3. The Greek Alphabet

According to the concept of FLOW discussed in Strong and Davis’s History of Creativity, another aspect essential to the creative progress of a civilization is the birth of a writing system. The Greek alphabet was first introduced around 700 BC as an extension of the Phoenician alphabet, but it had one distinctive and influential feature: it included vowel sounds, making it, “The first truly phonetic alphabet which is able to accurately and unambiguously transcribe the spoken word of any language using only twenty to thirty signs or letters” (McLuhan and Logan). This innovation proved extremely conducive to stimulating learning. Most obviously, it greatly increased literacy since it only used a few characters, as opposed to other systems that created symbols for ideas, resulting in extensive training required for full literacy. More importantly, however, the Greek alphabet provided a new perspective on learning. The use of an entirely phonetic alphabet divided words into linguistically meaningless sounds and represented the sounds with other meaningless symbols. However, when these symbols were arranged together, they formed words and ideas. This development directly correlated with the Greeks’ development of classification and philosophy, both aspects of learning that involved forming correlations between initially meaningless ideas or characteristics to form a more generalized concept.