A is for Ox: A Short History of the Alphabet

Product Information

The first half of the book gives a general overview of the development of alphabetic languages and lettering in general, focusing in on Europe, while the second half examines the (speculative, in some cases) history of the shape of each letter in the modern English alphabet. There are many illustrations and examples. The first half traces the development of the alphabet as a system of writing, representing (more-or-less) one symbol per sound. Specifically it covers the Latin alphabet as used in modern English, rather than, say, modern Greek or Cyrillic, from hieroglyphs though other forms such as cuneiform as they developed around the Mediterranean region, mainly for use in trade. Photographs and illustrations give a clear comparison of the different types of script.

Sometime around 750 BC, ancient Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians and added one last innovation: vowels. To do it, they simply took letters representing consonants that didn't exist in Greek and reassigned them to vowel sounds. Other hieroglyphs represented strings of sounds. A goose could stand for the word "goose" gb, the sound gb, or — followed by a glyph of a seated god — the name of the earth-god Geb. People from Canaan — modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan — often travelled to wealthy, neighbouring Egypt to seek their fortunes. Canaanites worked across Egypt in a variety of occupations and even made their way to a remote, windswept plateau in the Sinai desert called Serabit el-Khadim. The exhibition explores the connection between alphabets, books and artists – and its cases and cabinets overflow with the magic that this creates. The majority of the 150 works displayed, from medieval manuscripts to the AI-generated, are based on the Roman alphabet we use in the West. It starts at the beginning – once upon a time we made marks, ancient handprints that we can still see in caves from thousands of years ago. Then came pictograms, used for mundane administrative purposes to show ownership and represent classes of objects like barley, or sheep. But finding these to be too restrictive, signs to represent spoken sounds were invented. If you turn the letter A upside down, it looks something like an ox’s head– used to represent the initial sound for the Phoenician word for ox, ‘aleph’. B stands for ‘bēt’ , house in Phoenician. The Greeks changed the names from ‘aleph’ to ‘alpha’ and ‘bēt’ to ‘beta’ and hey presto the word alphabet was born.

Become a Member

This combination of direct representation, sound-substitution, and the occasional extra sign for clarification enabled hieroglyphs to represent the entire Egyptian language. Because each symbol could have several different meanings, though, hieroglyphs were a very challenging writing system to read, and it took years of dedicated study to master the system. Enter the Canaanites

urn:lcp:isforoxshorthist0000davi:epub:58de0463-dd63-48b0-aae5-d2f92cde7793 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isforoxshorthist0000davi Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t03036j2g Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781845671365 Fanfare is a 19th century term used to describe the ornate gold-toothed bindings of the period from 1570-1640 The Illuminated Alphabet G is part of An Illuminated Alphabet and is from a 15th century Italian prayer book These early scripts weren't alphabets, but they weren't simple picture-writing, either. All Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance, were images of objects and animals in the real world, but they didn't always represent those objects directly. For some reason, I always assumed that the alphabet more or less arrived as a set, stepping onto the stage of history as a group of 26. I never really gave the matter much thought, of course, or I would have realized that it could not possibly have happened that way, but it wasn't until I read this book that I learned how they came about. Some evolved out of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, some came from Phoenician, and others from early Semitic. This little book, after an introduction to the general lay of the historical (and prehistorical) land, takes us through the development of each one. Fenike'lilerde alef kelimesi ingilizcede ox kelimesi öküz anlamına gelmektedir. Ox kelimesi telaffuz olarak yazıya dökülmüş olsaydı ax şeklinde yazılacaktı. Yazarda buradan yola çıkarak sözün önemini vurgulamak için kitabına bu ismi vermiş. Kitap boyunca da çeşitli konularla birlikte sözelliğin önemi vurgulanmaya çalışılmış. Günümüz düşünüldüğünde verilen örnekler güncelliğini yitirmiş gibi görünebilir fakat form değiştirdiği aşikar. Yazarın yer yer düşüncelerinin çok uç noktalara vardığını düşünüyorum. Yazarın günümüz dünyasıyla ilgili düşüncelerini de okuma fırsatım olsaydı karşılaştırma adına çok güzel olabilirdi.This new type of writing that matched symbols to single sounds, instead of whole words or groups of sounds, was eventually named after the first two letters in the system: ʾalef-bayit, or alphabet. Five of our letters (F, U, V, W, and Y) all came from the same ancient semitic letter "waw", which meant "peg". Hence, "F is for peg". "A", on the other hand, came from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph which resembled the head of an ox. Hence, "A is for ox", which gives the book its name. Each letter's mini-chapter takes us through its development into Greek, Etruscan, Roman, medieval Carolingian, 15th century humanist, and eventually modern forms. I was also surprised to learn that several of our letters were not quite into their modern shape when the 1700's began, although the "f"-like form of the letter "s" reminded me that I already knew about at least one case like that. With a small number of symbols that can represent an unlimited number of words, alphabetic writing caught on around the world, and nearly all modern alphabets, from Arabic to Devanagari, Thai to Cyrillic, are descended from proto-Sinaitic. The twin crises of illiteracy and youth violence haunt our age; the failure of increasing numbers of young people to attain even minimal levels of literacy signals a catastrophe at the deepest levels of our culture.