If the world had no alphabet
People have probably lived on earth for around 2 million years. But the story of world history began only about 5,500 years ago with the invention of the alphabet. Since then, the book of the history of mankind turns to a new page.
The history of the alphabet began in ancient Egypt around 3500 BC. C. Most of the letters of the alphabet began as a simplified version of ancient drawings of animals, objects, or signs. But the writing of signs and images was too slow for the business world, so people developed an alphabet in which only symbols were used. Each symbol represented a sound and several were combined to form the sounds of a word. The alphabet was perfected by the Romans around AD 114 with 26 letters now called the Roman alphabet or the Latin alphabet.
Today, the alphabet is used throughout the world. There are more than ¾ of the world’s languages that use the alphabet, and about 60% of the world’s population speak languages that have a written alphabet. It is important to write and read for human society to communicate and learn about history. Until the invention of writing, the only way for humans to communicate was face to face. This prevented the information from being shared with any kind of wide dissemination. Based on the alphabet, people developed the writing system that could help preserve human knowledge in something called a “book.” Thanks to the book, people could read and know more about the world and shape the educational system like the current one. Therefore, the book is one of the most valuable treasures in the world. Alphabet also plays an important role for merchants and merchants in keeping records of their businesses.
Have you ever imagined what the world would be like today if the ancients hadn’t invented the alphabet? I dare not think about it, but it must be the worst of the worst. Without the alphabet, humanity would never have advanced to the levels we have today. If the alphabet had not been invented, the book would never have appeared and consequently people would be uneducated and life would be boring. You wouldn’t know any history, human knowledge wouldn’t have been preserved, and you couldn’t read my essay either. We would be narrow-minded and superficial. Our imagination would be limited. There would be no paper, no printing, no television, no Galileo Galilei, no William Shakespeare, no Charles Darwin, no Albert Einstein… Instead, tolerance would be low and the world would have been war-torn and cruel. In my opinion, it would be a pretty miserable world where nobody can read, write or think freely. To be honest, if the alphabet hadn’t existed, there would be a new way to communicate ideas.
We are now using the alphabet in everyday reading and writing. I can’t imagine if the alphabet started disappearing one day. It would be a terrible disaster and everything would dissolve into nothing. So don’t let anything happen to the alphabet!