That’s because many of our letters began as Egyptian hieroglyph symbols 4,000 years ago, with a hodgepodge of Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and Roman influences thrown in.

Why is “A” the first letter of our alphabet ... an isosceles triangle. This symbol became the Phoenician letter “daleth” (door), which became the Greek letter “delta,” and eventually ...

Letters are symbols, just like emojis or crosswalk signs ... the Greeks adopted vowels. The Greek alphabet looks a lot like ours, but our letters took their final form in Italy.

Like Roman numerals, their system borrowed letters; like the Arabic numerals we still use, it only needed one symbol for each decimal place. In the 6th century BCE, the Greek alphabet used 24 letters.

However, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, made up of 24 letters from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world. It is a ...