Principle: Spend little time on web page creation - just a text box plus a scan of the "doodle page".

At the moment I am reading The Odyssey.

I could spend my life reading secondary sources about The Odyssey. What do I want to get out of it? First, I simply want to enjoy the experience of reading it. Fine. Let's do that. Then, when I am finished, I will make a decision about what types of notes I make and what additional reading I do (both on the web and in other books).

8:40 am  I have read 3 chapters from The Odyssey this morning. It is gripping (I must admit I am somewhat surprised - although I shouldn't be - this story has been popular for over 2000 years!).

What am I learning?

1. I will soon be able to say that I have actually read this epic poem.

2. I now have genuine admiration for Homer and what he wrote.

3. I am curious about other literature from the time before Christ. What was there? Oral traditions (to be written down later) When was the first alphabet created?

- the Old Testament

- stories about the Buddha (written later, but from about 600 BC

- anything else? What civilizations were there at this time? Egypt. Mesopotamia. India, China, southeast Asia, polynesia, early Amerindian

I try typing "origin alphabet" into dogpile and find the following from:

  http://linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-1998.7/msg00394.html
 

The first alphabet was invented by speakers of Semitic languages in
the Middle East some time between 2000 and 1500 BC.  This Semitic
alphabet came to be used to write a number of Semitic languages in
the region during the next few centuries and after.  But the Semitic
alphabet was defective in one respect: it had letters only for
consonants, and none for vowels.

It is thought that some version of the Semitic alphabet, probably a
Phoenician one, was adopted by the Greeks some time after 800 BC.
The Greeks added vowel letters, thus inventing the first known
complete alphabet.

A western variety of the Greek alphabet was transmitted to the
Etruscans in Italy.  The Etruscans in turn passed it on to the
Romans, whose own version, the Roman alphabet, was used for writing
Latin and later spread to most of Europe and beyond.

A modified version of the Greek alphabet was later created for
writing the Slavic language Old Church Slavonic; with modifications,
this is still used today for writing Russian and other languages.

The familiar Hebrew and Arabic alphabets were both developments of the
early Semitic alphabet; even today, these alphabets do not represent
vowels.  The Arabic alphabet has been, and to a lesser extent still
is, used to write a number of languages, other than Arabic, in
countries in which Islam predominates.

The wide variety of alphabets used for writing the languages of India
and southeast Asia mostly derive from a common ancestor. It is
believed that this ancestor was inspired by a Semitic alphabet, but
the details are obscure.

The Korean alphabet is an independent invention in Korea; it is not
connected with any other.

Finally, note that a few languages are not normally written in an
alphabet at all; Chinese and Japanese are the best-known examples.

In the past, there were many other non-alphabetic writing systems in
use in Asia, Europe and North America, but almost all of these have
dropped out of use in favor of other writing systems, usually
alphabetic ones. So far as we know, the first true writing system was
invented by the Sumerians (in modern Iraq) about 3200 BC, but this
system was not alphabetic in nature, nor were very many of the other
early writing systems, such as the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the (much
later) Chinese script.

For more information, see this book:

Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (1996), The World's Writing
Systems, Oxford.

Another question: what are the earliest stories?

Try "early stories civilization" in dogpile:

http://projects.cac.psu.edu/Materials/CMLIT108_sdp4/time.htm
 

Dale Burnett dale.burnett@uleth.ca
First Created  February 5, 2000
Last Revised   March 1, 2000
Copyright Dale Burnett 2000 all rights reserved