A is for Ox: A Short History of the Alphabet

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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. 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

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. And so were its imaginative responses. While some of the exhibits come with a message like David McLiman’s beautiful ‘Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet’ (New York 2006) which highlights the animals on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature; and the niche ‘Rescuing Q’ (2003), Suzanne Moore’s attempt to free the letter from its association with the right wing conspiracy theorists at QAnon to its rightful place at the heart of free thinking questions; most are playful representations that take inspiration from the artists’ own imagination and creative flair. There are miniature alphabet books and pop ups, concertina books, cloth books, and sculptural books, there are letters seen in the shapes of landscapes and letters made from human bodies, animated letters, floral letters, illuminated letters filled with comical characters and large numbers of Amazing Animal Alphabets. Over 3,500 years ago, a few of them seem to have had the idea to adapt the writing system to their own language, and the way they repurposed hieroglyphs was inspired. 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.A drawing of a reed could mean "reed," but, since the Egyptian word for reed was ỉ, it could also stand for the sound ỉ in other words. The writing system operated on the same principle as a rebus puzzle, in which you might use a picture of a bumblebee as a substitute for the verb "be" because they sound the same. 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.

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) Over time, what had started out as drawings of animals, objects, and tiny people was simplified into abstract lines that could be jotted down easily. The waves of the ocean became the crests of the letter M, the slithering body of a snake resolved into the twisting letter N, and the bend of an elbow was preserved only as the curve of the letter J. Next, they took the hieroglyph that looked like a house, which in Canaanite was called bayit, and designated it as the sound b. They continued until they had 27 letters — enough to represent all the consonants in their language.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. 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. 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 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.

Some letters were rotated, so that today the ox horns of the letter A point downward instead of upward and the hands of a man held up in praise reach sideways as the arms of the letter E. urn:lcp:isforoxviolencee00sand_0:epub:238dd880-1991-4490-8774-ef261503d672 Extramarc University of Michigan Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isforoxviolencee00sand_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3516gj17 Invoice 11 Isbn 9780679417118 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. 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. So here in memory of the all those games I played with my dad is my own curated ABC – some images from the exhibition, and other favourites from my own collection. I hope you enjoy it.

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Canaanite miners used their new alphabet to write on mine walls and to inscribe gifts to Hathor. The text on this statuette, running from upper left to lower right, seems to read 'mt l bʿlt,' meaning 'gift for the lady.' From Althebräische Inschriften vom Sinai by Hubert Grimme, 1923. (Public domain) This development paved the way for the Latin alphabet used today, which was created by the Romans based on the example of Greek.

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 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. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9242 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000386 Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-19 06:02:35 Associated-names Brown, Iain Gordon, former owner Boxid IA40174703 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierThe 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. 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. 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.