US scientists believe they have found the earliest surviving alphabet in ancient Egyptian limestone inscriptions.

Only highly-trained scribes could read hieroglyphic writing

The letters in a Semitic language, carved in stone cliffs west of the Nile, were found by Yale University Egyptologist, Dr John Darnell.
He says they are nearly 4,000 years old, dating from around 1800 to 1900 BC.
Dr Darnell and his wife Deborah first found the letters in 1993, carved into soft limestone cliffs in a valley called Wadi el-Hol, beside an ancient road that linked Thebes and Abydos, west of present-day Luxor.
This summer the Darnells returned to Wadi el-Hol to research the inscriptions further, and Dr Darnell will present his findings next week at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Boston.
More democratic
Alphabetic writing emerged as a simpler and more democratic way of recording information than Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The first Semitic alphabet was developed from hieroglyphs

Instead of having to learn the hundreds of pictures used in Egyptian hieroglyphics, writers could learn to communicate much more quickly with 30 or less symbols to represent sounds.

[
Hibrew =22
English=26
Arabic = 28
Sanskrit/Bengali =42
Chinese 6502 -80000 or more unique Alphabets, one will need signficantly more than 3000-4000 vocabulary before one can read USA Today, and even more for reading TIME. ,]


The letters are in a Semitic language, but Dr Darnell says they show a strong Egyptian influence.
He believes the letters may have been invented as a simplified version of an existing form of "cursive" or joined-up Egyptian pictographs, commonly used in ancient Egypt in graffiti.
Mercenaries
A number of experts agree that these inscriptions are the earliest alphabetic writing yet discovered and their location has forced a rethink on the origins of writing.
Up to now it has been believed that alphabetic writing was developed around 1600 BC - up to 300 years later than the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions - by Semitic people living in the Sinai Peninsula and further north in Syria and Palestine.
Scholars had thought that these languages - known as Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite - had been developed from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
But this new evidence has prompted the theory that the development took place in Egypt itself, during the period of the Middle Kingdom.
Dr Darnell believes that scribes among foreign mercenaries serving with the Egyptian army developed the simplified writing - initially through the work of hieroglyphic scribes who simplified the pictograms into a rudimentary alphabet for use by Semitic speakers.

This is well before the probable time of the Biblical story of Joseph being delivered into slavery in Egypt, so predating the traditional seeds of a Semitic presence in Egypt.
Greek origins
So far, scholars who have studied the inscriptions have not managed to translate them, but they have succeeded in deciphering some letters.
M is formed of a undulating line deriving from the hieroglyph for water, very similar to the later Semitic letter for M.

Sumerian cuneiform was long thought to be the oldest writing, but its claim is now disputed

An ox head gradually transforms into the letter A, and a house develops into the Semitic B, or bayt.
A and B were later developed by the Phoenicians and latter-day Canaanites before being passed to the Greeks between 1200 and 900 BC.
From the Greek words for A and B - alpha and beta - we derive the word alphabet.
The earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform developed by Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley of present-day Iraq, remained entirely pictographic until about 1400 BC.

The Sumerians have generally been credited with the first invention of writing, around 3200 BC.

But fragments of pottery dating back 5500 years, found at Harappa in Pakistan, may have trumped the Sumerians' claim.

Answer from nearfar

2 people found this helpful

The question of how many characters there are is still the subject of debate

The question of how many characters there are is still the subject of debate. In the 18th century, European scholars claimed the total tally to be about 80,000. This number, however, is thought to be exaggerated as the character count varies by dictionary and its comprehensiveness. For example, the Kangxi Dictionary lists about 40,000 characters, while the modern Zhonghua Zihai lists in excess of 80,000 (the most comprehensive Korean hanja dictionary Han-Han Dae Sajeon consists about 60,000 characters, while Japanese competing kanji dictionary Dai Kan-Wa Jiten lists 50,000 entries). One reason for the overwhelming number of characters is due to the existence of rarely-occurring variant and obscure characters (many of which are unused, even in Classical Chinese). Note, however, that no two characters are ever contextually identical. ( Read more )

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character#Number_of_Chinese_characters

nearfar 104 months ago

 

Answer from orion_orange

2 people found this helpful

The number ranges from a few thousands to about Fifty thousands, depending on what you're looking for.

Long story for those who are partient: First of all, a Chinese character is more heavy-weight than an English alphabet. For example, there is a Chinese character representing "hand", another one representing "bag."  However, many English words can be repersented in Chinese by combining the characters. For example, to describe hand bag, you literally put the character "hand" and "bag" side-by-side. The formation of name of different fish spices is more like the swordfish, in the sense the name usually follows the pattern of one character (of some descriptive or arbitrary)  with the character "fish." So when you come across with a fish you don't recognize, you could guess it refers to some sort of fish. So the comparison with English alphabet is not exactly an apple-to-apple comparison. The number of characters is much more than the 26 alphabeters but signficantly less than the total number of English words. New characters keep coming out from time to time (like how English words come out.) . Another complication is that modern China uses what's called simplified characters (versus the "traditional" characters used in pre-communist China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). In short, multiple traditional characters are mapped to one single, simplified character (in terms of strokes). So the number of simplified characters is less. The actual number for the impatient: For traditional characters: A pretty modern comprehensive Chinese dictionary has 49,888 characters (Zhongwen Da Cidian (Great Dictionary of the Chinese Language), 1971). A mainstream traditional character set used in Internet, Big5, has about 13,000 characters. It is a good approximation of the need in a comprehensive-typical usage. For simplified characters: A mainstream simplied character set used in Internet, GB 18030, has about 6502 characters. It is a good approximation of the need in a comprehensive-typical usage. For typical usage: Most estimates are that a person needs to only master about 3000 - 4000 characters to be able to communicate effectively in a wide-variety of settings, e.g., reading the equivalent of USA Today and to some extent, TIME. As an analogy, in English, while one can learn the 26 alphabets quickly, one will need signficantly more than 3000-4000 vocabulary before one can read USA Today, and even more for reading TIME. See the characters in action! To get a sense of the difference between traditional characters and simplified characters, enjoy the following examples. It also has illustration of variation in scripts, similar to fonts in European characters. Oracle Bone Script Seal Script Clerical Script Semi-Cursive Script Cursive Script Regular Script(Traditional) Regular Script(Simplified) Pinyin Meaning — rì Sun — yuè Moon — shān Mountain — shuǐ Water — yǚ Rain — mù Wood — hé Rice Plant — rén Human — nǚ Woman — mǔ Mother — mù Eye — niú Bull — yáng Sheep mǎ Horse niǎo Bird guī Tortoise lóng Chinese Dragon fèng Chinese Phoenix

Sources: My knowledge,http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_artqa/2003-09/24/content_41869.htm,http://www.jbrowse.com/text/charsets.htm,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character

 

Video
	Some Chinese Caligraphy, obviously showy.

 

Video
	Another demonstration, in a more regular settings.

orion_orange 104 months ago

 

Answer from svendsen

1 people found this helpful

There are between 40,000 and 80,000 chinese characters

There are between 40,000 and 80,000 characters in the Chinese language. However, there are far less than this amount in daily usage. There are many obscure unused characters that some dictionaries recognize while others do not. For example, a single species of animal would have its own character. Chinese does not have an phonetic alphabet like all Western languages. Instead, it has picture-based characters, each having a single-syllable pronunciation. Each character is used alone as a word or combined with other characters to form compound words.  However, the way we read English is not so much different than chinese. We read by recognizing the shapes of words rather than parsing each letter and sounding them out in our heads. This is why lowercase words are easier to read than uppercase. The components of a chinese character (strokes/radicals) are nearly analagous to letters in english. When you look at it that way, the number of Chinese characters is not any more than the number of words in the English language.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character

svendsen 104 months ago

 

Answer from icheung

1 people found this helpful

It is a different system, but will try to answer anyway

Chinese word is composed by 1 or more components, 1 of the component is the major component and can be used as in index for dictionary lookup. Each component has different stroke. When you learn to write them you need to follow the same sequence of stroke. So the no of character aka component is in the ranges of couple of hundred but not thousand.

icheung 104 months ago

 

Answer from jakilpat

There are over 50,000 characters in the Chinese language, but only a few thousand are used in everyday life.

There are over 50,000 characters in the Chinese language, but only a few thousand are used in everyday life. These characters have changed little in 4,000 years, and Chinese people today can read ancient texts without too much trouble.

Sources: http://www.edhelper.com/ReadingComprehension_33_211.html

jakilpat 104 months ago