Alphabet is most probably the greatest human invention even more than wheel.
It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind", without it human progress is greatly hindered and inhibited [1].
"The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic" [2].
Very few, if any, inventions appear in a void, completely independent of prior inventions.
Most inventions, no matter how original and non-obvious they are claimed to be, appear at a closer analysis to be only modifications and combinations of prior inventions, where what is new is always much less than what is old.
The Phoenician alphabet with 22 letters was just a simplification of an older North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters.
Both the North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters (the oldest alphabet from which our alphabetic order A, B, C, D ..., comes) and the South-Semitic alphabet with 29 letters (and a different alphabetic order) come from an older Semitic alphabet, which had been derived from a simplification of the Egyptian consonantic writing system.
The Egyptian writing system has been derived from some older pictographic proto-writing system, a transition that might have been inspired by exposure to the Sumerian writing system, which had similarly been derived from an older proto-writing system used for accounting.
The proto-writing systems, i.e. sets of symbols designating various things, like icons or emojis, could have appeared only after people had discovered how to draw using pigments or how to sculpt or carve hard substrates.
And so on, every invention is based on even earlier inventions, and it is seldom possible to say that one step has been the most important. Normally all the chain of inventions is important and every step has been indispensable.
card_zero 28 days ago [-]
We invented a lot of things before the alphabet, though, such as the drawer, the manacle, musical scales, and socks with toes. I feel like a rich background of objects was necessary before we got it together to reach an alphabet level of abstraction. Letter T is a wheel (it's the spokes).
Jun8 29 days ago [-]
Got me thinking: how would you handle umlauts, eg ü? Maybe you’re holding twin babies in two and throw them up? Or maybe we can include pets.
Xophmeister 29 days ago [-]
Bumblebee headband?
card_zero 28 days ago [-]
The "pattern book" in the sources interests me. I've seen a reproduction of one of these before, also from the 1500s. Their purpose was to show illustrators and craftsmen how to draw things. This page demonstrates what an elephant looks like (and a fox):
> During the Late Middle Ages, two minuscule glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including /u/ and modern /v/. The pointed form ⟨v⟩ was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form ⟨u⟩ was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valour and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed as "haue" and "vpon". The first distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩ is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where ⟨v⟩ preceded ⟨u⟩. By the mid-16th century, the ⟨v⟩ form was used to represent the consonant and ⟨u⟩ the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter ⟨v⟩. ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later.[3] The rounded variant became the modern-day version of ⟨u⟩, and the letter's former pointed form became ⟨v⟩.
> The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W" character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter "V" (at the time, not yet distinct from "U").
Archelaos 28 days ago [-]
In this context I would also add, that there is still a reminisense of the ⟨u⟩ representing the /v/ ord /w/ sounds in many modern European languages, where it is generally used in <qu> to represent the sound /kv/ or /kw/. However, there are exception, for example in Swedish, where <kv> is common. My favorite example is the word "kvinna" for woman.
observationist 28 days ago [-]
Some traditional alphabet charts and primers treated W as a compound letter - double u, uu - and V stood in place of U.
adrian_b 28 days ago [-]
The classic Latin alphabet had 23 letters. The letters J, U and W have been added during the middle ages. They were originally just variants of the Latin letters I and V.
The origin of "u" is as the lowercase form of "V". Latin had used "V" both for the vowel form of "u" and for the consonant form of "u", which is written in English as "w". The Latin consonant "u" has become fricative in the Romance languages, i.e. the sound written in English as "v".
Due to this change in pronunciation, for the Romance languages 2 new letters have been created, uppercase "U" and lowercase "v", pairing them with the older "V" and "u" and giving them the current pronunciation. Most other European languages have then taken this updated Latin alphabet. A similar history was for the splitting of Latin "I" into "I" and "J".
English is one of the few Indo-European languages that has preserved the original consonant "u" pronunciation in many words, instead of changing to a fricative "v" pronunciation. Because of this, "W" has been originally created for English to write this pronunciation, for which neither "u" nor "v" was appropriate. Later "W" has been taken also by other languages, where it has received different pronunciations.
It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind", without it human progress is greatly hindered and inhibited [1].
"The Phoenician system is considered the first true alphabet and is the ultimate ancestor of many modern scripts, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic" [2].
[1] Bicycle of the Mind (45 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712009
[2] Alphabet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet
Most inventions, no matter how original and non-obvious they are claimed to be, appear at a closer analysis to be only modifications and combinations of prior inventions, where what is new is always much less than what is old.
The Phoenician alphabet with 22 letters was just a simplification of an older North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters.
Both the North-Semitic alphabet with 27 letters (the oldest alphabet from which our alphabetic order A, B, C, D ..., comes) and the South-Semitic alphabet with 29 letters (and a different alphabetic order) come from an older Semitic alphabet, which had been derived from a simplification of the Egyptian consonantic writing system.
The Egyptian writing system has been derived from some older pictographic proto-writing system, a transition that might have been inspired by exposure to the Sumerian writing system, which had similarly been derived from an older proto-writing system used for accounting.
The proto-writing systems, i.e. sets of symbols designating various things, like icons or emojis, could have appeared only after people had discovered how to draw using pigments or how to sculpt or carve hard substrates.
And so on, every invention is based on even earlier inventions, and it is seldom possible to say that one step has been the most important. Normally all the chain of inventions is important and every step has been indispensable.
https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/385c0fdd-03ce-42c7...
So most people were just copying the same patterns over and over, like clip art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V
> During the Late Middle Ages, two minuscule glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including /u/ and modern /v/. The pointed form ⟨v⟩ was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form ⟨u⟩ was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valour and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed as "haue" and "vpon". The first distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩ is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where ⟨v⟩ preceded ⟨u⟩. By the mid-16th century, the ⟨v⟩ form was used to represent the consonant and ⟨u⟩ the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter ⟨v⟩. ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later.[3] The rounded variant became the modern-day version of ⟨u⟩, and the letter's former pointed form became ⟨v⟩.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
> The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W" character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter "V" (at the time, not yet distinct from "U").
The origin of "u" is as the lowercase form of "V". Latin had used "V" both for the vowel form of "u" and for the consonant form of "u", which is written in English as "w". The Latin consonant "u" has become fricative in the Romance languages, i.e. the sound written in English as "v".
Due to this change in pronunciation, for the Romance languages 2 new letters have been created, uppercase "U" and lowercase "v", pairing them with the older "V" and "u" and giving them the current pronunciation. Most other European languages have then taken this updated Latin alphabet. A similar history was for the splitting of Latin "I" into "I" and "J".
English is one of the few Indo-European languages that has preserved the original consonant "u" pronunciation in many words, instead of changing to a fricative "v" pronunciation. Because of this, "W" has been originally created for English to write this pronunciation, for which neither "u" nor "v" was appropriate. Later "W" has been taken also by other languages, where it has received different pronunciations.