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Back to #2562 - Dan McClellan, with Dan McClellan.

How Did a Drawing of a House Become the Letter B in the Alphabet?

Inscriptions in the Sinai from around 1700 to 1900 BCE take signs that look like Egyptian hieroglyphs and make each sign stand for a single sound, the first sound of the word the symbol represents.

A drawing of a house stood for the word bait and for the b sound. An alphabet of 22 to 30 letters is easier to memorize than the hundreds of signs needed for ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, or Akkadian. The script was taken to Phoenicia, and apart from Hangul, the Korean script, virtually every other alphabet is descended from the Phoenician.

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#2562 - Dan McClellan ·

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