Page 22 - Boca Exposure - February '24

Page 22, Boca Exposure
Book Review

Letter Perfect: The Marvelous knowledge placed before few. This makes an alphabet easier to learn. Students need

History Of Our Alphabet From you all at once, at least memorize only two dozen or so letters to begin building
you will have it to turn to
toward literacy … Compare our 26 letters to the Chinese
A To Z later for reference from system, which involves at least 2,000 symbols for educated
daily reading and writing, out of an inventory of about
time to time. Provided
this subject is of interest 60,000 symbols overall.”
By Nils A. Shapiro to you, it will be well Here is an example of how the letters of today’s
As one whose entire worth it. alphabet have taken their shapes. The following, from the
personal and business Along the way you chapter about the letter A, is the caption that appears
life has been intimately will learn the very in the book below the diagram on this page marked
involved with the written interesting reasons why “Diagram A.”
word – from a love of the five vowels – a, e,
reading that began in early i, o, u – were added to
childhood to my career as the original characters
a magazine publisher and to make up the 26 in
book and newspaper editor, our present alphabet, as
as well as the more than 200 well as what most of us have long forgotten about the
book reviews to date – I “consonants” and “sibilants” we may or may not have
cannot recall a title ever attracting my attention more than learned in elementary school grammar classes.
the subject of this month’s column when I came across it At that point David Sacks begins his extraordinarily “The evolution of the ox. (1) Letter aleph, the ‘ox,’ as it
in a local bookstore. informative history of the 26 letters of our alphabet, each appears in one of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions from about
And what a fortuitous discovery it was! in its own chapter. You can jump to any place in the book; 1800 B.C … Unlikely as it seems, this pictorial image was
What surprises me is that this book, now in paperback, there is no need to read them in sequence. For example, the earliest form of our letter A. Today the horns of the ox
was originally published, unknown to me, as long ago I decided to turn first to the chapters about the initials of remain with us, unnoticed, in the upright legs of our A.
as 2003 – the work of author David Sacks, an expert my own name, NAS – my middle name is Allen. I suspect (2) Aleph’s shape looks simpler in another early Semitic
in written language who studied Greek and Latin at you may want to do the same with your name. inscription, carved at Serabit el-Khadem in Sinai, perhaps
Swarthmore College and Oxford University, and who is I found the histories so intriguing that I continued until around 1750 B.C. (3) Two horns are still evident in the
the author of an earlier book, Encyclopedia of the Ancient I finished the entire book in one more week of sittings. Phoenician aleph of 1000 B.C., but the letter is by now an
Greek World. I pointed out to my wife, Linda, to her delight, that her abstract form, to be written in three quick strokes of an
On publication it was received with international initial “L” has traditionally been considered the most ink brush on papyrus or a stylus on ceramic. (4) By the
acclaim. The New York Times reviewer wrote, “As fun soothing and relaxing of all the characters in the alphabet. 800s B.C., Phoenician aleph has a new look, rather more
to read as it is enlightening … Sacks’s obsession is I read to her the explanatory text, which included the like an ox’s head, to be written in perhaps two strokes.
contagious, and I can imagine few readers whose lives following phrase: “The L’s calming effect is heard in (Can you guess where the shape would go next?)”
would not be enriched by what he calls his ‘voyage of ‘lull,’ ‘lullaby,’ ‘lollipop,’ ‘lotus land’ and ‘la-la land.’” As serious and complex as this subject is, what makes
discovery.’” Perhaps I can best illustrate the depth and diversity of Letter Perfect a true joy to read is author David Sacks’s
I agree with that reviewer’s enthusiastic comment, but knowledge you will derive from this book by sharing several consistently light and approachable writing style, as is
in all fairness to the readers of my column must add a examples from Sacks’s research excerpted here. (Some of evident in his introductory page to the chapter about
note of caution to my description of this book’s content the text, including entire paragraphs, have been deleted for the letter “V,” which features a photograph of Winston
and purpose. lack of space and have been replaced by three dots.) Churchill in a familiar pose and the following text:
To begin with, I can promise that every one of the 367 “One-quarter of Earth’s population, 1.4 billion people, “History’s famous V. British Prime Minister Winston
pages of this book will offer a bounty of fascinating use nonalphabetic writing. Basically, this means China, Churchill gives the ‘V for Victory’ hand sign to a London
facts you had not previously known. (That doesn’t including Taiwan, and Japan. The Japanese system comes crowd in June 1943, during World War II. Conceived by
include the reference section – bibliography, index and from an adaptation of the Chinese that dates back to the Churchill in summer 1941 to help boost British morale
list of more than 100 helpful illustrations, photographs 600s A.D. … In Chinese script, each symbol denotes a after Britain’s darkest war year, the V sign proved hugely
and charts that accompany the text.) whole word of the Mandarin Chinese language. We call popular in armies and homelands of the Commonwealth
The author begins with a preface and opening chapter, such symbols ‘logograms’ (from two Greek roots meaning and, eventually, the United States, a symbol of defiance
“Little Letters, Big Idea,” which together total 51 pages ‘word letter’) … It does not operate by conveying sound; against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Churchill
that introduce the concept and beginnings of a written it conveys the idea behind the word. had initiated the sign as a knuckles-outward gesture but
alphabet in Egypt in 2000 B.C., then trace it throughout … Example: See the Chinese had reversed it to thumb-outward after learning that the
many evolutions to the Modern Roman alphabet of 1840 symbol for the word “Middle” in other one already had the vulgar meaning of ‘Up yours.’
we basically use today. the logogram on this page. Without a doubt, that continued nuance helped the V sign’s
The one caution I referred to above is that this evolution, “An alphabet enjoys one huge popularity.”
because of its complex nature, is treated in a rather advantage over any other writing My review can be summed up in a single letter: A+.
scholarly way that requires your fullest attention – perhaps system: It needs fewer symbols. No
requiring you to sometimes go back over the same text other system can get away with so
more than once in order to absorb so much information.
Indeed, throughout this book you will be presented with at
least 100 times as much knowledge as you can remember
after one reading. If it is possible to have too much

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