As languages became more established and civilizations developed, people needed to write things down. The earliest known writing was invented about 5500 years ago by the Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Later, they used a reed stylus with a wedge-shaped tip to write symbols in soft clay. This style of writing is known as cuneiform, from the Greek word for “wedge-shaped”.
Other ancient peoples developed picture writing which was slow to use because there were so many different symbols. The ancient Egyptians used a form of picture writing known as hieroglyphs and later added a simplified form called hieratic script which was quicker to use. The Maya, who built up a civilization in Central America between AD 300 and 900, carved picture symbols in stone.
Alphabets use single letters to represent the different sounds in a word. Writing with letters is far quicker than using hundreds of different symbols. The first people to use an alphabet were the Canaanites, who lived about 3000 years ago on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Their writing had only 18 letters. Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi and Phoenician alphabets all developed from it. The ancient Greeks took up the Phoenician alphabet but added vowels. The Romans developed their alphabet from a later Greek version. All Western European languages still use the Roman alphabet today. The Cyrillic alphabet also developed from the Greek alphabet. It is used in Russia and some Eastern European countries today.
The oldest Chinese writing we know about is on oracle bones. Priests scratched questions on animal bones and then held the bones in a fire so that they cracked. The places where the cracks crossed the pictograms were thought to give the answers from the gods. Modern Chinese writing has developed from the earliest pictograms, which illustrate how the characters have changed over the centuries.
The Chinese and Japanese still write with symbols called characters. The characters are painted with deft strokes, using a brush and ink. Chinese characters are descended from an ancient form of picture writing. They symbolize whole words or parts of words.
There are many different alphabets in use today. The Roman alphabet is probably the most widely used. The Arabic alphabet, which has 28 letters, is written from right to left. The Devangari alphabet, used for northern Indian languages, has 46 letters.
All the words mean “book”. Hindi, Greek, Russian and Arabic all have their own alphabets which are quite different from the Roman version. Other languages use the Roman alphabet but have accents over letters to show that they are pronounced in a special way.
The realization that words could be put together using a set of letters or symbols was a remarkable achievement which has allowed people to record history and to write down poetry, stories and plays.
Many languages have changed and developed because of outside influences. English as we know it today, for example, has many words adapted from other cultures. It has some Latin words from the days when England was part of the Roman Empire. It has a large number of words derived from French, the language of England’s ruling classes following the Norman invasion of 1066.
Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese and Romanian languages all have many similar words. This is because they are descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, of which Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and Romania were once part.
People who are deaf have to understand a language without being able to hear it. Many of them do this by reading the shapes of words on the speaker’s lips. This is known as lip-reading. Another way is to use the special sign language for the deaf. Sign language differs from one country to another, but the names of the countries are “signed” in the same way.
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