Out of everything people invent, don’t you think the alphabet is the easiest to take for granted?  I mean, we use it every day.

 Our alphabet is based on the one the Greeks invented.  They invented it about three hundred years ago.  Before that people used pictures for their alphabet.  But the problem is that there were different symbols for every word.  So to read you had to remember thousands of symbols.

 The idea the Greeks had was to use letters (symbols) to sound like letters that had a sound and those letters would make up all of their words.  That idea was better and simpler.

 The word alphabet came from the first two Greek letters that was alpha and beta.  Put them together and what do you get?  Alphabet!

 The Greek alphabet as changed though.  For example, our sixth letter of the alphabet is f.  Well, then, the 6th letter was Z.

 Another change in our old alphabet is that there were only 22 letters.  The letters that were left out were K, J, U, and W.

 During the Middle Ages the letter “j” was made from the letter “i”.  The reason it is i, j in the alphabet is because they are the only 2 letters that get dotted.

 A little later Ben Franklin decided to drop c, q, j, x, and w.  The reason he did not drop e, t, a, i, s, o, n, h, and r is because those are the most used words.

 There are 65 different alphabets.  The alphabet that has the most letters is in Cambodia.  It has 74 letters.  How many letters are in your
Alphabet?