The first forms of written communication employed by humans were probably pictograms, in which a picture of an idea or thing stands for the idea or thing. Such systems of written communication are useful; in China, for example, modified pictograms, called ideograms because they do not always represent the object or action under discussion, still constitute the majority of writing. However, a
. complex language communicated in pictograms can be overwhelming to learn, so certain communities throughout history have come up with simplified systems in which the symbols communicate the sounds of words rather than the meanings. Such systems are called alphabets. The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, "alpha" and "beta". However, the Greeks did not invent the concept of the alphabet. The first indication that archaeologists have found of a phonetic writing system is in ancient Egypt, where scribes wrote certain pronunciation guides using a series of characters. These characters were not, however, used systematically, though they may have provided the basis for the later Proto-Sinaitic script, which originated on the Sinai peninsula in the second millennium B.C.E. This script, in turn, evolved into the Semitic languages, which include Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. The Phoenicians were great traders, and their alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean, most prominently to Greece, where vowels were invented; the Greek alphabet is the mother of all Western alphabets today. The revolutionary idea of alphabetic communication also spread east. Arabic, for example, evolved from the letters used to write Aramaic, one of the early Semitic languages. Aramaic also influenced the Brahmi script of India, which in turn evolved into many of the alphabets in central Asia, one of which, in turn, influenced Sejong the Great, king of Korea, who invented an alphabet for his language in 1443 to replace Chinese ideograms. The alphabet is a unique and important piece of communications technology, as revolutionary in its day as the invention of the cellular telephone is in the present day. Although it may seem like a simple idea, it allowed people to learn written languages much more easily, democratizing the process and allowing broader education and recording of information. More Reference Links: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0054950 http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html
