A simple history of the alphabet

Hebrew alphabet

While in Egyptian captivity, the Jews did not adopt the Egyptian language, but retained the familiar one, which we today call Hebrew.
But while in captivity in Babylon (incomparably shorter - 70 years versus 4000 in Egypt), the Jews switched to Aramaic.
Aramaic is related to Canaanite (later Hebrew), like Russian and Ukrainian.
By the way, Abraham and the wives of the patriarchs were from Mesopotamia, so the captivity took place in their historical homeland.

They also began to use the Aramaic alphabet - a square script for both Aramaic and Hebrew - the Scriptures were rewritten in the new alphabet, but not translated into Aramaic.

The square letter was written without vowels, and writing the letters required minimal body movement, because initially the text was written on clay tablets or stone.
In this case it is critical.

And they write from right to left because it was more convenient to hold the hammer and chisel this way.

Download Hebrew fonts

Greek alphabet

An alphabet was invented that could be used to record pronunciation.
The Greeks looked at the alphabet of the Phoenicians and decided to add vowels, because they already wrote not on stone, but on papyrus.
This was one of the reasons for the popularity of the Greek language, which spread throughout the Roman Empire.

Amazingly, God divided the languages so that people could not agree and do the bad things they wanted to do.
And only twice in the history of mankind has there been a single international language.

1. Greek - during the time of Jesus and the beginning of the church.
2. English - today.

Download Greek fonts

Old Church Slavonic - Russian language

Old Church Slavonic was created for writing in the 9th century.
Cyril and Methodius came to translate the Bible into Russian and created an alphabet for this purpose.
The basis was the Greek alphabet, the letters Ш and Ц were taken from the Hebrew alphabet, because there were no such sounds in Greek.
Also, some letters were invented, for example Ya, Yu...

And the translation was made not into Russian, but into the practical Old Church Slavonic created by Cyril and Methodius on the basis of the easy language of the South Slavs that they understood.

This is how two languages appeared in Russia.
In the village, all leisure was spent on Sunday in church (there was no radio, no one read newspapers).
In the city they spoke Russian, there were theaters, newspapers, literature...

Maybe someone remembers how people from the village spoke an outdated (village) dialect. Today there is no difference anymore.

Therefore, the church was very opposed to the translation of the Bible into Russian and allowed it only for home reading.

Old Church Slavonic became Church Slavonic and was practically dead. It is used for services in Orthodox churches, but no one speaks Church Slavonic.

Hieroglyphs or alphabet?

The alphabet unites even such a large country as Russia, for example. People read the same literature and speak the same way; the difference in dialects is insignificant.

When the Bible was copied by hand, scribes replaced outdated words with modern ones, and this is how the Church Slavonic language developed. When book printing appeared, typed language began to become obsolete.