Sacks David. Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet From A to Z

Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2003. — xv, 395 pages. — ISBN: 0-676-97487-2.This book attempts a voyage of discovery among the letters of the alphabet. Like islands of an archipelago, the 26 letters will be visited and explored, one at a time. Each islands geography and local lore will be examined briefly, also its relationship to other islands in the navigational stream. Some islands may prove more lush or lofty than others. But any one will yield substantial mental nourishment to visitors, along with glorious vistas onto language, literature, and history of the past 4,000 years.Where do our letters come from? How did they get their shapes, their assigned sounds, their sequence, immortalized in our “Alphabet Song”? Why do we use “Roman” letters for English — also for Spanish, Czech, Turkish, Swahili, Vietnamese, and many others — while some languages (Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hindi, etc.) use different types of letters? What is a letter, exactly? What’s
an alphabet? These are among questions to be answered with authority and zest.And smaller questions, perhaps more intriguing. Why is X the unknown? What is The Story of O? Where did Irish rock band U2 get its name? Why does “mother” start with M? What’s Q’s source of pride? Which two letters came last to the alphabet? (Answer: J and V.) Why is Z called “zee” in the United States but “zed” in Britain and other Commonwealth countries? Which animal did A originally symbolize? (An ox: the A’s legs were horns, pointing upward, 3,000 years ago.)Every letter has its own chapter here. Typically, the chapter briefly explains the letter’s origin in ancient Near Eastern alphabets, including the Phoenician alphabet of 1000 b.c . (In this aspect, the book has benefited from a spectacular archaeological discovery made public in 1999 that placed the alphabet’s invention in Egypt, sometime around 2000 b.c .) Each chapter traces its letter’s history through ancient Greece and Rome, medieval England, and subsequent stages, and discusses the letter’s noteworthy roles in literature, traditional iconography, modern marketing and pop culture, and other categories.