What is Digg?42 Comments
- psygnisfive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17This animation has been around for at least 5 years. It's also missing the most important steps: Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Phoenician Alphabet. That was crucial, because without that part who would know why A's look like A's, or why M's look like M's, etc.? It's one thing to show how the alphabet changed over time, but to start at Phoenician and claim you're showing the evolution of the alphabet is a bit misleading; there's an entire 2000 years missing. That's almost half the life of the alphabet, and the most crucial, formatic part.
- dgendreau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Thats because O is actually a pictogram of the mouth while the sound is made.
- SeenD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html
you have to remove the dot behind the link :)
Great visuals though...
cool to see how it evolved, what is it going to be in the future?? Will it change much?
I personally don't think so, because in the old days, the ruling of nations varied a lot, today its only the USA, so it won't change, except when North Korea takes over the world and we have to combine our alphabet with theirs... that's the only possibility i see :P - oneoverzero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It wasn't the Egyptian hieroglyphs that turned into the Phonecian Alphabet; It was the Proto-canaan. Also, the Hebrew alphabet evolved cocurrently to this one. not before.
- dgendreau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5An interesting thing about most ancient writing systems. Ancient Hebrew, Arabic, Hieroglyphics etc. They rarely used vowels, spaces, capitalization or punctuation. Imagine how hard it must have been to read back then. see for yourself:
NNTRSTNGTHNGBTMSTNCNTWRTNGSYSTMSANCNTHBRWARBCHRGLPHCS
ETCTHYRRLYUSDVWLSSPCSCPTLZTNRPNCTTNMGNHWHRDTMSTHVBNTRD
BCKTHNSFRYRSLF
It was like an ancient form of data compression to conserve valuable resources (scrolls, scribes etc). Next time someone tells you it was impossible for them to make mistakes when they translate the ancient hebrew and aramaic scrolls of the bible into greek and later english, think about the original forms they were in. - vbsurfer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6oooooh. I get it.
- unloud, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8...well at least O knows what's up.
- acitta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6This animation, titled The Evolution of the Latin Alphabet, is one of several found on this page: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~rfradkin/alphapage.html.
- griz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Very cool, but can any anyone answer this? Why is the alphabet in this order?
There must have a root cause for its seemingly arbitrary order.
Sure the alphabet song would sound odd in any other order, but if it were in another order, we would now have a different song. - Draracle, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9The Egyptians had hieroglyphs, it doesn't translate into an alphabet. It would be more accurate to look at the Jews during the height of Egyptian power -- who actually had an "alphabet", arguably the first alphabet in history. It is a twist of irony that while Egypt ruled and Israel slaved -- one developed the hallmark for written language and the other built large monuments to house dead guys. Both impressive, but one far far more impressive than the other.
- dgendreau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4There was more contact in the ancient world than you might think.
It is pretty well accepted that they were influenced by the Latin and Etruscan alphabets.
http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/origins.html - ostracize, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Parent is correct. The Ancient Egyptians had a crude alphabet.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Phonetic_reading - loquax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3For those Tolkien geeks like me out there, take a look at the Etruscan. Much of the Nordic runes came (strangely) from Etruscan influence from a time when the two cultures should have had little contact. Also, most alphabets started out not as phonetic representations, but as logo-pictographic representations of cattle etc.The whole jump to phonetic representation was an amazing development.
Great digg!! - hypoxide, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I've always been curious about how–historically speaking–characters could suddenly flip horizontally or take an almost unrecognizable form. The evolution of alphabet characters is certainly interesting, but the origin is perhaps more interesting–where did these characters come from? How could they have possibly taken their current shape? Here's an insightful page from a google search:
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/alphabet.html - bennypowers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3aleph, bet, gimmel, daled, => alpha, beta, gamma, delta,
- Darrelc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Or not. 404.
- dextrase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3And because they did not indicate the vowel at the core of every syllable they were not in the strictest sense of the word alphabets. The Greeks were the ones to come up with the first alphabet, by force of circumstance, as Greek (as well as other Indo-European languages) cannot do what Semitic languages can, ie, predict the vowel of a syllable from a knowledge of the syntax and semantics of a phrase/sentence. Thus Semitic languages are represented visually by a syllabaries (each letter standing in for a syllable to which you, the native speaker, supply the vowel sound). Pointing in Hebrew (ie, dots and dashes inserted above and below the syllabic letters to indicate vowel sounds) was introduced centuries after Hebrew ceased being a living, spoken language and scholars had to indicate for readers the vowels to sound out in any given syllable). Now that Hebrew is again a living language, Modern Hebrew usually dispenses with this unnecessary pointing.
- dstrube, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's kinda cool, but the only Greek part that isn't morphed over is messed up in a lot of ways:
beta was not backwards
epsilon was not backwards
the F equivalent was not a backwards F, it was phi (shown incorrectly between W and X)
the backwards F was a wid or digamma, equivalent to the W
kappa was not backwards
xi (the 3 horizontal lines) is more of an equivalent of X than chi (what looks like an X)
mu was the M equivalent, not that squiggly thing they have in front of nu
where did omega go? psi is not the last letter.
There's more wrong with it, but you get the idea. In short, if the idea was to show a static progression, they shouldn't have morphed over the more familiar Greek. - polyGone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Evolution of the alphabet?
Now here is where I will lean to Intelligent Design!! - bennypowers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Who says there weren't mistakes?
The ancient rabbis wept and moaned when the Septuagint was translated. The reason is because of the myriad meanings present in the Hebrew were lost in translation to the Greek. Just look at the first word for an example: "*****" means "in the beginning OF", not "In the beginning".
But we're getting off topic.
Interestingly, certain aspects of Jewish tradition hold that the universe was actually created using the Hebrew letters, and that Hebrew was the universal language before the towel of babel (hence the similarities in language today) - bshniper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It is well known that the Hebrews did not necessarily have Hebrew script in anything like its current state until later - around the time of Isiah in Babylon. Not that the Jews didn't come up with amazing concepts far earlier than others (ethical monotheism, abstract morality, impartial judiciary, etc, etc). But I don't know that (we) can claim the first Alphabet.
- psygnisfive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2And thus my point is demonstrated. You are all fairly correct about the minor factual things, like Proto-Canaanite, the Egyptians not having a proper alphabet, etc. But you're missing the crucial step that I mentioned: Egyptian hieroglyphs had dual functionality, the primary function being alphabetic in nature, each glyph representing the first sound of the word for the thing it represents (ie, a picture of an apple representing the "a" sound, a bee representing "b", etc.). The secondary use was as logographs. The alphabetic usage became predominant, and here we are today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Canaanite_alphabet
You can read the history of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet there. If you're astute, you'll notice that the example glyphs there arenice, simplified versions of egyptian hieroglyphs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets
Reading just from the article on the MBA alphabet we can see that the Middle Bronze Age alphabet is "believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabets" and that "the script has graphic similarities with the Egyptian hieratic script, the less elaborate form of the hieroglyphs." Further down you can read about the Egyptian prototypes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Bronze_Age_alphabets#Egyptian_prototypes
I think I've demonstrated why I made my original comment. People know that our alphabet came from Phoenician, but Phoenician didn't just spring up out of nowhere. Neither did any other alphabet. The idea of one symbol representing one sound is not something that man just comes upon one afternoon. In our case, hieroglyphs were the prototype, providing the symbols. They were used by the Egyptians to represent the first phonetic sound of the word for the thing they represented. The simplified forms were then used for this alphabetic purposes and eventually turned into our alphabet through the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and Phoenician alphabet. - dgendreau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Horizontal flipping is not as strange as it might seem.
Hieroglyphics for example can be written in any direction. Flipping or rotating the symbol is used to indicate whether it is read left to right, right to left, top to bottom or bottom to top.
Many languages did this at times. - Zoshchenko, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why no Cyrillic? It is closely connected to the Greek and has some very interesting letters that require two or more to approximate in western alphabets.
- monsieurrompu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are a lot missing... I see eth, (Ðð) but I do not see thorn? (Þþ) or ß.
- b0wl0fud0n, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2It's easier to do the shape tweening with flash. Of course you can also convert the swf to gif...but I think in this instance, the flash format would be a smaller file size.
- Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6yeah i know, them tombs are mighty impressive
- Draracle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3No doubt. Now if only we had some system of abstract symbols to arrange into clusters that could form a basis for written communication... if only we had that, you could tell me more of what you know about Egypt's fine tombs.
- ginnie4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Were the rest of you as astonished as I was to see the "related ads" just above this evolving alphabet? Chinese fur toilet seats? End of the World prophecy? Crazy.
- bshniper, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I think the pronounciation of the alphabet was formed in order to rhyme in song, not vice versa.
- Dracos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1A flash animation about text? That's one of the most backwards things I've ever seen.
Just scrolling to the bottom of this thread told me that the comments here are more interesting than the article itself. - dgendreau, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"Who says there weren't mistakes?"
Most Evangelical Christians apparently. - godmode, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2"thats nuts! N-V-T-S nuts!"
- Nachoo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Why are we no longer supporting the "window"-character from the Etruscans? That one looked tight.
- kc8emd, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Very Interesting
- smur, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0I just love that movie (History of the World Part I).
- Draracle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Proto-canaan and the Hebrew alphabet is very very similar -- suggesting certain things about the origins. However, there is not proof -- this was a long time ago. But yeah, my point was the hieroglyphs are fundamentally different than an alphabet and requires a much more advanced understanding of language than simply hieroglyphs. And also the irony of the slaves carving an alphabet into the grandest structures of Egypt.
- thundercleese, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Didn't know this much could be done with a single gif file...
- aran86, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3this is inaccurate, God created the alphabet in his own image.
- SeenD, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1whoops, sry. wrong reply.
digg me down, pls :( - Dayz, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2The backwards B looks awesome
- intricate, on 10/12/2007, -19/+6Now I know my ABC's, next time won't you sing with me?
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