Your letter A used to be an ox head.

Around 1050 BC, Phoenician traders used an alphabet of 22 consonant signs. The first letter, 'aleph', meant ox and showed a head with horns; rotate it and you get our A. Greeks added vowels, Etruscans and Romans adopted it. Hebrew and Arabic descend from the same alphabet.

Useful: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic: one merchant script, five worlds.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

AlphabetGeschichteSchriftsysteme

Difficulty:

Related cards

Arabic runs right to left – its numbers run left to right.Arabic and Hebrew are written right to left, yet multi-digit numbers inside them run left to right …
An alphabet a king could explain in an afternoon.Korean Hangul was designed in 1443 under King Sejong and published in 1446 so ordinary people could …
Japanese mixes three scripts in a single sentence.A Japanese sentence combines kanji (Chinese characters for word stems, about 2,100 in the school …
The English alphabet once had 27 letters.The & sign is a ligature of e and t, Latin "et", attested since the 1st century. In 19th-century …
In 1712, Sweden had a 30th of February.From 1700 Sweden tried to ease from Julian to Gregorian by skipping every leap day for 40 years. …
Spain has lived in the wrong time zone since 1940.Geographically, mainland Spain belongs to Greenwich time like Portugal and Britain. On 16 March …
How a rumour can kill a healthy bank.Because banks hold only a fraction of deposits as cash, a bank can become insolvent when many …
Why the world counts in dollars: a hotel in New Hampshire, 1944.In July 1944, 44 nations at Bretton Woods agreed on a monetary system: the dollar was pegged to …

Keep reading

This card belongs to the topic Language & World. Every card is short, cites a source and can be saved – due ones come back by themselves later.

About Doomlearn · Projects · Legal notice · Privacy · Terms