Special Sub-Topic: Into the origins of Western language alphabets Click Here To Play: Into the origins of Western language alphabets

The first written language was born around 3300 BC and used cuneiform (Wedge-shaped) elements instead of the previous pictograms, and writing direction was changed to left-to-right in horizontal rows. Which is that blessed language?

Sumerian. Sumerian ("native tongue") of Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia (todays southeastern Iraq) from 4000 BC and their first use of a writing system was registered in the city of Uruk and Jamdat Nasr (3300 BC). The Sumerian writing system is classified as logophonetic, meaning that its signs represent both meaningful words (morphemes) and sounds. Web clay tables were the media to register commercial transactions and later laws. Five millennia later, the Hebrew word Ha'kak means both to engrave and legislate. The spoken Sumerian language virtually died by the 18th century BC, but its writing system was in use until 100 CE. Thus, Sumerian died at the age of 4000.

The first Semitic language developed 800 years later, around 2500 BC, in the Mesopotamia Region. Which was it?

Akkadian. Akkadian language developed from Sumeric and was named after the city of Akkad (close to todays Baghdad) with the raise of the Akkadian dynasty. It was also spoken by Assyrians and Babylonians. Since the Sumerian and Akkadian spoken languages are very different, the Sumerian signs were adopted for their sound rather than meaning and became more syllabic (usually consonant+vowel). At this point of the Quiz, our writing system have "only" 800 signs...

The 3100 BC Egyptian Hieroglyphs are signs which could represent from a single consonant to a whole word and even "determinatives" that help the reader understand a group of preceding signs. Although very different, they can be considered the source of all Semitic writing systems. Two Undeciphered scripts, dated 1800 and 1500 BC, form the evidence for an intermediate script form. In which (modern days) country were they found?

Egypt. Stone carved inscriptions, dated to 1800 BC, were found in Wadi el-Hol, Quena (along the Nile), by John and Deborah Darnell. The second group of inscriptions, which are carved graffiti, was found in the Sinai peninsula (in Serabit el-Khadim) by William F. Petrie and is dated to 1500 BC. Both locations are considered to be on important commercial paths, suggesting the critical role of trading in cultural development.

English letters have names that correspond to the sound they represent. The Semitic alphabet signs, however, have different names, although representing in many cases the same sound. What do these names represent?

Names of real world objects. Presumably translated from the hieroglyphs script system through the Proto-Sinaitic, the elements names of several Semitic alphabets are related to the shapes of objects that were represented by the Phoenician alphabet. So, for example, the letters named Daleth and Kaph had the shape of a "Delet" and a "Kaph" (a door and a hand in Hebrew), respectively. This graphical correspondence was preserved only partially in Hebrew.

This alphabet's appearance is registered to the 19th century BC and is ancestor to almost all the Semitic alphabets (and the Thai and Mongol in the East, but that is another Quiz). It had 30 elements and the Hebrew alphabet is its closest living predecessor. What is the name of this ancient alphabet?

Proto-Sinaitic. The people living in today's Sinai area were conquered by the Egyptians, from which they adopted 30 signs to represent the sound of their own Semitic language. It has spread to Canaan (it is also known as Proto-Canaanite) and developed into Phoenician after 500 years. Curiously, we do not know almost anything about the people that created the first pure consonantal alphabet and consequently reduced the number of signs to a manageable number.

This Greek alphabet, the direct ancestor of the Latin alphabet (among others) and consequently of most of the current western world, is actually a 9th century BC close adaptation of an extinct Semitic alphabet. Which alphabet was it?

Phoenician. The Phoenician was not the "chosen" chance or the Gods. The Phoenician people were marine merchants that needed an instrument to write spoken languages ended up spreading their alphabet as far as Ireland. Like today, differently spoken languages were written using the same set of elements. Greek, the oldest (spoken) language in use today, has a documented history of 3,500 years. It is also one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages, matched only by the Anatolian languages and Vedic Sanskrit.

The Greeks did not invent the alphabet, but modified it in such a way that facilitated its use and consequently its popularization. Which was this welcomed modification?

They introduced the written vowels, as previous alphabets had only consonants. The Phoenician alphabet, like all Semitic alphabets, is an abjad (consonantary) alphabet. Abjad (derived from the first 4 elements of arabic) alphabets are those alphabets in which consonants ("things that sound along"), but not vowels, have representations. In semi-abjad alphabets, like Hebrew and Arabic, vowels exist in the form of characters and Nikud (dots) and their use is optional. The Greeks added vowel symbols to accompany consonants, thus generating a pronounceable unit, reducing the need to learn the pronunciation of each and every word.

At around the 8th century BC, a new influential Afro-Asiatic language emerged, with scripts found in today’s Yemen and Iraq. Curiously, the scripts showed that the language was written in a completly different alphabet than the one actually used today. Which language made this alphabetic switch?

Arabic. Arabic, a Central Semitic language, is closely related to Aramaic and Hebrew and has the largest number of speakers among the Semitic family (>200 millions). The first inscriptions (the Hasaean) in (spoken) Arabic language were written in a variant of the epigraphic South Arabic musand (related to todays Ethiopian), not the Nabataean, the ancestor of modern Arabic alphabet. Thanks to the spread of Islam, non-Semitic languages, like Persian and Urdu, adopted the arabic alphabet.

In 1000 BC the Hebrew language used the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, but by 500 BC, during the exile to Babylon, it adopted the alphabet of the language used by most of the Middle East region population (lingua franca) at the time. Which language was it?

Aramaic. The Aramaic language, the language spoken by Jesus and today by the Assyrians, used the "cursive" Phoenician alphabet before creating a variation of it, introducing the "square" style. In turn, variations on the Aramaic alphabet created the (old) Hebrew and Nabataen alphabets. The adoption of the Aramaic alphabet, and consequently the Aramaic spoken language, led to the virtual extintion of Hebrew language from daily use; it remained as a literary and liturgical language. Also, the Hebrew alphabet was used to write, in Aramaic language, the Daniel and Ezra books of the Hebrew Bible and the 400-600 AD Jewish oral laws Talmud book. On the other hand, the adoption of the Aramaic alphabet forced the use of a few characters also as vowels (like "aleph" and "yodh" for "a" and "e", respectively), as not all Hebrew sounds were represented (Greek vowels were not used as consonants). The "Nikud" system to represent vowels is a 9th century CE invention.

Here is a question about text directionality. Modern Greek is written from left-to-right (dextroverse), while other, such as Arabic and Hebrew, are written right-to-left (sintroverse). The Egyptian hieroglyphs are written, among others, in the boustrophedon method. What direction is this?

Starting horizontally in one direction, than turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. In Hieroglyphs, the elements "face" the beginning of the line, so the reader must consider in which direction the "bird", for example, is looking. But the boustrophedon ("ox-turning") direction is not an Egyptian exclusivity. It was one of the possibilities (among dextroverse and sintroverse) of writing Greek before the adoption of the modern dextroverse at the 5th century BC. In contrast, traditional Chinese has been written vertically (top-to-bottom), from the right to the left of the page. The only top-to-bottom, left-to-right script is the Mongolian, actually an adaptation of a Semitic direction to the Chinese style. Several scripts in Indonesia and Philippines are written with lines away from the writer, from bottom to top And finally, the essence in three lines: Sumerian -> Akkadian (possibly Egyptian Hieroglyphs) -> Proto-Sinaitic -> Phoencian -> Greek -> Latin Phoencias -> Paleo-Hebrew -> Aramaic -> Hebrew Aramaic -> Nabatean -> Arabic - Persian Sources: wikipedia and ancientscripts web sites.