Rating: 
Summary: Superb
Review: Outstanding book with a gripping mix of serious scholarship and light humor. A can't-put-down book that will appeal to linguists, historians, and curious readers of all types. Five stars all the way!
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, delightful, and highly informative
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, delightful, and highly informative
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The Romance of the Written Word
Review: Ten thousand or more years ago, the species Homo Sapiens appeared on terra firma, as a consequence of biological selection and evolution. The small wild bands of uncouth individuals of the species, roaming and scouring the wilderness for their survival, rapidly started to evolve social structures. This social evolution continues and has already brought us internet connectivity! In the hoary past, Homo Sapiens discovered in themselves an ability to communicate effectively. The process perhaps started with the recognition that they could produce and reproduce distinctive sounds and sound patterns at will; and, use these to communicate meaningfully and effectively. For millennia, the transmission of data, information and knowledge in diverse human societies continued through oral traditions. Gradually, logos, i.e., visual symbols, started getting assigned to individual (oral) sounds/sound patterns and, many diverse scripts evolved. The process continues. Today, internet is helping transcend both the oral, as well as the written traditions of communication. The consequences of each stage of evolution, namely, formal oral communication, formal written communication and, (informal !) internet communication have been profound. Societal structures, aspirations and achievements have hinged upon these evolutions and revolutions in our communication methods. The eventual consequences of the still evolving internet revolution are yet moot. Dr. Sacks' compendium of the history of scripts is essentially confined to the scripts that emerged in the present Middle East. It is instructive to note here that the collective name for the letters of the predominant western sounds is the alphabet. The word 'alphabet' is clearly coined by stringing together the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. In contrast, the corresponding word in the Indian languages is 'varnamala', meaning a garland of colours. The implication is that each letter of the alphabet possesses a distinctive shade of colour (and, power). The various schools of the Saivite and the Indian/Tibetan Buddhist tantrik traditions have extensively explored and exploited the potencies of these concepts. Our predominant script is called "Devnagri" - the divine vehicle of civilized conduct. The letters of our alphabet are called "akshar" - the immutable, the indestructible. The origin of the Devnagri script could, indeed, be divine, meaning thereby that the shapes of the individual letters are not arbitrarily or whimsically contrived but, possess an inherent significance. The renowned German Indologist, Maxmuller, in the eighteenth century, carried out experiments using hollow clay models of the various letters of the Devnagri alphabet. He was pleasantly surprised by the results; when air was blown into the hollow models of the various letters, they emitted corresponding sounds ! Recently, American experimenters have obtained similar results - when different Devnagri alphabetic sounds were pronounced into a pipe, the emanating sound waves traced the shapes of the corresponding letters in the dust scattered near the pipe exit !
Rating:
Summary: Language Visible
Review: This book was a fantastic survey of the history and origins of the alphabet. It covered the origins and development of the roman alphabet letter by letter, and was an engagingly fresh and accessible read with great humour and an introductory level of detail. I would highly recommend this book for any reader who has a casual interest in language history, linguistic development, grammar, and communications. My only reservation about this book is that it provoked in me a burning desire to find out more about the great vowel shift and the evolution of upper and lower case lettering, and my small obsession is driving the librarians in my area nuts trying to satisfy my interests. A wonderful read. I was hooked.
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