Whether your native language has an alphabet or not,

you are sure to have at least an idea of what it is.

English, German, Italian, Spanish...

all of these languages are represented with alphabets.

But the question is - how many of them exist in the world?

And more importantly - how did alphabets appear?

When was this starting point?

All of this and even more in this video :)

First of all, let's answer the question - what is an alphabet?

Generally speaking, an alphabet is a set of graphemes (letters) written in a specific order

representing sounds of certain languages.

It is probably the most well-known and widespread writing system.

By the way, if you would like to know what other writing systems exist in our planet,

make sure to subscribe and watch this video.

But if you happen to have already watched this video,

you must know about such a thing as abjad,

sometimes called an alphabet too,

which is not really true...

An alphabet represents a set of consonants and vowels,

meanwhile abjads have characters to represent consonants only.

For example, Hebrew or Arabic.

However, and we will say it soon, abjads and alphabets do have a connection

they've been sharing throughout history.

If you're looking for a starting point, to see when the first ever alphabet appeared,

we will have to go back as far as to 2700 BCE to ancient Egypt...

By that time, Egyptian writing had developed a set of around 24 hieroglyphs,

each representing a syllable.

However, it is believed that Egyptian writing of that time was never meant

to encrypt Egyptian speech and instead was used to transcribe loan and foreign words.

By the middle of Bronze Age,

another system called Proto-Sinaitic script had emerged in central Egypt

and is said to have been created by Semitic workers who spoke a Semitic language,

who are believed to have taken Egyptian hieroglyphs to remake them, to remodel if you want,

and create a different script.

Nevertheless, a real history of creation of the Proto-Sinaitic writing

remains under the veil of secrecy and is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs

simply because of their graphic similarity.

In addition to that, considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing,

this script is still some kind of a secret and has not been wholly deciphered yet.