Question: how did our alpabet look like this

Zoe Vance answered on 12 Mar 2025:

This is such an interesting question! It’s not my field really as an evolutionary biologist, but the way language and writing changes over time is sort of similar to the way DNA changes so I find it pretty interesting.

So our alphabet is the Latin alphabet and has been around a couple thousand years. It seems that it came from older alphabets that already existed, which themselves were based on older ones all the way back to hieroglyphs in Ancient Egypt. The hieroglyphs were pictures of actual things, like say a fish, or a hand but as alphabets changed over time they got simplified into shapes, eventually ending up with letters like we have now. Some of our letters were probably also invented based on these ones as the language changed and different sounds needed to be represented.

If you look up “History of the latin script” on wikipedia you can see a table of how all the letters trace back through history. All very cool!