LANGUAGE
Living letters
|
`The book is a cultural history of the English alphabet from the earliest inscriptions to modern usage, told in an informal, chatty and conversational style.'
|
Human society, the world, and the whole mankind is to be found in the alphabet.
Victor Hugo
DAVID SACKS, a Canadian freelancer and author of Encyclopaedia of the Ancient Greek World, wrote a series of weekly columns (in 26 parts) for the newspaper Ottawa Citizen, which have formed the basis for the charming book The Alphabet. The book is a cultural history of the English alphabet from the earliest inscriptions to modern usage, told in an informal, chatty and conversational style. Who would not be interested in letters ("those miraculous little shapes" as the author calls them), the gateway to language and thence to knowledge? Sacks devotes a chapter to each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, studying and exploring how the letters attained their visually mystifying shape, how they acquired the sound: in other words, how they evolved historically over a long period of time.
The evolution of letters
The 42-page introduction unfolds a most fascinating story of the evolution of the letters. The alphabet was invented — so it is believed by archaeological experts — around 2000 BC in Egypt. In the prehistoric times, use of hieroglyphics served the purpose. The English alphabet derives its ancestry from the Phoenician script. The Phoenicians were Semites. They were the most enterprising of traders, who spread their wares, and their language into the bargain, far and wide among the East European countries. Language disseminated along with their trade. Now more than 80 per cent of the people in the world use one kind of an alphabet or the other. In some countries like China, agreed symbols, called logograms are employed for communication purposes. The English alphabet, or more familiarly the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used one in the world — in more than 100 languages. Mass literacy is possible since the alphabet is easy to learn. "An alphabet enjoys one huge advantage over any other writing system. It needs fewer symbols. No other system can get away with so few" (p.5).
Each of the 26 letters of the English alphabet has captivating facts and tales associated with it. Sacks recaptures them for us. A comes third in the frequency list of the letters, the first being E and the second T. Of all the letters, this scarlet letter has the richest symbolic value attached to it. In his handbook The English Grammar, published posthumously in 1640, Ben Jonson, the English playwright, shows his disregard for C when he says, "a letter which our fore-fathers might very well have spared in our tongue." In English spelling E is ubiquitous. Called by the Roman orator Cicero "the unsweetest" sound in Latin, "F is forever saddled with an obscenity." By the by, George Bernard Shaw, the 1925 Nobel laureate, left on his death in 1950 prize money for improving English spelling by introducing one letter for one sound: making the English spelling phonetic. H always has had to face the danger of fading out of words.
The Roman alphabet had initially only 23 letters. J, V and W came to be added at later points of time. Though J arrived in 1640, it took a full 200 years for it to be accepted in writing. Samuel Johnson's The Dictionary of the English Language (1755) had 24 letters in which J and V were not included. He excludes these two letters from his head-letter list. Noah Webster in his dictionary of 1828, which was the earliest attempt in forging distinctly the American language, helped J and V in finding a respectable place for themselves. They are, therefore, the youngest letters.
Repetitive structure
In most languages of the world, M introduces baby talk. O always conveys emotion as no other letter ever could and Shakespeare appears to be much too fond of it ("O that this too too solid flesh would melt" in Hamlet's famous soliloquy, for example). Ben Jonson refers to R as "the dog's letter" and S as "the serpent's letter". As the initial letter, S ranks first. The letter X, which originally stood for a promise to stick to an agreement, has now come to mean the kiss. Z was always thought to be a superfluous, unnecessary letter.
The book does not deal with the pronunciation aspect of the letters. English being the most unphonetic language, Sacks could not handle this aspect perhaps. Diphthongs and triphthongs do not come into the picture at all. The structure of the book gets repetitive by treating letter by letter. There is no table of contents in this useful book. One gets a fund of information in the discussion of the special properties and stories about each of the letters (including the typeface) drawn from literature, sports, fine arts, iconography, calligraphy, popular myths, trivia, advertising titbits, linguistics and so on and so on. This book, not scholarly by any manner of means, takes us on a cultural excursion, as it were. Sacks says his goal is to reach and teach a wide readership. And that, precisely, is what he does in this entertaining and engaging work.
M.S. NAGARAJAN
The Alphabet, David Sacks, Hutchinson, 2003, p. 395, £7.95.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
