Let’s go back to our example of the alphabet you invented for English, and imagine again the “monkey” you drew. Since there are fewer speech sounds than words, only about twenty, from now on, instead of using thousands of symbols, you would only use a limited number around twenty, which would be enough to write anything.įrom this original Semitic alphabet, which looked more like Egyptian drawings, several alphabets came out.Īs time went by, these letters were modified. You would choose a word for each phoneme. From now on, the monkey’s drawing would no longer represent the monkey, but only the “M” sound. So in every word that this sound appeared, the monkey’s design would appear. Then you would take the drawing of the monkey, and create the letter “monkey”, which would be used to represent the sound “m”. You choose any word that starts with this sound.įor example, you could choose the word “monkey”. You want to invent a letter for the “M” sound. So you decide to invent a phonetic alphabet to simplify writing. Imagine that in the English language we use “pictograms”, that is, we make drawings to represent each word. Let’s see an example: Imagine that you were going to invent the alphabet today, based on the English language. Some symbols were selected, so that a one word symbol would now represent a phoneme, and each existing sound of the language received a symbol. The idea was as follows: a “drawing” that previously represented a word, would now represent the sound which the word started with. Each letter is a sound it would be enough to join the sounds to form the words. Thus, with a few symbols it would be possible to write all the words. This means that each symbol would represent a sound, rather than a word. Over time, some people decided to invent a simpler script: the phonetic writing. These are extremely complex types of writing, which require learning thousands of different symbols.
Love, happiness, justice, heaven, earth, man, woman… each word would possess a symbol. To write dog, you would have a symbol for the dog. To write “tree”, for example, you would learn a symbol that would represent a tree. This means that for each word, you would need to learn a different symbol or combination. When writing was invented, people initially created symbols to represent ideas or words.įor example, ancient Egyptian script, or even Chinese script and parts of the Japanese script, which are still used today, were invented to work as follows:Įach symbol represents a word, or an idea. To better understand the origin of the Hebrew alphabet, let’s understand a little about the origin of writing, and the history of the alphabets. The Latin alphabet was eventually adopted by all these modern languages, including English.īut before the Latin alphabet existed, there were already several other forms of writing systems, used in many languages around the world. The English language, as well as other Western languages, such as Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, etc., is written with the Latin alphabet, which was used by the Romans to write their language, Latin. The “alef-beit”, as the Hebrew alphabet is known, consists of the 22 letters that are used to write the Hebrew words. The Hebrew language is written with an alphabet quite different from the one we use in English.
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