Serendipity Daily Thoughts

Hi. Thank you for revisiting my post today. I wrote how people usually manipulate languages and the ancient ways of communication. I left the post explaining the relationship between Chinese character and the religion prevalent in China. For today’s post, I’m going to write about alphabets as the title indicates.

There are 26 letters in alphabets used in English. Some non-English speaking countries, such as France, Spain and Italy, also utilize similar characters to write their languages – French, Spanish and Italian. Therefore, it seems that the origin of alphabets is rooted in Europe. In fact, the primitive alphabet was invented by Phoenician 3000 years ago. There were said to be 22 characters used for keeping the trade records. Since Phoenician played a significant role in sea trades at that time, they forced surrounding countries to use the same characters, contributing to wide-spread use of the primitive alphabet. Although Phoenician letters were regarded as the origin of alphabet that we currently use, they were only pictograms. For example, “A” represented Ox, because “A” looks like the up side down version of ox’s head. “D” implied a door, and “E” was considered as a window. Another interesting fact is that they did not have any vowels, which means that every reader were supposed to guess blanks. It can be assumed that they did not need complicated system of letters because the letters were only used for keeping the trade records.

200 years later than the era of Phoenician, Greek added vowels to the letters. In this way, the language became easier to learn by non-native speakers, leading to wider shares of thoughts and ideas through written papers. This is why science, philosophy and politics in Greek era can be tracked down in detail. Allowance of more people to be involved in writing letters on papers possibly contribute to more innovations, because people may be able to come up with new ideas through knowing others’ thoughts.

During the period of Roman empire, the alphabet we currently use was developed, and it was spread out around European region. Similar to how Chinese characters helped the religion to prevail in the country, the Latin, developed in Roman empire era, contributed the Christianity to be believed in European countries. Thanks to the language system, we are enabled to understand what was happening in centuries ago.

Nowadays, the age of AI has already started and I feel like it will create its own world at some point. Interestingly, programs that run AI is generated using alphabets, and actually, almost all codes behind apps and AIs are written in alphabets. One potential reason why alphabets are employed in broad range is that it is one of the easiest language to acquire and manipulate. In this sense, the development of alphabets has progressed the human development a lot. But I wonder – is there any easier language to acquire for non-native speakers than English in this world? Is it possible to create a completely new language that follows human instincts? Please leave comments if you have any ideas.

Thank you for reading my post today. I appreciate if you leave any comments including the one I proposed. See you in the next post!