Usually, people only talk about how a language is spoken. I, personally, barely heard someone talk about written language before. That is why I found it interesting to present the history of writing, during the language awareness classes.
Where ever you are you, you will see different fonts and different styles of alphabets. You will see them in commercials and other advertisements. Coca cola posters, communism posters, Latin, religious books, monuments/temples and even fashion are things where you can recognize many languages.
But as mentioned before, I am going to present the history of written language in short.
Ages ago, the basics of our script was created in Ancient Egypt. If you look closely on the included pictures in this post, you will see that the letter A was a cow in the ancient days. This was simplified over the ages and it all started with Phoenician and then Etruscan and at last Italic. The Hebrew script and Arabic also evolved from the Phoenician script.
Hieroglyphs were first used around 3200 B.C. and slowly the population on the east side of Egypt (Phoenicia, currently Israel, Lebanon and Palestine) adapted the language and made some changes to it. This happened around the year 1050 B.C. Slowly Greece adapted that as well and made it their own by making it Etruscan. Slowly it went into Italy and became as how we know our script right now. The written language of Slavic countries evolved around the year 900 and is called Cyrillic and is still being used.
Arabic also played a great role in our current society. The Arabic language was created around the year 400 A.D. Around that time, the Italic language had its own numbers. Slowly, Arabic introduced the Arabic numerals and were slowly adapted by the Italians. The Arabic numerals are more simplified and were then integrated into the Italic language.
Actually, if you watch closely, you will notice that not the basic grammar rules are similar, but also the script. Everything is related to each other and brings us more together than you know.
This presentation and project is made by Mohammed Sharkawi (S1028280) & Teije Smits (S1026761)
