In other words, English speakers are still writing a permutation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics — which all scholars can agree is mind-blowingly cool. This article originally appeared on PRI.org.

Thus, the hieroglyph for an ox, aleph, helped give a shape to the letter “a,” while the alphabet’s inventors derived “b” from the hieroglyph for “house,” bêt.

Tracing roots back to Proto-Sinaitic (1750 BCE)–which was the first alphabet to be built from consonants, pulling a lot of inspiration from Egyptian hieroglyphics–the D began as a drawn fish.

The ancient Egyptians invented one of the earliest known writing systems used from around 3000 BC. The symbols they used were called hieroglyphs, which comes from a Greek word meaning ‘sacred ...

Ancient Egyptian Writing: New Symbols Reveal Development Of Hieroglyphics Published Jun 22, 2017 at 7:17 AM EDT Updated Jun 22, 2017 at 8:21 AM EDT ...

You might not have learned it in elementary school, but the earliest history of the alphabet that forms the basis of written English and French has its origins in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

While the text is written in hieratic — a form of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing — "all [the] words appear to be of foreign linguistic origin" and are mostly Semitic, wrote Schneider in his paper.

Emoglyphs is the study of the transformation of picture writing from Egyptian hieroglyphs, developed some 5,000 years ago, to the 'emojis' of the 21st Century.