Letters

Languages as we know them today started out in ancient history, with ancient cultures using pictures to convey what they wanted to say. Cavemen were the first to use this method, drawing pictures on their cave walls, they were much like our family photo albums of today, can you imagine daddy caveman goes hunting and brings home a mammoth for dinner, and a baby sabre tooth tiger for junior, mummy draws pictures on the wall, a few years later, and they are having a family re-union, and junior, who is a grown man now asks what the pictures on the wall mean, so mum points to the mammoth and says that’s what we used to eat in the good old days before the mammoth became extinct, due to the global recession, and this picture, is of your favourite cat tiddles, he was only a dagger toothed tiger when your dad brought him home for you.

Some millenia later, somewhere in the middle east, the Egyptians had evolved into a high culture, and their writings had evolved along with them. Hieroglyphics were the language of this era, then we skip another few hundred years, and we find ourselves in Rome, and strange things are forcing their way into a Romans mind, they were called letters, he kept his minds eye on these letters and counted twenty six of them in all, one day he decided that he would put these down on paper, or papyrus, so as they appeared in his mind he wrote them down, he wondered what to call this collection of new symbols, the Greeks had something a bit like this and they called it an alphabet, he thought to himself well I’m Roman, so I’ll call it the Roman alphabet, and this is how we got the alphabet that is used throughout the western world today. The letters weren’t content though, being on their own, so they started to socialise, mixing with other letters, in small groups called words, as time went by these small groups became larger, words like to and day would form alliances to make even bigger words, words themselves, became discontent, and they started mingling with other words, and they formed themselves into sentences. Words written in the Roman alphabet, didn’t want to stay in Rome, so they wormed their way into the minds of leaders, making them think of things like conquest. The roman armies marched, and with them went the words, they began to translate themselves with every new land the Romans conquered, as the Romans got stronger the words had to keep one step in front, they started by forming themselves into paragraphs, the books, they put themselves in the minds of powerful men, presenting themselves as books on warfare, the tactics of siege, etc. when they were chilling out after a good conquest, words and letters would get into the minds of men in the form of stories, or poetry, or do it yourself manuals and recipe books. In the not too distant past words tired of being in books, after all that’s the media they had been stuck with for the last couple of thousand years. Once again they started to infiltrate the minds of men, scientists and technicians in particular guiding them to developed computers, once the computer was established, words decided on world domination, so they implanted the Internet into the minds of developers, and brought about the Internet. You can believe this story or believe it not, if you don’t believe, then I will ask you this question, what do you see when you look at your key board? yes letters. Letters that jump of the keyboard and into your mind, they jump into your mind and start forming words, then they urge you to press the keys in a certain order, this article is living proof, at least that’s what the words told me to say. Never again under estimate the power of the written word.