Alpha and beta

An alphabet is a series of culturally agreed upon marks - letters - that represent specific sounds. Before the Phoenicians developed an alphabet around 1500 B.C.E, written language had depicted entire words at a time. The picture of a bull meant a bull, independent of its pronunciation. Being able to write, meant knowing thousands of marks that represented all the things in the known world. By developing a system dependant upon sound ('ah) and not object (bull) or concept (love), the Phoenicians were able to capture language with 20 marks instead of hundreds or thousands. In terms of letterforms, the Phoenicians were the basis of the alphabet.

The word 'alphabet' is a compression of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. By 800 B.C.E, the Greeks had adapted the 20 letters from the Phoenician alphabet, changing the shape and sound of some letters.

This has been adapted from 'A type primer' by John Kane.