Paragraph on “Ancient Alphabets and Languages” complete paragraph for Class 9, Class 10, Class 11 and Class 12

Ancient Alphabets and Languages

Modern alphabets are a very recent development, in the earlier days people used to draw small pictures to represent things in text. This was called Picture writing. The Egyptian system of picture writing was called Hieroglyphics. Writing originated in Mesopotamia about 5000 years ago. The Mesopotamians began to use wedge shaped marks to represent sounds. Since paper had not yet been discovered in those days the Mesopotamians used wet clay tablets and made marks on them with the help of wedge shaped pens. This form of writing was called Cuneiform writing. With this began the origin of the alphabet.

Alphabets did not represent pictures, they represented sounds and combination of these sounds produced words. The first modern alphabet was developed about 3000 years ago by the Phoenicians. These alphabets were then adapted by the ancient Greeks. The Romans improved upon the Greek alphabets and from these came the English alphabet. One of the first languages used widely over Europe was Latin. Most of the works of European scholars are in Latin. Though the Roman alphabets are the most widely used ones in the world, there are others as well. The Japanese, Chinese and Indian are amongst these others. Today the English language has 26 letters in the alphabet. In the olden days English alphabets were written using only capital letters, it was after the 8th century that smaller alphabets appeared. Alongwith letters, today we also use punctuation marks to highlight pronunciation or to signify a break in a sentence or after ending a sentence. There are over 5000 different languages all over the world, of these there are over 800 different types in India alone. One of the most common languages all over the world is English. There are people who cannot speak or hear, such people use a sign language which is made up of hand signals using various positions of the fingers.