'Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story' (Part 2)

 a book by Michael Rosen 

[Susannah Cahalan’s review-cum-sampling of Michael Rosen’s 2015 book ran in the New York Post of 8 February 2015 (https://nypost.com/2015/02/08/the-stories-behind-the-letters-of-our-alphabet/).  A collection of other published articles on Alphabetical was posted on this blog on 1 November.

[Cahalan’s article includes some (26) whimsical illustrations by Leah Tiscione, so I reserved it to post in its own.

[And here it is!]

“THE STORIES BEHIND THE LETTERS OFOUR ALPHABET”
by Susannah Cahalan

G’s that look like I’s, F’s that sound like “Waw,” and Q’s that look like monkeys — man, was our alphabet a mess.

That’s because many of our letters began as Egyptian hieroglyph symbols 4,000 years ago, with a hodgepodge of Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and Roman influences thrown in.

It would take centuries, and the dropping of more than a few letters along the way, before our alphabet was born. By year 1011, the order that we know today was largely in place — excluding “J,” “U,” “W” — but there were 29 letters, including the ampersand.

The alphabet we know today takes its modern 26-letter shape in the 16th century.

Author Michael Rosen devotes 400-plus pages to topsy-turvy history of our letters in his entertaining “Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells A Story” (Counterpoint [2015]), dedicating a chapter to each of the 26 letters. Here’s a brief look.

Illustrations by Leah Tiscione

A

Turn the “A” upside down and you’ll have a good sense of its original shape and meaning when it was introduced around 1800 BC. Resembling an animal’s head with antlers or horns, the original meaning of the letter in ancient Semitic was “ox.”

—————————

B

Flip “B” on its belly and you see a home — complete with a door, a room and a roof. Now you have some idea of why 4,000 years ago in Egypt, “B” (which sounded like our “h”) was a hieroglyph that meant “shelter.”

—————————

C 

The first “C” shape emerged in Phoenician and stood for a hunter’s stick or boomerang. The Greeks renamed it “gamma” and when they switched to reading from right to left to left to right in 500 BC, they flipped the shape. As the letter spread to Italy, it took on a more crescent shape, and the C as we know it today was born.

—————————

D

Around 800 BC, Phoenicians began to use a “dalet” — or a rough triangle facing left — which translated to door. The Greeks adopted it and renamed it “delta.” The Romans later added serifs and varied the thickness of the lines, softening one side into a semicircle.

—————————

E

 

The “E” of 3,800 years ago, pronounced “h” in Semitic, resembled a stick with two arms and a leg meant to signify a human form. The Greeks flipped it around in 700 BC and changed the sound to “ee.”

—————————

F 

The “F” of Phoenician times resembled a “Y” and sounded like “waw.” The ancient Greeks changed it to “digamma” and tipped the “Y” over to look like a drunk version of our “F.” The Romans regulated the writing of the letter centuries later, drawing the cross lines at firm geometric right angles, also giving it the “fff” sound.

—————————

G

Today’s “G” derives from the Greek letter “zeta,” a letter that looks like our “I” but was pronounced as a “zzz.” Around 250 BC, Romans altered the shape of this strange letter to look more like an “E” without the middle horizontal arm and then applied the “g” sound because they didn’t need the “z” sound in Latin. Over time, the crescent curved. 

—————————

H

Based on the Egyptian hieroglyph of a fence, it’s one of the most controversial letters in the English language. The breathy sound associated with the letter made academics argue that the letter was unnecessary — and many Latin and British scholars began dropping the “H” in 500 AD. Despite the controversy, “H” secured a spot in our alphabet. 

—————————

I

Around 1000 BC, the letter “I” was “yod,” meaning arm and hand. The Greeks adopted the letter as “iota” changing it to a vertical squiggle. By 700 BC, “I” became the straight line we use today. 

—————————

J 

“I” was a popular letter and often a stand-in for “j” sounds. The red-headed stepchild of our alphabet, “J” was only introduced in standardized spelling in the 15th century by the Spanish and only appeared consistently in print around 1640. 

—————————

K

What appeared to be an outstretched hand with one finger and a thumb visible appeared in Egyptian hieroglyphs around 2000 BC. The ancient Semites called it a “kaph,” meaning “palm of the hand,” which sounded like our “K.” Around 800 BC, the Greeks reversed it and took it on as their own “kappa.” 

—————————

L 

A hook-shaped letter, referred to as “El,” meaning “God” emerged in ancient Semitic inscriptions around 1800 BC. The Phoenicians straightened out the hook, reversed its position, and called it “lamed” (“lah-med”), meaning a cattle prod. Again the Greeks flipped the letter and renamed it “lamda.” The Romans straightened the bottom leg into a right angle. 

—————————

M 

Four-thousand years ago, Egyptians drew a vertical wavy line with five peaks to denote “water.” The Semites reduced the number of waves to three in 1800 BC; the Phoenicians continued the trend by removing one more wave. By 800 BC, the peaks became zigzags and the structure was made horizontal — our “M” in sound and appearance. 

—————————

N

Around the same time as “M,” “N” was emerging in Egypt with a small ripple on top and a larger one below. The word translated to “snake” or “cobra.” Ancient Semites gave it the sound “n,” meaning fish. By around 1000 BC, the sign contained just one wave and was named “nu” by the Greeks. 

—————————

O

“O” starts its life on Egyptian hieroglyphs (around the time as “M” and “N”) as “eye.” Semites called it “ayin” but with a guttural sound that sounds like “ch” (think Hebrew name Chaim). The Phoenicians reduced the eye to just the outline of a pupil, our “O.” 

—————————

P 

An inverted “V”-shape appears in early Semitic language 3,800 years ago, sounding like “pe” and meaning “mouth.” The Phoenicians adapted it to a diagonal hook shape at the top. The Romans closed the loop, and flipped it right, by 200 BC. 

—————————

Q 

Around 1000 BC, “Q,” which sounded like “qoph,” either meant ”monkey” or a “ball of wool.” According to Rosen, academics are still split. “Q” was then a circle with a vertical line through it. A “Q” that we’d recognize appeared in Roman inscriptions in 520 BC — it was also then that the “u after q” rule was invented.

—————————

R 

“R” first appears in ancient Semitic in the form of a profile of a human. Pronounced “resh” it translated to (no surprise) “head.” The Romans flipped it to face right and added a tail, “probably to distinguish it from ‘P’,” writes Rosen. 

—————————

S 

Early “S’s” appeared 3,600 years ago as a horizontal, curvy “W” shape, meant to denote an archer’s bow. Phoenicians added an angularity that looks more like our “W’s” At this stage it was known as “shin” meaning “tooth.” The early Greeks rotated it to the vertical and called it “sigma” with the “s” sound — and the Romans flipped it. 

—————————

T 

“T” in its modern, lower-case form, is found all over ancient Semitic inscriptions. By 1000 BC, the Phoenicians referred to it as “taw,” meaning “mark,” with our current “tee” sound. The Greeks named it “tau” and added a cross stroke at the top to differentiate it from “X.” 

—————————

U 

There’s a lot of confusion among letters “U,” “V” and “W.” According to Rosen, the Phoenicians began using a letter that looked like our “Y” around 1000 BC. They called it “waw” meaning “peg.” The Greeks adopted this in 700 BC and called it “upsilon.” 

—————————

V 

The Romans did not differentiate between “V” and “U” sounds — so Venus was actually pronounced “Weenus.” Even Shakespeare used “U’s” in place of “V’s” in his plays and poems. Capital “V’s” at the start of words started to appear in the 1400s. 

—————————

W 

During the Middle Ages, Charlemagne’s scribes placed two “U’s” side by side with a space between (as in literally “double U”), a new letter that sounded like a “V.” It wasn’t until around 1700 that W as a unique letter (not two “U’s” or two “V’s” placed side-by-side) emerged in printing presses across Europe. In French, this letter is still referred to as “double V.” 

—————————

X 

The ancient Greeks had a letter “ksi” which sounded like our “X.” Lower case “x’s” arrive via handwritten manuscripts of early medieval times and the Italian printers of the late 15th century. 

—————————

Y 

The original “Y” entered the alphabet as “upsilon” or our “U.” Around 100 AD Romans added “Y” to their alphabet, usually to denote something of Greek origins. 

—————————

Z 

“Z” might be the last letter of the alphabet, but it’s an elder. Three-thousand years ago the Phoenicians used a letter called “zayin,” meaning “ax.” It looked like an uppercase “I” with top and bottom serifs. The Greeks adopted it as “zeta” around 800 BC, when it evolved into our modern “Z” shape (and also led to the creation of our “G”) with the sound of “dz.” The letter fell into disuse for several centuries, until the Norman French arrived with words that used the “Z” sound. 

What didn’t make the cut

It took thousands of years to establish our 26-letter alphabet. As we formed our modern language, we lost a few letters, including:

Thorn: þ
This letter — which was pronounced “th” as in “them” and translated to “the” — took the place of “ye” in place names like “Ye Olde Fishe and Chippe Shoppe.” Over time, as Gothic script was introduced to Old English, “Y” and “thorn” looked too similar — and one had to go.

Wynn: ƿ
Latin didn’t offer a letter with the “wah” sound popular to English speakers. Wynn filled the void, but not for long. Over time, it became popular to stick two double-“U’s” side-by-side to create the sound of wynn.

Yogh: Ȝ
The yogh sound entered during the Middle English to represent the “ch” sound (think: Bach). It disappeared thanks to the French printing presses, which decided to replace yogh with “gh.”

Ash: ӕ
You’ve seen it in medieval (when spelled mediaeval) or in aeon and aether. This is an example of Roman ligature, meaning the tying together of two letters, in this case “a” and “e.” Though it was dropped as a letter from English, it remains one in Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic.

Ethel: œ
Another Latin ligature, this is the combination of “o” and “e” that can be seen in words like “foetus” and “subpoena.” Now in most cases, we replace this letter with an e.

Ampersand: &
Though Rosen does not include this in his book, because he says “pedantically and fussily” that it’s a symbol, not a letter. But the ampersand was once considered part of the alphabet. In fact, that’s how it got its name. The end of the alphabet was “x, y, z and, per se, and.” That is, “in itself, and,” meaning the symbol for “and.” That became am-per-sand.

[Susannah Cahalan is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and public speaker.  Her 2012 memoir, Brain on Fire (written with Souhel Najjar, a Syrian-American neurologist) has sold over a million copies and was made into a 2016 Netflix original movie.  Her second book, The Great Pretender (2019), made an array of “Best-Of” lists and was shortlisted for the 2020 Royal Society’s Science Book Award.  She’s written for the New York Times, the New York Post, Elle, The New Scientist, and BBC Focus (later BBC Science Focus), as well as academic journals The Lancet and Biological Psychiatry.

[I had intended to insert samples of the characters and proto-letters to which Rosen and Cahalan referred in the book and article, but while some of the figures were simply special characters that Word (which is what I create my initial copy with) can print—and most likely that Blogger can reproduce—many others were “images,” or tiny pictures which don’t transfer so easily and with which I feared I’d have trouble on Blogger.  So, unhappily, I dropped the idea.

[I can only add that most of the alphabets, proto-alphabets, and writing systems on which Rosen based his analysis are available on the ’Net and readers can find them (many are reproduced in various entries on Wikipedia) and see to what Rosen and Cahalan are referring in their comparisons.  That’s a more time-consuming and effortful chore than a comparison would have been if I’d been able to include the samples in the post as I wished, but circumstances have prevented that.  I can but apologize to ROTters.]