Page 28 - Boca ViewPointe - February '24

Page 28, Viewpointe February 2024
Book Review

Letter Perfect: The Marvelous after one reading. If it is other system can get away with so few. This makes an

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

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