Alphabets

Alphabet is the certain number of letters that are located in special order. Every letter has usually the sound or several sounds that it depicts. Usually all letters of alphabet are divided into consonants and vowel sounds. This division has specialities in every language. Letters are used to make the word. There are combinations of letters when they are heard as one sound or letter during pronunciation. The example of such combinations may be the next combinations as "sh", "ch", "th".

Greeks were the first to invent the alphabet. To do it they used the Phoenician alphabet. When Greeks started to use this alphabet they faced the problem of the full transmission of the word sound with the help of syllabic system.

The problem was that there were almost no letters for vowel sounds in the Phoenician alphabet. Special elements were using to transmit the vowel sound. Greeks considered such form to be not rather convenient for words. That is why they introduced special letters for the vowel sounds transmission. In the result of such introduction written language started another stage of its development.

Now using the order of 30 letters that could be learned by any person without any difficulties it was possible to transmit practically any words of the oral language. Thanks to its simplicity the alphabetic writing spread all over the world. However there were civilizations that didn't adapt this kind of written language. Greeks used a lot of elements of Phoenician's alphabet. The speciality was that this alphabet had the sounds that Greeks didn't have. The word alphabet comes from the Greek that mean two first letter of Greek alphabet "alpha" and "beta".