By chance, another fantastic advancement happened that made humans not only map sounds for ‘things’ (dog, woman, mountain, etc.) with signs, but also parts of these sounds, or what we refer to today as ‘letters’. Of course, we cannot say that they mapped the sound for [R] with a sign because there was no “R” back then. So let’s take the name “Rameses”, pronounced as [RAMSS]. Pronounce it in your head. Can you see how the [RA] stands out? [RA-M-SS]. Well [RA], or [R] as we may say (because there is no true “R” sound but variations of it) became important for them for various reasons. The same observation was used with the rest of the sounds from [RA-M-SS]. They didn’t actually sit down and say “the sound [RA] must be written this way, [M] that way, and [SS] like this”. By a kind of chance, in the same language, “mouth” (an object) was pronounced as [RO] (similar to [RA]) and already had this sign for it
So guess what happened next? Similar to the sign for “arrow” and “life” - the sign for mouth became associated with the sound [RA], so now we know that the name [RA-M-SS] starts with the symbol , or at least that’s how it ended up.
The rest of the letters followed a similar path and [RAMSS] became this (from sounds to ‘letters’):