Specific Purpose: After listening to my speech, my audience will understand where the alphabet originated from, what other languages influenced the alphabet, and the importance of having an alphabet
Introduction I. Attention-Getter: Most Americans use the alphabet everyday, but have never been taught the origins.
II. Personal Credibility: I also didn’t know where the alphabet came from.
III. Audience Relate: I’m sure that many people in this room don’t know the origins of the alphabet.
IV. Preview & Thesis: I hope that by the end of my speech, you’ll understand where the alphabet came from, what other languages influenced the alphabet, and the importance of having an alphabet.
Transition: Let’s start with the main question: Where did …show more content…
VI. Let’s discuss the different languages that influenced the English alphabet.
By 2700 BCE, Egyptian writing had a set of 22 hieroglyphs that represented syllables that began with a single consonant of their language, and a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These hieroglyphs were used as pronunciation guides for the signs or characters that were written, to write grammatical inflections which are the extra letters at the end of some words in their different grammatical forms, and, later, to transcribe long words and foreign names.
In the Middle Bronze Age, an apparently "alphabetic" system known as the Proto-Sinaitic script is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but only one of these early writings has been deciphered and their exact nature remains open to interpretation. Based on letter appearances and names, it is believed to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.
B. This script eventually developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet which in turn was refined into the Phoenician