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Where would we be without writing? Thered be no books, magazines, or newspapers. Thered be no

instructions for putting together a bike or a VCR. Thered be no birthday or anniversary cards. Thered be

no signs on the road to tell us where to go.

WHAT IS WRITING?

Writing is a method of communication. It uses marks that we see and understand. The marks we use to

write English are the letters of the alphabet. They stand for sounds.

At a very young age, we memorize the letters of our alphabet and their sounds. Once we have done

that, we can combine the marks into words and sentences. Other people can understand them. We can

understand what other people have written. We also can write down our thoughts just for ourselves.

HOW DID WRITING BEGIN?

People probably began with picture writing. They didnt always have an alphabet. In picture writing, a

sign stands for an object. For example, a circle might stand for the Sun.

But a picture-writing system is difficult. There are just too many things to represent with pictures.

Picture writing requires thousands of signs. In addition, pictures cant be strung together to sound the

way people speak. Its also hard to express things like opinions and ideas with pictures.

Over time, picture writing developed into a different system. The circle that stood for Sun began to

stand for the sound or syllable sun or even son. It could be used to make other words, like sunshine.

This was a good system. There are a lot fewer sounds in a language than there are objects to be

represented.

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Egyptian hieroglyphs are a kind of picture writing. In time, the pictures came to stand for sounds. This

also happened to Chinese and many other languages. Chinese characters started out as pictures and

now stand for sounds.

Egyptian hieroglyphs are among the oldest forms of writing. The earliest Egyptian writing we know of

dates from about 3200 bc. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia also were writing before 3000 bc.

BIRTH OF THE ALPHABET

After signs got linked to sounds, the next big step in writing was the development of an alphabet. With

an alphabet, people no longer had to guess what a picture meant. Without an alphabet, how could they

tell if a picture of a bee, for example, meant the insect bee, the verb to be, or the first syllable in another

word like believe?

The alphabet developed in the Middle East. The first alphabet we know about was developed by the

Phoenicians who lived in what is now Lebanon. Their alphabet had 22 letters.

The Phoenician alphabet did not have letters for vowels (a, e, i, o, u). The Greeks added those letters.

Our word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.

THE ABCS

An alphabet is a clever set of letters or other symbols. Each letter represents a different sound of a

language. These letters can be combined to write all the words of a language.

There are about 50 different alphabets used in the world today. They are different in the way they look

and in the sounds their letters stand for. Most alphabets have between 20 and 30 letters. The English

language uses the Roman alphabet. It has 26 letters.

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Languages with fewer sounds require fewer letters. The sounds of the Hawaiian language, for example,

are written using only 12 letters of the Roman alphabet. This alphabet has the fewest letters of any

language. Other alphabets, such as Sinhalese, the alphabet of Sri Lanka, have 50 letters or more.

DO ALL LANGUAGES HAVE AN ALPHABET?

Only a few languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, do not use an alphabet.

Like other ancient languages, Chinese began as a pictographic language. Todays written Chinese still

uses thousands of symbols, or characters. To read a newspaper in Chinese, you would need to know

from 3,000 to 4,000 characters!

Also in Encarta Kids

All articles about reading and writing

English Language

Korean alphabet

Language

Literature

Poetry

Secret Codes

On the Web

See the translations of some Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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