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Product Details

* Hardcover: 416 pages
* Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (August 19, 2003)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0767911725
* ISBN-13: 978-0767911726
* Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
* Shipping Weight: 1.3 poundsEditorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Following up on his Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World, Sacks here delves into the origins of the Roman alphabet. Its beginnings appear to lie with Semitic-speaking mercenaries in Egypt, who borrowed from their overlords’ hieroglyphics to create a system of sound-representing signs, many of which survive today in the Hebrew alphabet. Along the way, the Indo-European Greek language borrowed the Semitic alphabet of the Phoenicians, which when transmuted by the Romans gave us 24 of our 26 modern English letters. The bulk of the book offers beautifully illustrated capsule biographies of all 26, including J and V, which did not enter regular usage until the 17th century and were not standardized until the 19th. Beyond initial “A”, the Sacks covers the first letters of several of the words for God; M, which begins an extraordinary number of the words for “Mother”; and “O,” which requires the most shaping by the lips. There are essays on lexicographers (Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, among others), on printing, and on how the letter X came to stand for the unknown in mathematics because Descartes’s printer was running out of Ys and Zs to print all of the mathematician’s equations. Such anecdotes, and the care evinced throughout, make this a demanding gem of popular linguistic history, and any book that includes a chapter called “The Birth of `V’ness” certainly avoids taking itself too seriously.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
From aleph (ancient forerunner of our own a), discovered carved in Egyptian stone as part of the oldest known alphabetic inscription, all the way to the repeated Zs that help give the rock group ZZ Top its name, journalist Sacks unfolds the romance and magic of the English alphabet. Although Sacks writes for nonspecialists, he distills an impressive range of scholarship into his examination of the alphabet’s complex cultural history. Readers learn about the astonishing recent archaeological discoveries in central Egypt that have overturned previous theories locating the alphabet’s origins in ancient Canaan. We likewise learn about the surprising linguistic flexibility that allowed a single alphabet to jump language barriers around the world, thus giving most of the globe’s literate populations recognizably related scripts. This is a delightfully entertaining and engrossing tale of how the score of Roman letters that arrived in England in the seventh century eventually gave us everything from the poetry of William Shakespeare to the official grades used by meat inspectors to evaluate chicken. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Scrabble players take delight. Linguists and lovers of the phonetic stand up and cheer. In this original and delightful book the letters take on their own personalities as author David Sacks reveals their origins and their transitions from ancient tongues into modern English.

Combining classic erudition (Sacks is the author of The Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World) with contemporary references and allusions–such as “p” being for “Puff Daddy” and “w” for President George W. (Dubya) Bush–David Sacks brings the alphabet to life and reveals its long and twisted history.

The sounds and shapes of the letters are explored in minute detail. We can trance the evolution of the letter “a” from its Phoenician origins as the symbol for an ox to its use by Hebrews as “aleph” to its incorporation by the Greeks as “alpha,” and know that A was always first. We can see how the letter “e” (the most frequently used letter in the English language) was once shaped like a stick figure man in Egypt around 1800 B.C. in a long dead Semitic language, and how it became the logo for Enron (tilted up so that it supposedly symbolized “ascent and power”). Sacks reveals that one such Enron sculpture sold for forty-four thousand dollars at an auction in September 2002.

Why does X stand for the unknown and not Z? Sacks has the answer. How did G become C when the Greeks had gamma as the third letter of their alphabet? Indeed why do we have an alphabet at all? Why do we have alphabetic writing instead of the nonalphabetic kind as used by the Chinese and others? Sacks answers these questions and hundreds of others. He is obviously a man who takes delight in esoteric detail and in learning for the sake of learning, but he writes like a popular artist, not like a pedant. He takes delight in contrasting the old with the new.

The way the book is structured invites us in without preliminary. There is no table of contents, but there is an index. The “chapters” are not numbered. (They are lettered, of course!) The beginning word of each chapter is the same as the focus of its subject matter. Thus the chapter on A begins, “Associated with beginnings, fundamentals, and superiority,” while the next chapter has “Below the best or second in sequence.”

A form of each letter in some specialized or historic typeface and/or some information about it graces the offsetting page of chapter beginnings. An emblem from the Department of Agriculture for “Grade A” is one example; an embedded M in an illustration from the Mad-Hatter’s party in Alice in Wonderland is another; and three zees penned by American type designer Frederic W. Goudy is still another. Each letter has a personality tag: there is the “Dependable D,” the “Gorge-ous G,” the “Exzotic Z,” etc.

There is a Preface and an introductory chapter entitled, “Little Letters, Big Idea.” The morphological history of each letter is illustrated showing the progression in many cases from the Egyptian hieroglyph to the Phoenician letter and then through the Hebrew, Greek and Roman adaptations and on into English. It was the letter N not the letter S that was originally an Egyptian snake, although Ben Johnson called S, “the serpent’s letter,” and it is often depicted as such. And it is M that comes from the hieroglyph for water, not, as one might think, W.

There are sidebar mini-essays and longer ones set over gray shading, each one focusing on some aspect of letters and their history, such as “The Alphabet in the Middle Ages,” or “The Creation of American Spelling.” Sacks does not neglect the sounds of letters and how they have been pronounced over the ages. In so far as possible he gives that history as well. He even explains why some letters are pronounced with an initial vowel sound, S and F, for example; and how others are pronounced with a trailing vowel sound, such as, B and C.

This is a highly visual book written in an infectious style that makes the alphabet anything but boring. It is a beautiful book and one to treasure. I am much impressed.