first questions, some bigger than others

1. Why was it that the symbols used by people before the time of the Greeks and the Phoenicians are not generally regarded as contributing significantly to modern alphabet languages?
   
   
2. To what extent were the Greeks and the Phoenicians responsible for laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages?
   
   
3. What other races had a significant part to play in laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages, and to what extent?
   
   
4. How is it that Asian languages and those based on the Cyrillic alphabet have characters which are so different from the 26 letter “Western” alphabet?

Thanks for reading.

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Discussion/Reflection


describe the research process for that week

I started collecting bookmarks (favourites) and created subfolders based on keywords in the project title.

document your research findings so far
include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

The more I read, the larger the task seemed to become. The work seemed intimately connected with linguistics, which was inevitable, but I had hoped to be able skip over the detail in some areas but still be able to tell the story. At this stage I am happy to have posed a few questions and hope, optimistically, that a way through this research will come to me.

I don't have any reportable findings at present, but as a supervisor once told me, it's not about the actual problem solving (important though that may be), it's about asking the right questions.

share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

I have bookmarked the following websites, though I have not worked through 1/3 of them yet.


http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/

http://www.pandia.com/cgi-local/plus3.pl?etype=odp&passurl=/Science/Social_Sciences/Linguistics/

http://www.omniglot.com/

http://www.math.twsu.edu/history/topics/num-sys.html#greek

http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t102.e4660&category=

http://www.archive.org/details/storyofalphabet00egeorich

http://phoenicia.org/alphabet.html

http://www.jstor.org/pss/4604349