A (Very) Brief History of the Roman Alphabet
Writing, as we know it, began roughly around 4100 BC as a way to keep track of trade and other economic practices. At this point it was as simple as making notches in a stick to determine how much livestock was owned or how many acres acquired, etc. Tokens were also used.
Between 4100 and 3800 BC, the Sumerians developed these tokens into symbols. These symbols systematically represented the sounds of a language.
At first, in 3500 BC these symbols were pictographs, iconic pictures that represented a vague concept (such as the stick-figure of a man for the word "man"). These developed into ideographs where a fixed form represented many different ideas (the symbol for "man" could now represent "woman", "person", etc.). This lead to Sumerian Cuneiform, the first known script. This was adapted by the East Semetic peoples and became the Akkadian language (the first Semetic language).
Between 4000 and 3000 BC the Egyptians used Cuneiform to form their Hieroglyphs which were phonograms with words, syllables and phonemes (individual sounds) similar to what we have today.
Around 1700 BC the Phoenicians further modified the hieroglyphs and this led to the births of the modern semetic writing systems (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.). The Greeks, seeing a good system in this type of writing but also seeing a few flaws (there were no letters for vowels, these were either known contextually by the reader or indicated by dots or strokes in certain places around the consonants) took it and modified it into their own Greek alphabet.
As the Greeks were then, in turn conquered by the Romans, their conquerers built upon the previous system, the Roman or Latin alphabet, what we currently use today. Since that time it has undergone few changes and is the most widely recognized alphabetic system in most parts of the world (though it is important to note that systems such as Slavic, which also developed from Greek, and the Semetic and Asian systems rival it in some areas).
Terms to know: Cuneiform, pictographys, ideographs, Hieroglyphs, phonemes, Semetic alphabets, Greek alphabet, Roman alphabet
If there are any questions, please post them below.
