The Development of the Modern Alphabet
by Gina Lewis

Read this story about the development of our modern alphabet. Use it to complete the next page.

Many languages, such as French, Spanish, English, and German, are written using the 26 letter alphabet known as the Roman alphabet. The Romans didn't invent this alphabet, however. They merely put some finishing touches on a system that had been evolving for thousands of years.

The ancient Egyptians used a complicated system of several hundred picture signs, developed around 3000 B.C., that could stand for either syllables or full words. There were no signs for vowels. To write the word nefer, which meant "good," the Egyptians could use a single sign that stood for the whole word, or three signs stood for the sounds n, f and r.

The Phoenicians, who lived along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, invented their own system of 22 signs around 1000 B.C. Like the Egyptian system, their alphabet contained no vowels and used some picture symbols.

When the Greeks came in contact with Phoenician traders, they borrowed Phoenician symbols to make their own alphabet in about 800 B.C. The Phoenician alphabet used more consonants than the Greeks needed for their language, so they used the extra signs for vowel sounds. This was an improvement over the Egyptian and Phoenician systems, because they could combine both consonants and vowels to form any sound they wanted. This alphabet was later adopted by the Romans, who gave it much the same form we use today.

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