THE WRITTEN WORD 



There is one thing that the Phoenicians invented 

 that has made a vast difference to all the world. It 

 is the alphabet. 



Did you ever wonder why those little letters that 

 make up our words came to represent the sounds 

 we give them when we read? Before you went to 

 school you never thought of letters when you heard 

 any one talking or when you talked yourself. But 

 when you learned to read, you had to learn the 

 sound of all those letters that make up our written 

 words. For each one represents some sound that 

 we make with our throats, our tongues and our lips, 

 the sounds which form our spoken words. 



Savages and uncivilized races have a spoken lan- 

 guage, but they cannot read or write. Learning to 

 speak has been a natural growth in human beings, 

 like learning to use their hands, but the art of writ- 

 ing they have had to invent. 



Those very earliest men of all could only grunt 

 and make sounds something like the sounds the 

 animals made all about them. Some of those sounds 

 we still make when we are pleased or surprised or 

 hurt. We say, ^'Ah!" and ^^Oh!" if we are sur- 

 prised or pleased, ''Ugh!" if we are quite displeased 

 and ''Umph!" if we do not care much about a thing; 

 and it was by making sounds like these that the first 



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