The Alphabet: An Underrated Blessing from Antiquity

       The concept of an 'Alphabet' is one that we take for granted. Considering the fact that most of the world today uses some form of an alphabet (including languages as distinct as Korean, Russian, Indian, and English), and that there are a lot of different alphabets (such as the Romance, Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets), it is easy to ignore the reality of how rare alphabets actually are. Every single alphabet (except the Korean Alphabet) has a common origin within one original alphabet, the Phoenician Alphabet.

      The Phoenician Alphabet was invented by a civilization that occupied what is now Israel, Lebanon, and Syria but happily colonized the rest of the Mediterranean spreading trade as they went. The Phoenicians would come into contact with various other groups, including the Arabs, and Indian people-groups, who would adopt the Phoenician writing system but would adapt it for their languages (This is where we get the Arabic script and the Sanskritic script).

      The Greeks would come into contact with Phoenicians and would adopt their trade partners' writing system, but with some sizable differences. For one, the Greeks would write left to right unlike the Phoenicians, and they would modify some Phoenician characters. Later, the Romans would come into contact with the Greeks, and they would take the Greek alphabet and use it with some minor changes to its characters. This was the birth of the Roman script or the script in which we write today.

       Later, the Greek Byzantines would send missionaries to Eastern Europe and Russia. These missionaries would teach the local Slavs to write, using a modified version of the Greek alphabet suited for Slavic pronunciation, creating a new alphabet called the Cyrillic Alphabet.

       The concept of the alphabet is rare and unnatural, just as was the conception of the wheel, or the sail. The concept of the alphabet is an invention from early civilization that has defined all advancements in western society behind it, becoming a staple in how people in the west understand written language. It is a concept that I, as a college student, am fronted with on a near minutely basis on my laptop, on my phone, and on my professor's smartboard. Words are a necessity of life in the 21st century, and behind them is 5000 years of history dating back to one simple discovery that changed the world.