1. The Origins and Development of the English Language Chapter 3: Letters and Sounds: A Brief History of Writing John Algeo and Thomas Pyles Michael Cheng National Chengchi University

3. Ideographic and Syllabic Writing Pictures or comic strips (Native American) Ideographs or logographic writing (Chinese) – each word represented by symbol Phonograms – sound represented by symbol Syllabary – symbols represent syllables

4. From Semitic Writing to the Greek Alphabet Semitic writing - 2 nd millennium BCE Usually consonants only Adopted by Greeks Semitic names of letters matched to phonetics Extra consonants turned into vowels (3000 years ago) A = ‘aleph “ox” turned into alpha

6. Latin Greek Original Phoenician Hebrew Arabic

7. The Romans Adopt the Greek Alphabet Romans modified the Greek alphabet Europeans adopted Roman alphabet Some eastern European people adopted the Greek alphabet directly; this became the Cyrillic alphabet

8. http://go.hrw.com/venus_images/0304MC05.gif http://go.hrw.com/venus_images/0304MC05.gif http://go.hrw.com/hrw.nd/gohrw_rls1/pKeywordResults?keyword=st9%20roman%20empire

9. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_Ancient_Rome

11. The Use of Digraphs Pairs of letters to represent single sounds sh, ch, th, dg gu in guest and guilt vs. gesture, gibe Ghent is not pronounced like gent

12. Additional Symbols þ thorn ƿ wynn ð edh æ ash

13. The History of English Writing

14. Futhark/Futhorc

16. The Spelling of English Consonant Sounds

17. The Spelling of English Vowel Sounds

18. Spelling Pronunciations and Pronunciation Spellings

19. Writing and History

21. Exercises