And as time went on these letters began to represent sounds rather than objects (although sounds related to the pronunciation of the object).īy around 2,500 BCE people living around Egypt, Syria and Palestine were using these symbols extensively to represent sounds this was known as the Semitic alphabet. In other words it turned into a symbol or a letter. Later, the picture of the ox became more stylized and looked nothing like an ox. A picture of an ox represented a real life ox, for example. Here pictures represented real-life objects. Where Does the English Alphabet Come From?Īlthough the history of the English alphabet is a not certain, it’s thought that its earliest ancestor was the Egyptian Hieroglyphic system. The word vowel comes from the Latin word vowis meaning voice the word consonant comes from the Latin word consonare meaning sound together. These in turn come from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet where they meant ox and house respectively. The word alphabet comes from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. The English alphabet is a bicameral, that is it has upper case (or capitals):Ī B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZĪ b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z Etymologies Think of the different pronunciations of the letter c as in cake and nice. ![]() Think of the /k/ sound in case and the same sound in Kate. This means in English different letters often have different sounds and, likewise, sometimes the same sound has different letters representing it: ![]() When we write them, however, some words do not have one of the vowels above, such as:Īlthough these words have a vowel sound, they use the consonant letter y instead of a vowel.Ī very few words contain all five vowels in alphabetical order:Īlthough there are 26 letters in the alphabet there are roughly 40 different sounds. ![]() The consonants are: b,c,d,f,g,h,j,k,l,m,n,p,q,r,s,t,v,w,x,y,zĮvery word has at least one vowel sound. These can be divided into vowels and consonants. The English Alphabet contains 26 letters.
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