A is for Ox: A Short History of the Alphabet

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The twin crises of illiteracy and youth violence haunt our age; the failure of increasing numbers of young people to attain even minimal levels of literacy signals a catastrophe at the deepest levels of our culture. Over 3,500 years ago, a few of them seem to have had the idea to adapt the writing system to their own language, and the way they repurposed hieroglyphs was inspired. Incredibly, the people who invented the world's first alphabet may very well have been illiterate. Their inscriptions didn't follow the format of Egyptian writing, nor did they import any sounds or meanings from the earlier writing system as they likely would have done if they had learned hieroglyphs first. Over time, what had started out as drawings of animals, objects, and tiny people was simplified into abstract lines that could be jotted down easily. The waves of the ocean became the crests of the letter M, the slithering body of a snake resolved into the twisting letter N, and the bend of an elbow was preserved only as the curve of the letter J.

Admission is free A Stephen T. Johnson Alphabet City (1995) Leonard Baskin, A Gehenna Alphabet. The Gehenna Press was founded in 1942 and was one of the first fine-art presses in the USA. Alphabetics/an aesthetically awesome alliterated alphabet anthology. Writing was invented in two different places around the same time 5,500 years ago: Mesopotamia (the region of modern-day Iraq) and Egypt. It was later reinvented, independently, in China and Mesoamerica. This new type of writing that matched symbols to single sounds, instead of whole words or groups of sounds, was eventually named after the first two letters in the system: ʾalef-bayit, or alphabet. Canaanite miners used their new alphabet to write on mine walls and to inscribe gifts to Hathor. The text on this statuette, running from upper left to lower right, seems to read 'mt l bʿlt,' meaning 'gift for the lady.' From Althebräische Inschriften vom Sinai by Hubert Grimme, 1923. (Public domain)These early scripts weren't alphabets, but they weren't simple picture-writing, either. All Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance, were images of objects and animals in the real world, but they didn't always represent those objects directly. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9242 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000386 Openlibrary_edition Five of our letters (F, U, V, W, and Y) all came from the same ancient semitic letter "waw", which meant "peg". Hence, "F is for peg". "A", on the other hand, came from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph which resembled the head of an ox. Hence, "A is for ox", which gives the book its name. Each letter's mini-chapter takes us through its development into Greek, Etruscan, Roman, medieval Carolingian, 15th century humanist, and eventually modern forms. I was also surprised to learn that several of our letters were not quite into their modern shape when the 1700's began, although the "f"-like form of the letter "s" reminded me that I already knew about at least one case like that.

The first half of the book gives a general overview of the development of alphabetic languages and lettering in general, focusing in on Europe, while the second half examines the (speculative, in some cases) history of the shape of each letter in the modern English alphabet. There are many illustrations and examples.Sometime around 750 BC, ancient Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians and added one last innovation: vowels. To do it, they simply took letters representing consonants that didn't exist in Greek and reassigned them to vowel sounds.