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HISTORY
Abjad: This Writing System Changed The World
Thanks to Phoenicians who made our lives easier.
Imagine you have to memorize 700 symbols to express your thoughts on paper. Unless you are from China, this is how the world used to be around 3000 years ago.
The Egyptian Hieroglyph is considered as one of the oldest writing systems known in the world, where the Egyptians used to draw symbols on the walls to deliver a message to others.
Each symbol represents an idea and includes a sound value. Such as the Mouth symbol, which is pronounced ‘ra’, Snake as ‘f’, and the bird symbol has the sound ‘a’. Some symbols combine two to three syllables — such as the bee’s picture 𓋏 that equals to ‘bat’.
The Chinese writing language follows a similar pattern, each of its characters represents a picture that has a meaning.
火 (Fire), 天 (Sky), 马 (Horse)This kind of writing system remained for four thousand years while it kept developing to a simpler language until it was replaced by the Abjad writing system, which changed the writing history for humans until this day.
Around 1700 BC during the Phoenician era, the Canaanites were able to convert the Egyptian hieroglyphs to simpler characters that represent the sounds used in those symbols. This became to be called the Abjad Proto-Canaanite writing system.
Later, more improvement was added to the Abjad writing system to be named the Phoenician Abjad. It created 22 fundamental letters that represent the primary sounds of the hieroglyphs.
Nowadays, the Phoenician Abjad writing system is used in most of the world languages, including Latin — with its derivatives as the major European languages — Arabic, and Hebrew.
The name Abjad is originally taken from the Arabic language, which refers to the Abjad numerals — every alphabet has a numeric value that’s used for mathematical purposes.
However, people generally linked it with its characters’ starting order, which are four letters (A, B, J, D). A similar pattern is applied to the other mentioned languages as well.
