How were writting systems developed? How we decided the characters and their meanings?
In: Other
Imagine you are a Middle Eastern government official before the invention of writing. Your duties include counting things of value (so you know how much you can tax or how much people already paid). You already have a system of lines and dashes to record numbers. So you draw a cattle head and inscribe a certain number, you count the houses in a village and a certain number and the number of camels. Now you realise that those symbols are read in your language something like:
Cattle head – Aleph
House – Bet
Camel – Gamla
Hmm, maybe you can write your name “Gab” as Camel-Cow-House (basically using the first sound of what the images depict). That’s neat and other people use other symbols for other sounds and now every government official can sign their name and even the name of the village, that’s cool!
After some time people no longer draw detailed images, they try to write faster and faster and the symbols do not really look like their original images, but that’s ok because the writers are trained government officials so they know all the shorthand’s.
Some foreigners come to your land after some time and see this newfangled writing stuff, so they go back to their land and show their own people the shorthand’s they saw. They didn’t really hear the right sounds because foreigners have funny accents so they call them:
Alpha
Betta
Gamma
Now the traders don’t really know what images mean, or what the letter names mean, but they like this writing thing and start using it. After millennia’s of this “telephone” game, you get our own modern writing system used to write English.
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