I don't know if I got it right, but I guess you're talking about alphabet. The 'English letters' aren't just english letters and neither they did have been discovered. They came from Latin, hence their name 'Latin Alphabet', that had modified the Ancient Greek Alphabet, which was already an evolution from the Phoenician Alphabet, used in the Ancient Middle East. The Latin Alphabet is, by far, the major alphabet of the Ocident, used by English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. etc.

Hello Hunter, It is amazing how the written language developed * rather than discovered* in a chronological order from Thiago's Phoenician Alphabet passing through the greek and roman alphabets to Jura's wikipedian explanation of relatively modern Latin alphabets. Mentioning the phonenician alphabet, they consisted of 22 consonants but no vowels. The reader was assumed to speak the language, so they would know what sound to put between the consonants. It might be interesting for you to check those Phoenician alphabets: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/phoenician.htm and other alphabets as well remembering that the word "alphabet",this first phonetic system of writing in opposition to pictorial and transcription systems derives originally from the first letters in this old system of writing "Aleph , Beth.." You can check this table of phonetician letters and their equivalent Latin alphabets that passed through the Etruscans to the Roman Alphabet: http://phoenicia.org/tblalpha.html There has been even hypothesis debating that the origin of the sound of those phonetic letters might go back to ancient pictorials such as hieroglyphs by adapting the so called "arcrophony".Check there: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/2587/alpha.html This will take us further back in the chronological order of the development of modern English letters. If you are interested about this subject you can make further searches or read books about it such as: *Ox, House, Stick: The History of the Alphabet written by Don Robb *Modern English :Its Growth and present use by George Philip Krapp,

From Wikipedia; The English language was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the fifth century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself, by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, these being mostly short inscriptions or fragments. The Latin alphabet, introduced by Christian missionaries, began to replace the Anglo-Saxon futhorc from about the seventh century, although the two continued in parallel for some time. Futhorc influenced the Latin alphabet by providing it with the letters thorn (Þ þ) and wynn (Ƿ ƿ). The letter eth (Ð ð) was later devised as a modification of d, and finally yogh (Ȝ ȝ) was created by Norman scribes from the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g. The a-e ligature æsc (ash, Æ æ) was adopted as a letter its own right, named after a futhorc rune. In very early Old English the o-e ligature œðel (ethel, Œ œ) also appeared as a distinct letter, likewise named after a rune, odal. Additionally, the v-v ligature w (double-u) was in use. In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes.[2] He listed the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including ampersand) first, then 5 additional English letters, starting with the Tironian note ond (⁊) an insular symbol for and: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z & ⁊ Ƿ Þ Ð Æ