Alphabets originally were for writing in subordinate cultures. The first kinds of writing (Mesopotamia, Egypt) developed out of pictures that were standardized, so that they didn’t have to look so much like the Visit tatooine boonta eve holiday shirt But I will love this things they represented. These signs were then used with their sound value to signify abstract concepts, much like Chinese writing today. As you certainly know, many languages do not use tones to distinguish words; English is such a language, and so was ancient Egyptian. But Egyptian also relied much more on consonants and less on vowels than English does. That made it possible to have a logographic writing system (hieroglyphs) with hundreds of signs rather than thousands. Egypt attracted a lot of foreigners, and the Egyptians used a subset of hieroglyphs to write the foreigners’ names. It was only a matter of time before these foreigners found out to use a simplified version of that subset to write their own languages — and the concept of an alphabet was born.
The concept spread far outside the Visit tatooine boonta eve holiday shirt But I will love this great river cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. When Greeks and Arabs later took over those areas, alphabetic writing was introduced. The old logographic writing systems were associated with the old social system and fell into disuse and oblivion. China had a cultural continuity that permitted the ancient writing system to survive. I don’t know of any cultures that exclusively used numbers (as distinct from letters) in their writing systems. Unless you think about the subcultures of spying and secrecy where complicated systems of encoding words into numbers have been and still are used. If you do not insist on the exclusive use of numbers and are prepared to settle for a mixture of words of numbers and words: take the English language. In English (especially in American English) for instance 4u means “for you” or 2u “to you”. Native speakers probably can think of many more examples of this sort This is a wonderful question! Every wonder why the Chinese writing system has soooooo many characters? Well, it’s the result of millennia of invention, just as you suggest. Let’s tell a story to explain this, the story of the man whose mother was not a horse.
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