An alphabet is only one solution to the problem of recording speech, and not the most widely used one.
Writing has been invented from scratch perhaps four times in human history, in Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and probably Egypt. Everything else is borrowed, adapted or reverse-engineered from something already in use. The Latin alphabet you are reading passed from Phoenician traders to Greek speakers to the Etruscans before Rome got hold of it, and every stage rearranged the letters to fit a different set of sounds. The result is that scripts encode speech at different levels. An alphabet aims at individual sounds. A syllabary gives each syllable one symbol. An abjad writes consonants and leaves the reader to supply vowels. Chinese characters mostly stand for units of meaning. None of these is more advanced than the others; each suits the language it grew up with, and each imposes its own costs on learners.
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Play it insteadAnswer: B. Chinese characters
Why: Everyday literacy conventionally requires a few thousand of them. Most characters pair a meaning element with a rough phonetic hint.
Answer: A. Right to left
Why: Numerals in both still run left to right, so mixed text changes direction mid-line. Early Greek did alternate direction line by line before settling.
Answer: D. Devanagari
Why: Sanskrit, Marathi and Nepali use it as well. The continuous horizontal line along the top of the words is its most obvious feature.
Answer: C. King Sejong
Why: It was promulgated in 1446 to give commoners a script they could actually learn. Its letter shapes were designed to suggest the position of the tongue and lips.
Answer: B. The Etruscan alphabet
Why: The Etruscans had taken theirs from a Greek alphabet used by colonists in southern Italy. The Greeks in turn had it from Phoenician traders.
Answer: A. A script writing consonants and leaving most vowels unmarked
Why: Arabic and Hebrew are the best-known examples. Both have vowel marks, but they are normally reserved for children's books, scripture and dictionaries.
Answer: D. Raised dots within a six-position cell
Why: Louis Braille adapted a military system for reading messages in the dark. He published his version in 1829, at the age of twenty.
Answer: C. Three
Why: Kanji, hiragana and katakana each do a different job in the same sentence. Katakana is mostly reserved for foreign borrowings and emphasis.
Answer: B. Saint Cyril
Why: He and his brother Methodius devised the earlier Glagolitic script in the ninth century. Cyrillic itself was assembled by their pupils and named in his honour.
Answer: A. Cherokee
Why: Sequoyah devised it in the 1820s without being literate in any language beforehand. The Cherokee Nation adopted it and had a printed newspaper within a decade.
Scripts, Alphabets and Writing Systems has 10 questions and takes about 7 minutes to finish. It is rated Medium and sits in our Language & Words category.
Each of the 10 correct answers adds 10 XP, up to 100 XP for a clean run. Wrong answers cost you nothing, and your full question-by-question review is shown at the end.
Yes. All 10 questions carry a written explanation of why the correct answer is right, so the quiz works as a study sheet as well as a test.
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