Chapter 2

Chapter two of our text talked about early forms of alphabets, which are sets of visual symbols or characters that represent the sounds of a spoken language. The North Semitic alphabet is believed to be where the idea of the alphabet originated. The Phoenicians developed their own scripts influenced by their business with the surrounding civilizations, creating Sui generis, symbols that didn't hold any pictorail meaning, Sinaitic script, an adaptation on the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Ras Shamra, which used cuneiformlike symbols and no vowels. The Aramaic alphabet is a major branch of the North Semitic script with twenty-two letters for consonants. It is the predecessor to modern Hebrew and Arabic, which are two commonly used scripts today. Both alphabets use the twenty-two letters from the North Semitic alphabet and developed other characters to include vowels. The North Semitic alphabet was also useful to the development of the Greek alphabet, who took five of the consonants and changed them to be vowels. The way the Greeks wrote the alphabet was structured and geometrical. All the characters were based on either a square, triangle, or circle and were written in a few different styles before finally being written left to right. The alphabet took on a role in the democracy of the Greek culture with voting, public services and signature seals. The Latin alphabet sprung from the Greek alphabet, giving us the twenty-six letters that are used in the English alphabet. The Romans also wrote in a structured, but stylized form with their attention to space and their use of the serif. Rome also began to use parchment instead of papyrus since it was cheaper and easier to write on and store.
I found the discussion of the Roman serif interesting since it wasn't really done on purpose that way, it was simply how it was done whether it was done while carving or by the flick of the brush during the writing. I also was interested to learn how much easier parchment was to deal with than the papyrus scrolls. I guess I never thought that the scrolls were that much of a problem to use.
After reading about the development of these different alphabets, I wonder how many people during those times could actually read the characters?