Alphabet (Not That one: Google Parent); Its Invention and Utility

choi

I add the following to the posting titled Louis XIV.

(1) Louis XV (reign 1715 (age 5) – 1774) was great grandson of Louis XIV. Born in 1710, Louis XIV's heir (the oldest and only surviving son; future Louis XV's grandfather) died of smallpox in 1711. In February and March, 1712 future Louis XV's mother, father (grandson of Louis XIV) died in quick succession of measles and its treatment of blood-letting.  
(2)
(a) Dunkirk
https://www.Dunkirk (etymonline.com/word/dunkirk  
(the place name is "in reference to the 7c. church of St. Eloi")
(b) Saint Eligius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Eligius  
(588 – 660; French: Éloi [Eligius is Latin spelling])

In his lifetime, he built several monasteries, which were long gone. The present-day Church of Saint-Éloi, Dunkirk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Saint-Éloi,_Dunkirk
had its construction that started in 1559  and ended in 1567 (many a change in structures since)



=====================
Katherine A Powers, Sorting out the Universe. Arranging a list of catalog by the initial letters of each entry seems elementary today. But it began as a revolution. Wall Street Journal, Oct 17, 2020 (in the Review section that appears every Saturday).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-p ... niverse-11602860309
http://content.the-omj.com/News/StoryText/1672948
(book review on Judith Flanders, A place for everything; The curious history of alphabetical order. Basic Books, 2020).

Note:
(a)
(i) "Ms Flanders begins where she must, with the invention of writing, which, she notes, may have occurred as many as six times across the globe * * * But, as she points out, we only have evidence of a single invention of phonetic writing, this by traders and mercenaries in the Middle East sometime in the second or third millenium BC. These travelers, sharing no common tongue, communicated in a form of creole whose words were then disassembled into phonetic characters which could be written as sounds required. Like money, the alphabet was a radical abstraction, for letters have no value or meaning in themselves, but stand for something that does."
(i) history of writing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing
(writing system spread or "was passed on by traders or merchants traveling between geographical regions. * * * Scholars now recognize that writing may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia (between 3400 and 3100 BC), Egypt (around 3250 BC), China (1200 BC), and lowland areas of Southern Mexico and Guatemala (by 500 BC)") (citations omitted)
(A) Chinese, cuneiform, and Mayan use logograms/ ideograms, or characters, to write.
(B) Latin-English dictionary:
* cuneus (noun masculine): "wedge"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cuneus
(C) Ancient Greek-English dictionary:
* lógos (noun masculine): "that which is said: word, speech"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CF%8C%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%82
(ii) Since I am familiar with Japanese, so I wondered about kana of Japanese.  
(A) "The Japanese language had no written form at the time Chinese characters were introduced, and texts were written and read only in Chinese."  en.wikipedia.org for kanji 漢字.

That Wiki page did not say when. Sources say in the fifth or eighth century why such a discrepancy and the basis of each is unknown to me.
(B) But kana 仮名 is surely an alphabet, right?  But its origin lies in India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana
(section 3 History)
(iii) "a single invention of phonetic writing"
(A) alphabet  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet
("The first fully phonemic script, the Proto-[sinaitic] script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is considered to be the first alphabet, and is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and possibly Brahmic. It was created by Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula * * * by selecting a small number of hieroglyphs commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language")
(B) Sinai
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Sinai
(Sinaitic (adj) )

(b) "The Latin word 'alphabeto' came into use around the year AD 200 * * * [speculating the origin of alphabetic order]: an author who placed angeli [plural of Latin noun masculine angelus angel], angels, before deus, God, simply because A comes before D, was an author who had failed to comprehend the order of the universe."

The English noun alphabet came, through Latin, from Ancient Greek noun alphábētos (alpha + beta) of the same meaning.

(c) "Isidore of Seville's 'Etymologies,' a proto-encyclopedia"

Etymologiae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae
(i) Latin-English dictionary:  
* etymologia (noun feminine; nominative plural etymologiae): "etymology"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/etymologia
(ii) Isidore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isidore
("is an English and French masculine given name. The name is derived from the Greek name Isídōros and can literally be translated to 'gift of Isis [a goddess of ancient Egypt]' ")
(A) Isidore of Seville is English spelling for both names (person and place). Its Modern Spanish spelling is San Isidro or San Isidoro (Latin: Isidorus) de Sevilla.
(B) Compare Theodore (name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_(name)  
("from the Greek words θεός (theós) God and δώρον (dōron) 'gift') ")
(C) Ancient Greek-English dictionary:
* δῶρον (noun neuter): "gift"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/δῶρον