Whatever Our Written Language Is,

we all tend to take it for granted,

so how did our written language come about? some letters have appeared relatively the same for millennia, while others, like U, V, and W, developed much closer to our own time period from a single character, enter Matt Baker of Useful Charts who creates helpful visual guides that condense hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of years of history into streamlined flowcharts, His poster Evolution of the Alphabet looks at nearly 3,800 years of the alphabet’s evolution, tracing it from Egyptian hieroglyphs (c. 1750 BCE) through Phoenician, early Greek and Latin, and finally to the present forms we use today,

He explains in great detail these systems, and their evolution in greater detail in his video above “History of the Alphabet” you can view more timelines of historical developments on his website, Youtube, and Instagram, the design was created in association with his Writing Systems of the World chart which takes a look at 51 different writing systems from around the world, Baker has each of these prints for sale on his website and Etsy, it seems strange that just 500 hundred or so years ago we would have difficulty in understanding people from our our town or village.