Sometime around 2,800 years ago, the Phoenicians made a major invention—the vowel! That is, they realized that instead of each symbol representing a syllable (ba, be, bi, bo, bu, ca, ce, ci, co, cu, etc.), each individual sound could be represented by its own symbol, reducing the number of symbols from over 100 to just 22. This alphabet (from the name of the first two letters), spread like wildfire over western Asia, northern Africa, and Europe.
