm using to write this video) is of course the Latin
alphabet, but of course the alphabet didnât just fall from the sky one day, it was developed
over a long and winding history extending back to the dawn of writing itself, and that
connects it with most of the other writing systems of the world today. So this is the Latin alphabet, the English
version of which contains 21 consonants and 5 vowels, though of course if you get all
the expansion packs you can get access to a whole bunch of new characters⊠mostly
just the regular characters with special markings, but still. Of course, if you look at it for long enough,
youâll notice some weird peculiarities. For instance, why are the vowels all randomly
dispersed in the alphabet? Why do some letters make more than one sound? And also, what the hell is with letters like
Q and X? What the hell do we need with those? To learn all about this, letâs go back in
time about 5,000 years to when writing was first invented in the Middle East. Now writing was technically invented multiple
times in different places, on account of there not being much of a good way to inform people
who you donât even know exist about something you just invented (especially without a writing
system), but our story takes us here for two of these instances that popped up around the
same time, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiforms. By the 3rd millennium BC, the Nile and the
Tigris and Euphrates river valleys had both become major centers of trade and civilization,
with many of the worldâs first cities popping up around here. Cities however are huge and they need to keep
track of everything from finances to crop yields, which past a certain level canât
be easily committed to human memory. I mean sure, if you actively committed these
things to memory you could memorize how much food your house has in the fridge and you
can memorize how much money is in your wallet, but can you do that on the scale of a whole
neighborhood? Or a whole city-state? And can you remember what these amounts were
at different time periods across different generations? [Nope!] This created the perfect market for special
symbols pressed into a clay tablet to mark these things down. Now, the Latin alphabet is quite different
from these systems, as it is whatâs known as an alphabet. Contrary to what at least I originally thought,
an alphabet is not a collection of all the letters of a writing system, it is actually
a type of writing system itself, specifically one that has characters representing both
consonants and vowels in more or less the same way. This is in contrast to abugidas which only
do this for consonants with vowels being special modifications to said consonants, or abjads
that basically just write consonants, or syllabaries with characters representing a consonant and
a vowel in a sequence, or indeed what these writings systems were, which were logograms. A pictogram is basically a drawing or a picture
of something meant to represent that thing, for instance this drawing of a cow, which
is meant to represent⊠a cow. An ideogram is like a pictogram, but a little
less literal so that it can represent concepts related to the picture, for example a drawing
of the sun can either represent the actual star our planet orbits, or something the sun
reminds us of, like warm weather or summer. A logogram in turn expands on this idea, with
glyphs representing different ideas that could be related to the concept or could look completely
different, just as long as everyone who will use the system knows that these markings or
these wedges only refer to something specific. Now, Mesopotamian cuneiforms might have been
the earliest writing system to come into existence, but it was in Egypt where the evolution of
the Latin alphabet (and many others) first started. Ancient Egypt as many of us already know used
a system of complex hieroglyphs, which were generally used either ideographically or logographically,
but they could also be used phonetically as an abjad depending on the context. So basically a particular glyph could either
represent the things itâs literally a picture of, some other vague concept that needed a
symbol, or just a sound making up a word (perhaps for something like foreign names). It was a convoluted system that only a small
fraction of the population could master, with well over 700 characters, meaning that being
a scribe was actually a very exclusive class in Ancient Egypt. This system nonetheless would evolve and simplify,
first coming into the Levant as the Proto-Sinaitic abjad, and then into modern-day Lebanon where
our story really ramps up. The Phoenicians were a Semitic people group
who lived on the shores of what is now Lebanon. Expert seafarers, they crucially both had
extensive trade links with Egypt and would establish a massive trading post empire across
the ancient Mediterranean. The Phoenicians inherited the previous systems,
but assigned their own names to some of the letters, pairing the first sounds in each
of said names to whichever letter it was assigned to. Take this symbol of an ox for example, the
Phoenician word for ox was âalep, which started with a sound called a glottal stop
(represented here by the apostrophe), with both the name and initial sound now assigned
to this character (which was simplified into this shape). This was the exact same story with bÄt, gÄ«ml,
dÄlet, hÄ, wÄw, zayin, áž„et, áčet, yĆd, kÄp, lÄmed, mÄm, nĆ«n, sÄmek, âayin,
pÄ, áčŁÄdÄ, qĆp, reĆĄ, ĆĄÄ«n, and tÄw. (Oh thatâs where the letter Q came from!) As you can see, these characters still kind
of looked like their original ideograms, but were simplified for use purely as the phonological
building blocks of words. This was arguably the key to helping the writing
system spread to other languages, as they could be molded into whatever word for whatever
concept the situation demanded, (at least as long as the language in question had a
similar sound inventory to Phoenician). It was basically the difference between learning
of a new, foreign concept, and having to create whole a logogram to represent it, versus just
learning what others called it and spelling that out phonetically. Phoenician was an abjad, and one that was
written from right-to-left, which (as if the names of the letters werenât enough of a
clue) would branch off to the east to form scripts including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic,
Syriac, and many others-- even into India and Southeast Asia as the Brahmic scripts--
but to the west, it would also branch off in a different way. One of the hot destinations on the phonetic-Phoeniciansâ
trade routes by the mid 1st millennium BC was of course Greece, home to numerous city-states
with which the Phoenicians would establish contact. The Greeks had a writing system of their own
back in the day, a syllabary entirely unrelated to the modern Greek script known as Linear
B (or at least thatâs what we call it today), used by the Mycenaeans, but whose use had
faded away shortly after the Late Bronze Age Collapse. According to Ancient Greek mythology, it was
the Theban king Cadmus who brought the Phoenician writing system to Greece, but however exactly
it actually happened, the Greeks would adopt the Phoenician script for their language and
dialects. It wasnât a perfect fit though, since Phoenician
was an Afro-Asiatic Semitic language, and Greek an Indo-European Hellenic language,
meaning their phonologies were completely different, especially in how the two languages
treated vowels. Most of the letters upon adoption didnât
change their sounds at all but changed their look and names a bit, like bet becoming beta
(Î), reĆĄ becoming rho (ÎĄ), tÄw becoming tau (΀), etc. In the absence of a glottal stop however âalep
became alpha (Î) for the /a/ sound; hÄ and áž„et got similar treatments as well, as Ancient
Greek did have a /h/ sound, but not two, so áž„et became eta (Î) -- whose sound has since
changed-- and the softer hÄ became epsilon (Î); âayin lost that other weird Semitic
glottal sound and became omicron (Î); and wÄw split to become the now extinct digamma
(Ï) for the /w/ sound and the extant upsilon (΄) for the /u/ or /y/ sound, with the Greeks
finally adding on a few more letters to even things out. One of the letters the Greeks added was chi
(Χ), in most dialects pronounced as a /x/ or /ç/ sound, but was also paired with sigma
(ÎŁ) to make the /ks/ sounds, which in some dialects was simplified so that it was just
the letter chi making those sounds. So that explains the whole deal with X. It was here the writing direction started
to change as well, slowly morphing from right-to-left to left-to-right, but in between using a system
called boustrophedon, âbousâ meaning ox, âstrophÄâ meaning turn, and âdĂłnâ
meaning âin the manner ofâ, âturning in the manner of an oxâ, meaning many in
Ancient Greece wrote in alternating directions, in much the same manner as an ox plows a field. This would also explain how some letters got
flipped over time, since the letters also changed direction along with the sentences. For example, going left-to-right the letter
A was written like this, but right-to-left it was written like this⊠uh okay, bad example. Then the Greek script started to spread westwards
to the Romans⊠except not really, it did spread west into modern-day Italy but not
just to the Latin-speaking peoples in central Italy, but also to a long-lost group just
to the north called the Etruscans, who would later influence said Latin-speaking peoples. A right-to-left script for a non-Indo European
language, the Old-Italic script nonetheless helped set up the framework for the Latin
alphabet as we know it, basically taking 21 of the letters of the Greek alphabet and slightly
modifying their shape. The Etruscans had a different phonology from
Greek as well though, and so dropped letters including theta (Î) and phi (Ί), and also
pronounced their version of gamma (Î) with more of a /k/ sound, as they didnât have
a /g/ sound in their language, which explains why Greek and all the older systems start
off with A, B, G, yet Latin starts off with A, B, C. This brings us to the Latin alphabet of the
Romans, who in turn re-added some of those old sounds, pronouncing C as /k/ or /g/ but
adding a tail when it was /g/ to avoid confusion, and assigning the /f/ sound phi used to make
to the old digamma that became F, delegating the task of making a /w/ sound to V (before
it ever made a /v/ sound), a descendant of upsilon which itself split to create the letters
V and Y. So thatâs the Latin alphabet, all 23 letters
of it. Of course, V was pronounced as an /u/ or a
/w/ sound depending on its place in a word, and there was no /dÊ/ sound, so an âIâ
did the trick instead, which explains why Julius Caesar would have called himself âIVLIVS
CAESARâ (âyu-lius kaisarâ). Letters like J, U, and W would be added after
the fall of the Western Roman Empire, completing the basic 26 letters used across most of the
languages which use the script, though perhaps I should also address why we use two different
writing systems. Upper and lower case, anyone? I mean think about it, having some letters
different from others for stylistic reasons is kind of a weird feature, and one that only
really shows up in scripts related to Latin. Anyway, the Romans basically spent their whole
history writing in caps lock rage, at least when it came to big, important texts. When it came to shorter texts that needed
to be written quickly however, a sort of cursive started to develop, almost as a kind of shorthand
script. At the same time the Eastern Roman Empire
was doing the same thing with the Greek script, Latin cursive steadily evolved into Carolingian
miniscule, and later the oh-so stereotypical Germanic blackletter font, and then our modern
lowercase. The two versions of the Latin script were
at first used separately, uppercase only being used for big, important words, but slowly
they started to intermingle, using the more prominent uppercase characters to mark important
things, like for instance the first letter of a sentence. The Latin alphabet had by now reached more
or less its final form, but continued to diversify as it spread across Europe and around the
world, adding new characters from other scripts, putting little markings on old characters,
and solidifying the look of the letters with the printing press (and thus also changing
their mind on the runic characters). Nowadays the Latin alphabet is the official
script in 131 sovereign states and co-official in 12 more, now used by languages as unrelated
to Latin as Hawaiian or Xhosa. Now, will we see further shifts in the Latin
alphabet? Itâs hard to say in the age of the internet,
with many believing that this might be the final form of the Latin alphabet weâll be
seeing, but I suppose thatâs a question for the KhAnubises of the 31st century. As always, thanks for watching. As you might have already heard, Iâve shifted
to a two-week schedule instead of a one-week schedule, so hopefully I was able to make
this video even more enjoyable than the ones I only spent one week on. If you did enjoy it, be sure to like, share,
check out the Patreon page, and subscribe to learn something new every⊠other Sunday.
Nice. I was just wondering about this exact topic. Thanks OP.