A IS FOR OX Folio Society

Product Information

Incredibly, the people who invented the world's first alphabet may very well have been illiterate. Their inscriptions didn't follow the format of Egyptian writing, nor did they import any sounds or meanings from the earlier writing system as they likely would have done if they had learned hieroglyphs first. 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.

Writing was invented in two different places around the same time 5,500 years ago: Mesopotamia (the region of modern-day Iraq) and Egypt. It was later reinvented, independently, in China and Mesoamerica. 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.

Become a Member

The written word, so indispensable to modern society, is easy to take for granted, but writing was a late development in the history of human language. Our ancestors spoke and signed for hundreds of thousands — possibly tens of millions — of years before they devised a technology for representing language in art. 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. Hathor was one of the most important goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon. Among her many jurisdictions, she presided over the gemstone turquoise, which is why she was worshipped at this temple in the mining settlement of Serabit el-Khadim. David Roberts, 1839.(Public domain) 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.

This development paved the way for the Latin alphabet used today, which was created by the Romans based on the example of Greek.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-10-04 16:48:32 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA1113501 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor