What makes the Greek alphabet so beautiful and fascinating? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Mary Norris, Author, Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen, on Quora:
There is a theory that the Greeks developed their alphabet around the same time they wrote down Homer. They saw the need to preserve the Iliad and the Odyssey and to spread these epic poems as widely as possible. Up till then, poetry had been an oral tradition, a performance, and writing made it possible to transmit Homer to faraway places and to the future as well, which is far away in time. The forms of the letters go all the way back to the Phoenicians, and the first two letters, alpha beta, which came into English from Greek through Latin, have not changed in all that time. That the alphabet has survived, in one form or another, for so long is a testament to its usefulness and durability—to the genius of it.
The Phoenician alphabet was all consonants. The innovation of the Greeks was that they used some of the symbols for vowels. This made the written language more expressive—it put the human soul into it. In order to speak, we need to breathe out, exhale, and make sounds using our throats and the resonant chambers in our heads as well as our lips and teeth and tongue. The vowels are the breath of the alphabet—they could be said to carry the human voice. They sing. In our time, email was an innovation, and before that the fax machine, and before that the telegraph (the Twitter of its time). The evolution of the alphabet as a way to record human speech was the beginning of civilization, in a way. This supple group of 24 symbols (in the Greek alphabet; the Roman alphabet has 26) made it possible for humankind to address the future and look back at the past. The other thing I think is amazing about the invention of writing is that it was originally done on clay, so it is as if we inscribed poetry into the earth itself.
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