THE ALPHABET EXPLAINED: The origin of every letter

Every letter of our alphabet has a story to tell. Join me for an A to Z of A to Z.

I'll explain...
𐦃 The Egyptian hieroglyphics that became our letters
🏛 Why W is called "double U"
🇫🇷 Why do the French call Y a "Greek I"?
💤 Is it ZEE or ZED??
✏️ How I and J were the same for the Romans
🤔 Why we can easily confuse U and V

Let's get cracking!

===LINKS===
(Thanks to those who suggested I read it)

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==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introduction
0:43 The birth of the alphabet
1:25 Hieroglyphics: A & B
4:13 C, E, K, M, N, O & R
6:04 L, S, D & Q - Early Semitic
9:23 F, U, V & Y - Ypsilon
10:35 W - double U
11:34 I & J - Latin double
13:08 G, H, P, T & X
14:29 Z - zed or zee?

[kreuzundqueer]

The hieroglyph for time is actually a determinative and can also be used in the Old/Middle Egyptian word 'zp' (for example 2 zp means twice, literally two times). It is not a button though, the image provided here is a bit weird, it is supposed to be a moon.
Even though the alphabet was inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, their sounds/interpretations are not of the same value as in Middle Egyptian. For example the Canaanites assigned the value/sound 'M' to the wavy water sign, in original Middle Egyptian it was an 'N'. The hand sign for the 'K' was originally in standard Middle Egyptian a dj-sound like in 'jungle'.
On the topic of Canaanite-Egyptian work relations and the origin of the alphabet, I recommend the work of Ludwig D. Morenz. And looking up the Hathor-Ba'alat sphinx which looks pretty cool.

[thesalinator]

I'm no linguist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but

The reason so many of these characters seem to flip horizontally, is, I believe, because some of those ancient languages could be written both left-to-right, and right-to-left. So instead of starting over on a new line when you get to the end of one like we do now, they would continue on the next line going the other way. And when this was done, they also wrote the characters backwards (probably so you could tell which way to read them). And the backward version of those characters just stuck.

[jafkp]

Rob's tasteful alliterations around each example are done just right, man's a poet

[droprelease]

In addition to your artful alliteration, I really want to commend you/your editor for the brilliant letter transformation animations - it really helped conceptualise how a seemingly abstract hieroglyphic pictograph transformed into a letter

[Eric_In_SF]

It’s pretty clear the Romans were very artistic. All the changes they made to the letters were to create uniformity in shape and format, so they all occupy the same space, they all have similar vertical lines, horizontal lines, and angles and curves, and most importantly, the minimum amount of strokes.

Would love to see a video about that. This one was pretty enlightening Thank you.

[simpleau]

I'm French and it just clicked that Y is called 'greek i'! We spelled it igrec in school but they never taught us its 'i - grec'. The evolution of language is so fascinating, love the videos!

[waverod]

One of the important things behind the C/G split (and the C/K doublet) is the path from Greek to Latin via Etruscan. Etruscan didn't have voiced stops, so both Greek kappa and Greek gamma represented the same sound. Kappa evolved to K, while Gamma evolved to C. Latin did have voiced stops, so they made the G to make the distinction again.

[nephiilim]

i love so much that this chanel exists. everytime i feel like media is killing my brain cells i come here to recover

[Ploni.Almoni]

I just stumbled upon your channel and am delighted. As a language illiterate myself, I have found your videos enlightening and entertaining. I have an entire new appreciation for language. Bravo!

[brassmule]

Nothing hits the spot quite like a new RobWords video first thing on Saturday morning. It's been exciting and rewarding to see this channel continue to grow. Keep up the great work, sir!

[eliasblum]

I love the fact that my child (who is six and still in the process of learning to read) and I can watch your videos together - and we both learn something new.

[gregorholzl]

as a german native speaker who learns greek and bulgarian at the same time, i have to thank you. your vid cleared the big confusion in my head! thank you!

[pillow]

In arabic the first word in the alphabet is still called Aleph and the second Ba, The name for house is also "Bet". I think because it is also a semitic language.

[lostincyberspaceIII]

What I find really interesting is that a lot of the changes over the years came from the tools that they were used in their writing. It would be neat to see a follow up that talks about this interesting point that if poorly shared with the world.

[Mostlyharmless]

What I love about how we talk about letters has so much to do with printing.
For example upper and lower case letters were literally stored in the upper and lower cases of the font, which was the storage for a specific typeface, which could be the slanty italian or italic style! And we mind the leading of the text with tabs of lead.
It’s just cool to me how much of it is carried over despite not having a lick of anything to do with physically pressing lead letters to paper.

[Paline]

As an Hebrew speaker it's cool to see how sound of word remained in the letter, for example the letter R that come from head is making sense to me because the Hebrew word for head is "ROSH" which starts with the letter R .Also the letter M that came from water, and water in Hebrew is "MAYIM" yet again starts with the letter M. BTW the letters ALEF and BET are also the first 2 letters in Hebrew.

[velprox]

Thank you so much for all of your videos. Our 5 year old loves your channel! He has always been fascinated with the alphabet and reading and making words in general. Needless to say our driveway is covered in much of your teaching!

[tyleraricci]

I am a linguist and glad someone made a simple video to explain several years of my undergrad studies.

[MyMy-tvfd]

the flipping of letters left-to-right and vice versa comes from the fact that even in ancient Greek (and other languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics), it was quite acceptable to write and read left to right or right to left and this was determined case-by-case per sentence by the direction that the assymetric symbols were facing. Hieroglyphs could also read top-down, but not down-to-top.

[sayari]

What a great teacher. Thankyou for this .