- The English word alphabet comes to us, by way of Latin, from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta.
- The Greeks, who traded with the Phoenicians, adopted their alphabet in 800 B.C., but found that the Phoenician alphabet did not contain vowel sounds, which they needed for their language. So they kept 19 Phoenician letters and added 5 of their own (vowels) to make a 24 letter alphabet.
- There are more than 40 distinct sounds in English.
- The original set of 30 signs, known as the Semitic alphabet, was used in ancient Phoenicia beginning around 1600 B.C.
- The capital Q was once the symbol for a monkey. The ancient drawing looked like a Q with a head, ears, and short lines for arms!
- Letters ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ and ‘d’ do not appear anywhere in the spellings of numbers 1 to 99
- (Letter ‘d’ comes for the first time in Hundred)
- Letters ‘a’, ‘b’ ‘c’ do not appear anywhere in the spellings of numbers 1 to 999
- (Letter ‘a’ comes for the first time in Thousand)
- Letters ‘b’ and ‘c’ do not appear anywhere in the spellings of numbers 1 to 999,999,999 (Letter ‘b’ comes for the first time in Billion)
- Letter ‘c’ does not appear anywhere in the spellings of entire English number Counting.
Alphabet facts
