After Class, Chapter 2 & 3

In this class, we discussed the different alphabets and how they evolved along with Chinese calligraphy. The Phoenicians had 22 characters in their alphabet and the reason why they could spread the word about their alphabet was because they had the technology at the time to do so. They had boats and were very advanced. Then came the Greek alphabet. This alphabet was very advanced, along with their civilization. The Greeks added vowels to the alphabet and developed a more rounded writing style called uncials. Then we have the Latin alphabet. Along with all the alphabets at the time, all the letters were upper-case. The latin alphabet used what's called a ligature, which we can see in the letter W. A ligature is the joining of 2 letters. So, for the letter W, to Vs were formed to make W. They also produced a few more letters that weren't in the alphabet before, such as Y, Z, J, U, W, and Z.

Chinese calligraphy, as we learned and visually saw, is a very difficult language to understand. It is however very visually attractive to the eye and I see calligraphy tattoos on a number of people. The Chinese contributed a lot along with important inventions such as paper and printing. We discussed how the first form of printing was relief printing and how movable type was very inconvenient to those who used it.

One interesting fact I learned today was that Chinese calligraphy has a total of more than 44,000 characters. All of these characters however are not used today because that would be impossible to know all 44,000 characters!

One question that I have is about how the Chinese came up with the order of the logograms. Since the Chinese writing system isn't alphabetical, how did they come up with the order and why did they choose to do it that way?