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Old 09-09-2005   #10 (permalink)
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Qfwfq
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Re: No wonder English is such a hard language to learn.

Not all Jews are mean, I am quite against certain things myself but there are also positive things in Jewish culture. Just like in any ethinc group, there may be bad and good people. Please remember the rules concerning racism or derogatory posts.

The same goes for other European alphabets as for the English. The Greek and Latin alphabets were derived from the Semitic alephbets, not so specifically from the Hebrew. Anyway that shouldn't make English more difficult to learn and grammer has nothing to do with the origin of the alphabet.

The Semitic alephbets, including the Arabic, came in turn from use of a few of the Egyptian heiroglyphs to denote the initial consonantal sound of the corresponding word. The letter d was indicated with the heiroglyph for door, that began with the same d sound. Greek had much more need to indicate vowels and no need for some consonantal sounds such as 'h' or a glottal stop, so the Greek scribes used a few symbols for vowels.

For instance 'a' is from the Greek alpha, in turn from the Semitic Aleph which originally indicated a glottal stop. In Arabic it is still a vertical line and derived from the heiroglyph for 'rejoice', hallel, which presumably didn't have the initial h sound but a glottal stop. The heiroglyph was a guy with arms straight up.

The Semitic he became the Greek epsilon from whence the Latin e, but soon a letter h also crept into Latin writing.

The Semitic vau originally represented the consonantal sounds of v and w as pronounced in English, the current name of the letter is something like "waw" in Arabic and "vav" in Persian, but it also gave birth to the vowels o and u, as well as being behind the history of the letter f.


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Last edited by Qfwfq; 09-09-2005 at 03:13 AM..
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