Writing is awesome, it’s easy to take it for granted, but if (for instance) I couldn’t
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 I’m using
to write this video) is of course the Latin alphabet, but of course the alphabet didn’t
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, you’ll 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, let’s 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 don’t 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 world’s 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 can’t 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 what’s 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 it’s 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 ‘alep, 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 bēt, gīml, dālet, hē, wāw, zayin, ḥet, ṭet, yōd,
kāp, lāmed, mēm, nūn, sāmek, ‘ayin, pē, ṣādē, qōp, reš, šīn, and tāw.
(Oh that’s 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 weren’t 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-Phoenicians’ 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 that’s 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 wasn’t 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 didn’t change their sounds at all but changed their
look and names a bit, like bet becoming beta (Β), reš becoming rho (Ρ), tāw becoming
tau (Τ), etc.
In the absence of a glottal stop however ‘alep became alpha (Α) for the /a/ sound; hē and
ḥet got similar treatments as well, as Ancient Greek did have a /h/ sound, but not two, so
ḥet became eta (Η) -- whose sound has since changed-- and the softer hē became epsilon
(Ε); ‘ayin lost that other weird Semitic glottal sound and became omicron (Ο); and
wāw split to become the now extinct digamma (Ϝ) for the /w/ sound and the extant upsilon
(Υ) 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 (Σ) 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, “bous” meaning ox,
“strophē” meaning turn, and “dón” meaning ‘in the manner of’, “turning
in the manner of an ox”, 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 (Θ) and phi (Φ), and also pronounced their version of gamma (Γ) with
more of a /k/ sound, as they didn’t 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 that’s 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 /dʒ/ sound, so an “I” did the trick instead, which explains why
Julius Caesar would have called himself “IVLIVS CAESAR” (“yu-lius kaisar”).
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?
It’s hard to say in the age of the internet, with many believing that this might be the
final form of the Latin alphabet we’ll be seeing, but I suppose that’s a question
for the KhAnubises of the 31st century.
As always, thanks for watching.
As you might have already heard, I’ve 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.