Evolution of the Alphabet

Comments · 4.7K

• DA

  @danielthybomouritsen8990 · 6 years ago

  Imagine how big of a genius you would have to be to get the idea to attribute symbols to verbal sounds that you can then write down to form words

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• SC

  @schalotten · 6 years ago

  I find it interesting how a letter that looked like an "I" became "Z" and the one looking like a "Z" became "I"

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• RI

  @richardhall206 · 3 years ago

  The letter Thorn was still in regular use in England at the time of the invention of the printing press but, because it was not used in the German alphabet, standard typesets did not include it. Instead, English printers used a capital Y as a surrogate because it had a similar appearance. So 'The' (which would have had a Thorn instead of TH) was rendered 'Ye' but pronounced the same way. "Ye Olde Boke Shoppe" would have been pronounced as "The Old Book Shop", not with a Y sound at all.

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• ER

  @ErikDeKoster-f2w · 11 months ago

  Interesting how canaan people seem to have invented two radical simplifications: replacing the whole zoo of hundreds of idioms with a radically simplified sound-based script, and replacing a whole zoo of deities with the one god in monotheism. I wonder if these abstractions have something in common.

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• IM

  @imaginerus · 5 years ago

  I think it's incredible that after more than 3000 years, some letters still somehow resemble the original symbol, like the upside-down bulls head in A, the ladder in H, the snake in N and the eye in O

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• JA

  @jason_inthehouse · 6 years ago (edited)

  Every alphabet: Goes through quite a few changes<br>O: Literally O

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• RR

  @rreagan007 · 6 years ago (edited)

  Thorn is a very interesting letter which I wish we kept around in modern English instead of using a &quot;Th&quot; digraph to make the same sound. Since most early English printers didn&apos;t have a thorn letter, they would often substitute a &quot;Y&quot; for thorn, which still survives today in an attempt to make something seem old and nostalgic, such as &quot;Ye olde...&quot;. Most people will pronounce the &quot;Y&quot; like a modern Y, but since it is meant to represent the letter thorn it should be pronounced the same as the modern English &quot;th&quot; digraph.

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• SA

  @sachabaptista · 3 years ago

  W &quot;double U&quot; is actually pronounced &quot;double vé&quot; in French, meaning &quot;double V&quot;, which makes more sense since it&apos;s shaped like a VV and not a UU.

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• ST

  @sthenzel · 6 years ago

  I wouldn´t mind getting þ back, as THe sound is so common in English.

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• PA

  @patrickhayes3099 · 5 years ago (edited)

  Having been involved in a Greek letter group in college, I never realized that Omega &amp; Omicron were simply Big (mega) O and Little (micro) O. &nbsp;This was a good reminder.

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• KA

  @Kastagaar · 6 years ago

  It would be really interesting to trace this alongside the runic and cyrillic scripts and see how they all contributed to each other.

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• FA

  @faramund9865 · 3 years ago

  Still one of the best videos about any topic out there. Gets all the information you want across clearly in a heartbeat.

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