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Where did the alphabet come from? How did it develop, and why?

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History of Writing - The Alphabet - Extra History

Where did the alphabet come from? How did it develop, and why? The writing systems first developed in Sumer provided a basis for the written word, but their system of characters also inspired a shift to single phoneme systems where each letter represents a distinct sound. Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon (--More below) Grab your Extra Credits gear at the store! http://bit.ly/ExtraStore Subscribe for new episodes every Saturday! http://bit.ly/SubToEC _________ Thanks for participating in this week's discussion! We want you to be aware of our community posting guidelines so that we can have high-quality conversations: https://goo.gl/HkzwQh Contribute community subtitles to Extra Credits: http://www.youtube.com/timedtext_cs_panel?c=UCCODtTcd5M1JavPCOr_Uydg&tab=2 ___________ Play games with us on Extra Play! http://bit.ly/WatchEXP Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): http://bit.ly/ECTweet Follow us on Facebook: http://bit.ly/ECFBPage Get our list of recommended games on Steam: http://bit.ly/ECCurator ____________ ♪ Get the intro music here! http://bit.ly/1EQA5N7 *Music by Demetori: http://bit.ly/1AaJG4H ♪ Get the outro music here! http://bit.ly/23isQfx *Music by Sean and Dean Kiner: http://bit.ly/1WdBhnm

Comments

Anonymous

Neat stuff

Anonymous

Great one off episode. Does this mean next week is Lies?

Anonymous

[Singing badly] A, B, C, D, E, F, G...

Anonymous

Nice video. 1 question though- At 5:10, are the keyboard buttons supposed to be completely buggered like that?

Anonymous

Spotted an error: at 1:29, the episode is describing how cuneiform spread outward from Sumeria to be used by the rest of the ancient Mediterranean countries, but the image shown is of a map with arrows emanating outward from Egypt. Just a bit afterward, the voiceover describes how symbols for a specific sound originated in Egypt, which might be where this error came from.

ExtraCredits

Whoops! Our bad. For such a short episode this one was chock full of info. We did our best to check it, but alas!

Tempestfury

You know, I really hope you do more single episodes like this and the Sanitation movement. One Shots that aren't big enough to be their own series, but are very important to history off a whole, and subjects already covered. That, and I hope you eventually cover the history of writing completely!

JT

I am really enjoying these episodes on early and ancient civilizations. Its cool to see how things from thousands of years ago still impact us today!

Anonymous

Thank you for the amazing work

Anonymous

Greatly educational and interesting as always! Question though, 5:39 - what's a "phenome"? ;)

Anonymous

5:40... Papyrus leads to Phenomes?

Anonymous

WHOOO!! We got Phoenicians!!

Porcupine

Actually, I'd love to see a series specifically about them...

Anonymous

Late due to life, but YAY!

Anonymous

Modern Hebrew is still lacks vowels, it was one of the stranger things to wrap my head around as a native English speaker.

Anonymous

PERFECT! I now found a way to pull an "Adam Conover" when a Greek and a Jew argue about which (Greek or Hebrew) came first. Meanwhile in the FAR East, something similar happened. Everyone started to adopt the Chinese characters and eventually ditched the characters in order to fit their own language. Two examples I can think of Katakana and Hangul. The former takes pieces of the Chinese characters and replaces them with sound. Hangul, on the other hand, abandons the characters entirely and just uses their own alphabet. I am unfamiliar with the India, Thailand and the South Asia area; therefore someone please give me a quick summary of the languages of that area please.

ExtraCredits

We'll always have a few one shots! It depends on the length of the main series.

ExtraCredits

I'm hoping we can keep doing these and talk about the history of many languages, including the far east. Hangul in particular is one I'd love to explore in an episode!

Tempestfury

... Huh, was going to ask how exactly writing developed out in the far east such as China and India, but Joo-Hwan Jun seems to cover Chneese quite well...

Bill Lemmond

This is great, but how did I miss your Bronze Age Collapse series? I need to find that. Just not tonight - too tired, already, for learning. Just want fun, for now. :)

Anonymous

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5ABU4r0U2Mcj_Gj32UN80zX" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5ABU4r0U2Mcj_Gj32UN80zX</a>