Why do we use letters to write stuff?

zbeckabee

Convenience for one. Historically, letters exist from the time of ancient Egypt and Sumer, all the way through Rome and Greece and China. Letters make up several of the books of the Christian Bible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter Jul 31 06, 8:07 AM

Gnomon

Writing using an alphabet of letters is very efficient, in that there aren't too many symbols to learn, and it has very little amiguity. Before we had letters, people used a symbol to represent a number of sounds - this was the system in Egyptiant heiroglyphs. A typical hieroglyph represented two or even three consonants (with the vowels in between omitted). This meant that there had to be extra symbols called determinatives to remove the ambiguity. There were about 750 different symbols, making the whole writing system so complex that only a few people could understand it. It's not clear exactly where letters came from, but one leading theory is that Semitic people working in the Luxor, the capital of Egypt, in around 1,800 BC, developed a simple system of writing their own language based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, but used symbols representing only one consonant, making determinatives unnecessary. This system became the Phoenician alphabet, and gave rise to the later Semitic alphabets such as Hebrew and the Arabic. A modification of the Phoenician alphabet resulted in vowels being added, which became the Greek alphabet, from which our letters are descended. http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2451890 Jul 31 06, 8:12 AM

Baloo55th

The priests wouldn't have been very happy about this, as they were the ones who could read the hieroglyphics (as the name shows - it means priest-writing basically). Hieroglyphics are fine for impressive monuments, when you can slip an obol to a nearby priest for a translation, but they're useless for business, where you need quick writing and clarity of expression. A sort of intermediate form of writing came in called demotic (meaning of the people). Well, they didn't call it hieroglyphics and demotic because those are Greek words in origin, but it's what we call 'em. Jul 31 06, 2:04 PM