"We call writing any system used by men to fix the expression of their thoughts by material signs, so as to be able to communicate them to each other other than by word and to give them a duration"
, wrote the Assyriologist François Lenormant in his
Essay on the propagation of the Phoenician alphabet in the ancient world
in 1875. It was in order to freeze on a physical medium what men could no longer retain mentally that writing was invented.
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How the “Y” changed meaning
The origin of writing, and therefore of the alphabet, dates back to the 4th millennium BC.
J.-C. The cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia as well as the Egyptian hieroglyphs are considered as the first systems of writing.
It is then a question of listing on a physical support other than the body, the foodstuffs and the goods that the men committed to forced labor bring as an offering to the doors of the temples, explains Pierre Bergounioux in
The Body of the letter
(Fata Morgana).
From hieroglyphs to the Latin alphabet
The first writing systems are analog systems that come under ideographism.
These are painted representations of material signs borrowed from nature or the works of human industry.
They are used to express an idea.
They are found in China and Egypt in particular, where, for example, a rectangle symbolizes a body of water.
A different symbol corresponds to each object.
About 3500 years ago, a new simplified system in which symbols correspond to sounds was created.
Phonetics is adopted by several languages, including Phoenician (spoken in the region corresponding to present-day Lebanon).
In
The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet and Ancient Phoenician Scripts
, Peter Kyle McCarter, a professor of biblical studies at American Johns Hopkins University, writes that this language borrows the first sound of the name of the object represented by Egyptian hieroglyphs .
It is the birth of the alphabet as a set of letters in which the phonemes of a language appear, arranged in a conventional order, to use the definition of the
Trésor de la langue française
.
Disseminated through Phoenician merchants in the Mediterranean, it is from this alphabet that the Greek alphabet of 24 letters came, which itself gave birth to the Latin alphabet of 26 letters that we use today. .
In this way, the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a bull's head, represented in the shape of a "V" in the Phoenician alphabet (due to the presence of horns), gave rise to the letter "A".
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