Озвученный английский онлайн текст Alphabet.
People learned to write long before they had an alphabet. Different peoples had different ways of writing. Old Egyptians, for example, used hundreds of different signs. They developed out of pictures and stood not for sounds, as modern letters do, but for words and parts of words. Some signs stood for whole ideas, and only 24 of them stood for simple sounds.
The alphabet probably started with the Phoenicians who were the great traders of ancient times. They saw that Egyptian writing was complicated and hit upon the idea of a much easier way. They would only use signs for simple sounds, usually those which most common words began with.
The Greek borrowed the alphabet and improved it. They used some letters for vowel sounds, dropped some letters and introduced new ones. Similar changes were later made by the Romans.
The alphabet came down to the English language from the Romans with little change. After printing was invented U and V, which had been two ways of writing the same letter, became two separate letters (so did I and J). But most of the 26 English letters are the same as those the Romans used 2,000 years ago.