What is writing for?
We write to “draw” what we want to say and to communicate with the society that surrounds us.
So writing is drawing?
About five thousand years ago, men were already writing on the walls of caves. The first writings were pictures of men, animals, or objects. They were called pictograms. Later, drawings were invented to represent ideas: wanting, seeing… These are ideograms. All these pictures are called characters.
The alphabeth
Centuries later, alphabets were born. In them, each drawing represents neither an object nor an idea, but a sound of the language. These pictures are the letters. To write a word, the letters are combined. Today, most of the world’s peoples write with alphabets.
Different alphabets
To write in Spanish or English, the Latin alphabet is used. But there are others: Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic (the Russian alphabet)… The Chinese and the Japanese write with ideograms. You have to know at least a thousand to write the words for each day! The Arabic, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets are very different from ours.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are pictograms.
WE LEARN A NEW CONCEPT
Latin alphabet: it is the alphabet you know, the one you learned in school. It is made up of twenty-seven letters, from A to Z.
