Before Class, Chapter 2-3

1. Sum up the reading in your own words in 1-2 paragraphs. Do not copy straight from the book, or you will receive a zero for your first grade.


Chapter 2 is about the beginning of alphabets. They started with the Cretan's pictographs which were only behind Mesopotamia and Egypt in their civilization's development, and continued with the Phoneticians who created their alphabet off the Mesopotamia's writing system. Then they talked about the Aramaic alphabet which talked about how the horizontal lines sometimes depicted in the script started merely as lines to write on but eventually became a part of the script. The next section was on the Greek Alphabet which talked about how the history seemed to meld with mythology a little. The ability to use the script led to the Oddesy, the Illiad, the great Library in Alexandria and started what it sounds like a form of cursive script. the unicales are said to be rounded and written more quickly which sounds like our modern cursive english script vs. our printed script. Apparently the Greeks also started the voting tokens. Afterwards, it starts the Latin alphabet section, which started when the Greeks passed their script to the Romans. The Romans extended the Greek alphabet, which made several types of fonts we're familiar with today. A lot of types are named but the one I remember most is the book mentioning how one of them is comparable to our capital letters, only the whole font is all capital letters. In my mind, I see it similar to the type: Trajan Pro. Lastly, the book talks about the Korean Alphabet, and how its make up is based on the position of the tongue in a pictographic form.

Chapter 3 is about the Asian Contributions. It talks about the beginning of oracle bones and how Chinese wrote on the bones of animals first for fortune telling, supposing that the messages read are from the ancient Spirits. This section was slightly more interesting for me, but not by much. It talked about how the Chinese scripts are pictographic, making each character representing a word, instead of a sound like the previously mentioned scripts. The Chinese writing was originally written on bamboo shoots but as paper was invented, it was used for everything. When silk came around, it was also written on but was very expensive, so it wasn't as popular as regular paper for writing. The Chinese "chop" was also talked about, used as a Chinese identification piece. Basically a really old stamp carved of stone. It's said the Chinesewere the first to invent printing because they were able to make movable type and the first to start ink rubbings.

2. Name the fact you found most interesting from the reading.

I think the most interesting thing from the reading was that VWXYZ were all added at the very  end, with no origin to the original Cretan pictographs. The basics of the alphabet were able to be met by the essential characters used by the Sumerians and Phoneticians. However something made the Greeks and Romans believe they needed more characters to express the extra syllables humans could make.