The Story of Alphabet by O. F, Ege

This week's post is about my reading of a classic reference on alphabets by Ege¹, and my first reading about the Rosetta stone.

The relevance of this post is that it deals with part of Question 2: " To what extent were the Greeks and the Phoenicians responsible for laying the foundations of modern alphabet languages?"

Ege¹ contends that the transformation of a race from a barbaric one to a civilised one is due, in large part, to the invention/adoption of an alphabet. There were no practical alphabets in the world for 3000 years until hieroglyphics and other writing systems were discovered around 2000 BCE.


The Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone¹ is a stone with writing on it in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek). It was carved in 196 BCE and is so called because it was found in a small town near the Nile Delta called Rashid (or El-Rashid), which the French called Rosette, and the English Rosetta.

It is written in three scripts because when it was written, there were three scripts being used in Egypt. The first was hieroglyphic which was the script used for important or religious documents. The second script was written in demotic which was the most common script used in Egypt at the time. Finally, Greek was used as it was the language used by the leaders in Egypt at the time.

Although the Rosetta stone was discovered by Napoleon's soldiers in 1799, it had to wait for over 100 years before its content could be decoded. Apart from its discovery being quite fortuitous, if it hadn't been for the right scholars viewing it at the right time it is possible that its meaning may have remained a secret for even longer.

The importance of the discovery and its value to linguists will be discussed more in a later post. However it will become evident that a knowledge of many languages and their origins are essential to the work of a professional in this field.

This also gives us a motivation for studying, in some depth, the origins of our alphabet.


After a brief introduction, Ege¹ describes the origins of the modern English/Western/Latin alphabet characters. It is a fascinating read and well worth the effort.

Here is a summary of Ege¹ in graphic-organiser / mind mapping form:
* click the image to enlarge it
* for an interactive image click here
* FreeMind was used to draw it.















Thanks for reading!


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Reflection/Discussion

describe the research process for that week
After what seemed like an eternity scanning websites of ancient writing and history, I finally decided to concentrate on one or two sites and "jump in". The site by Boeree¹ is an excellent starting point, though it is written by a professional linguist and contains serious content for the interested amateur.

A chance stumbling upon the Ege¹ text provided my first in-depth study on alphabets. I did not know how to record my reading in such a way that I could return to my notes and retrieve material easily in the future. I had used graphic organisers before and managed to find a free one FreeMind¹. The rest of the week I spent creating a "mind map" content.

document your research findings so far

It is clear that the Rosetta Stone played an important part in the decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics. What I didn't know, was that it was discovered so recently, that a physicist identified the word Ptolemy in several places, and that the stage was then set for another to complete the translation.

The only reference to Chinese I have found, so far, is that it provided characters for the Japanese and Korean languages.

The Caananite, Phoenician and Early Hebrew writing systems were very important in the development of our alphabet.


include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced
I felt that I could have spent longer collecting information which may prove useful. The difficulty has been finding a suitable entry point, but I think I have found one in the Bouree¹ site. I was also lucky to find a "scrap booking" tool - Google Notebooks - into which I could place web site fragments and my own observations. I feel that that the project may be coming together at last.


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

Google Notebooks¹ for keeping website material together - simply select the images/text and right-click add to note. It is no longer supported by Google though it may be obtained from http://www.google.com/notebook . I believe you will need to be using the Firefox browser with a Google Notebooks Add-On installed.

Don't copy and paste from Word into Blogger! I always prepared the Post in Word first, together with images, then tried to copy/paste into Blogger. Word attaches HTML code to your typing which Blogger can't handle. If you get a "Meta tags not handled" error in Blogger, that's the reason. If you must type into Word first, then copy/paste into Notepad, then copy paste into Blogger.




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References

Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 25 April 2010, < http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html>.


Ege¹
Ege, O F 1921,The story of alphabet, Norman T A Munder & Co., Baltimore, Maryland
available at <http://www.archive.org/details/storyofalphabet00egeorich>.

Google Notebooks¹
Anonymous [eHow Contributing Writer] 2010, How to download browser extension for Google Notebook, eHow Inc., viewed 26 April 2010,
<http://www.ehow.com/how_2318524_download-browser-extension-google-notebook.html>.

Rosetta¹
Strachan, RA & Roetzel, KA 1997, Ancient peoples: a hypertext view, Minnesota State University at Mankato, viewed 26 April 2010, <http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/prehistory/egypt/hieroglyphics/rosettastone.html>.