Where does the word alphabet come from?
The word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. It was first used, in its Latin form, alphabetum, by Tertullian during the 2nd–3rd century CE and by St. Jerome.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
247 points (97.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35903 readers
1808 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I woke up at 7:00 a.m. for this and had a sudden moment of clarity out of absolutely nowhere. Thank you.
These little epiphanies are always fun. Like when you realise how many maths and astronomy terms are just romanised Arabic words like Algebra and Algorithm.
Another fun one that I wasn't smart enough to notice on my own is that the Hindu-Arabic numerals have the same number of angles in the symbols as the number they represent.
It’s a Christmas miracle! 😉
You had a Sudden Clarity Clarence moment, but you don't think in memes.
So calling it your ABCs when you're younger isn't that far off. Interesting.
Pretty much. English borrowed it from Latin because it's posh. And Latin borrowed it from Greek because it's posh. But at the end of the day it's in the same spirit as "the ABC", or Latin "abecedarius".
And the Greeks took it from the Phoenicians where it was Alep Bet (almost identical to the Hebrew Aleph Beth).
And these are words that start with the sound of the letter. Aleph means Ox and Beth is house.
It's also "ABC" ("ábécé") in Hungarian. (And I bet in a lot of other languages too.)
Then why do Abacuses help us count instead of spell? 🤔
Coincidence. The word backtracks to Greek ᾰ̓́βᾰξ / ábax "board, slab", it doesn't have to do with ABC.
Abacus comes from the Greek "Abak" meaning board or slab.
- Abaci
It's abecedario in Spanish (ABCDs). I'd imagine the -rio is like diccionario, which is like a collection.
It is kind of the same suffix but the story is a mess.
That -ario and all words using it are reborrowed* from Latin. And originally it was two related suffixes, fulfilling two purposes:
- masculine -arius, feminine -aria: transform noun into adjective. Like "a be ce de" (ABCD) into "abecedarius" (alphabetic).
- neuter -arium: noun denoting a place for another noun. Like "dictio" (saying) into "dictionarium" (dictionary, or "where you store sayings")
Except that Latin allowed you to use an adjective as if it was a noun (Spanish still does it), so that "abecedarius" ended as a substantive again. And Spanish merged Latin masculine and neuter, further conflating both versions of the suffix.
*the inherited doublet is the -ero in llavero (place for keys) and herrero (related to iron - professions took the suffix and systematised the re-substantivisation).
Similarly, the viking rune "alphabet" is called the Futhark, because the first letters are pronounced F, U, Þ, A, R, K.
Fun fact - in Polish language the word alfabet exists as a technical name of the alphabet. There is also a more casual word, often used by children: abecadło which is basically polish way of saying "The ABCs".
Spanish is similar. For spanish the word is abecedario.
English has "abecedarian", which can mean "alphabetical", "rudimentary", "elementary", "novice" or "beginner".
We also have alfabeto though.
Finnish word is aakkoset. Well, it has the a. It sounds like a pet name or slang for something, but as far as I know it's just nonsense.
The Latin word is "abecedarium". I don't know why English adopted the Greek word.
Wow, I can't believe I never put that together before.
Shower thought material right there
yes.
source: can speak Greek.
Also the first two letters of the Greek alphabet are άλφα (alpha) and βήτα (beta)
Not that different from us talking about “learning our ABCs”.
If it isn't, then where else would the word "alphabet" come from?
Oh wait, you could look at the Hebrew alphabet and pretend that the word came from its first two letters: Aleph and Bet.
This is what I thought. From Hebrew.
From Phoenician actually
From Egyptian Hieroglyphs actually.
Which the Phoenicians turned into letters, which eventually became our letters.
Look, A is a lil upside down cows head hieroglyph.
In all honesty, I don't know which of the two languages is older.
Hebrew is slightly older than Greek but it was also more isolated than Greek and likely did not have much influence on Greek. As another commenter pointed out, Phoenician is the accepted source for the Greek alphabet.
I guess that answers that.
No, it's a noun made from the portmanteau of the first two letters of the greek alphabet
Technically correct
The best kind of correct.
There's a series on Prime via The Great Courses Collection about the origins of language. (Almost?) all languages derive their names like this, but that's like, a throw away line in a much deeper series.
Many Indian languages use some version of 'akshara', which means 'unchanging' or 'indestructible'. (I guess the alphabet does change, but too slowly for us to notice.) Most Indian languages start the alphabet with all the vowels, so 'first n letters' would be unpronouncable.
Azbuka, name of the cirillic script, also comes from the old names of the first two letters.
Yeah
I never thought of it before, but it is a conjunction of those first two Greek letters. Or else, it's named after the soup it resembles.
No, it’s named after the cereal
Completely wrong as is clearly named after Google parent company Alphabet
Yeah. Little known fact, they named their company after their original product, but struggled with how to turn in profit, so they created a Google subsidiary which invented a search engine. True story.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Sounds like a question asked by someone who already knows the answer.
view more: next ›