Why is alphabet called alphabet

If you imagine a capital A upside down , you'll see that it's pretty close. It's Phoenician name was alf which meant "Ox". Hence the Greek "alpha".

The letter beta was originally a house actually the bird's eye view of a square house. In most Semitic languages the word for house is pronounced "Beth, Bayt Hence the Greek "beta". Gamma is a camel , Delta a door , Epsilon a window etc Add a comment. Alpha is the first letter in the Greek "alphabet", and Beta is the second.

Hellion Thursagen Thursagen They were, at the time, writing with a set of hieroglyphs that were used both as representations of the consonants of their language and as logographs a logograph or logogram is a letter, symbol, or sign used to represent an entire word. It was either Canaanite workers living on the Sinai Peninsula in the 19th century BC or Semitic workers living in Central Egypt in the 15th century BC who created the first purely alphabetic script.

Over the next few centuries, this alphabet spread through the rest of the Middle East and into Europe. Almost all subsequent alphabets in the Western world have either descended from it, or been inspired by or adapted from one of its descendants.

The first people to extensively use the alphabet as it emerged from Egypt were the Phoenicians, who ruled a small empire of maritime city-states and colonies around the Mediterranean. Their extensive use of the alphabet in business dealings throughout their vast trade network led to its quick spread throughout the Mediterranean region — later versions were called the Phoenician alphabet.

The Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet sometime in the 8th century BC or earlier, keeping the order and adapting it for use with their own language. For example, the Phoenician alphabet did not have letters representing vowel sounds, which were important in the Greek language and had to be added. After they had worked out the finer points of their new alphabet, Greeks living on the Italian peninsula came in contact with a tribe known as the Latins. Sometime in the 5th century BC, the tribe adopted writing from the Greeks and another tribe called the Etruscans, choosing and mixing letters from the two alphabets as they needed.

You can read the entire blog post below:. We do not intend to become one. We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about. But in the technology industry , where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.

Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google. This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main internet products contained in Alphabet instead.

What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens , and Calico focused on longevity. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence.

In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed. We will rigorously handle capital allocation and work to make sure each business is executing well. In addition, with this new structure we plan to implement segment reporting for our Q4 results, where Google financials will be provided separately than those for the rest of Alphabet businesses as a whole. This was done in order to prevent the company from drifting away from its vision due to pressure from investors to perform financially.

Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have always had a healthy disregard for the impossible. They imbued this thought process into their company's DNA, making Google a fount of innovation within Silicon Valley, where innovation is a byword instead of a buzzword. But many of Alphabet's attempts at innovation have , in fact, flopped.

The company's attempts to reinvent itself as a hardware and Internet of Things IoT player have also come under constant scrutiny by the media and Wall Street. Each company within the Alphabet umbrella is headed by a CEO, who reports to the Alphabet CEO, who allows the respective head to determine the best course of action without worrying about the effect on the search engine cash cow.

It also avoids negative public relations PR through direct association with the search engine business, which makes money by inferring user interests. For example, Google's acquisition of the home security company Nest raised privacy concerns. According to the author of Google's ten commandments, Larry Page and Sergey always had a bigger picture of technology's role in the world.

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