AaThe characters or letters of the alphabet are learnt in preschool through repetitive songs and large posters put up on the wall of the classroom. They are painstakingly written in uppercase and lowercase by repetitively printing and writing longhand (cursive). Cursive is also called script or joined-up writing by some teachers. This style of writing takes place after the art of printing is learnt; the letters are written all connected to each other in a flowing manner to help the writer write faster.
People did not always write the way they do today. Many, many years ago, people drew pictures to tell a story. (People also did not speak quite as we do today.) As languages developed, so did the idea of writing – from paintings on cave walls by nomadic people, to the Egyptians developing a cursive script that related to the hieroglyphs they used to write stories with cursive characters that we know today come from a very long history.
Hieroglyphs were a mixture of pictures, symbols and letters. For many hundreds of years, the strange letters, pictures and symbols on tombs and stones found in Egypt could not be understood because the art of deciphering these was lost over time. It was only in 1820, quite recently as time goes, that a historian finally managed to decipher what all the strange markings meant.
The writing we do today is thought to have been developed over time from three sources in ancient Sumeria (which was in the Middle East) in ancient Mexico and in ancient North China. The strange characters from those by-gone days were changed by the Greeks to go with their language and then as years went by, people known as Latins – they eventually became the Romans – adopted the characters and began to change some of the letters to go with the Roman language. Eventually, the Olde Worlde English people, called Anglo-Saxons, began using Roman letters to write with.
The letter signs and the sounds for the word “alphabet” came from the Greeks with the first letter being “Alpha as in A” and the second letter being “Beta as in B.” There are other ways to communicate too; Braille is where a lot of raised dots are made so blind people can read with their fingers; semaphore is used when signals are sent out by using flags held out at different angles to the body (you have to be close enough to see these flags); and Morse Code, which is a series of dots (short taps) and dashes (long taps) as a sound for each letter in the alphabet. This was used a lot during the war years as – in those olden days – telephones were not as we know them today.
You can have fun with your friends by learning Morse Code (see on page 5) and tapping it out to each other to see if they can read what you are trying to tell them. See if you can tap out “Have Fun” by following the code.
