The Greatest Invention Since
Beer
by
Howard Richler
If you ask people to name the most consequential
inventions of world history, you’ll likely hear a list that
includes the telephone, the computer, the wheel and among some of my
rowdy crowd – beer. In fact, the creation of the alphabet should
be on this list if we measure the extent of its use in modern daily
life. (I concede that in terms of longevity it pales in comparison to
the wheel's inception in 3500 B.C. and to beer's in 6000 B.C.)
While it is widely known that the word alphabet is an
amalgam of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and
beta, not as well known is the Greeks copying the Phoenicians’
Semitic letters and using them to write their own language.
Sometime before 1000 B.C., the Phoenicians began writing their
language in a 22-letter alphabet. They didn’t invent the alphabet
ex nihilo, but inherited their 22-consonant alphabet from a prior
Semitic tradition that was developed around 1700 B.C. in Canaan and
Phoenicia. In fact, 19 of the letters of the alphabet can be traced
back in their shapes, sequence and sounds to their Phoenician
counterparts. The innovation of the Greeks was the invention of the
vowels by reassigning certain Phoenician letters to symbolize vowel
sounds. Around 700 B.C., the Etruscans of Italy copied the Greek
letters, from which derived the letters of the ancient Roman
alphabet, and ultimately all western alphabets. Most alphabets
contain 20-30 symbols, but the relative complexity of the sound
system leads to alphabets of varying size. The smallest alphabet is
Rotokas, used in the Solomon Islands, with 11 letters while the
largest is the Khmer of Asia, with 74 letters. In
any case all modern alphabets have far fewer characters than the
approximately 1000 characters (based on the 214 traditional root
characters) that the young Chinese student must learn or the
hundreds of hieroglyphics that the ancient Egyptian student had to
memorize.
This is not to imply that knowledge of the alphabet has
always been widespread. In a medieval precursor to Sesame Street,
Giovanni de Genoa, writes in Catholicon
in 1286: “You must proceed everywhere
according to the alphabet. So, according to this order you will
easily be able to find the spelling of any word here included. For
example, I intend to discuss amo
before bibo. I will
discuss amo before
bibo because
a is the first letter of amo
and b is the first
letter of bibo and
a is before b in
the alphabet.”
Knowledge of the alphabet
among adults was still restricted in Elizabethan England. In the
first English dictionary published in 1604, Robert Cawdrey cautions
in Table Alphabeticall
that “to profit by this Table then thou must learne the Alphabet,
to wit, the order of the letters as they stand..as neere the
beginning, about the middest, and toward the end.”
Have you ever wondered why so many words different
languages words for “mother” have an “m” sound to start the
word ? We have Basque ama,
Finnish emo, Hebrew
ema, Hindi maa,
Serbian majka, Malay
emak, German mutter,
Mandarin and Quechua ma
and Vietnamese me, to
name but a few. This is probably due to the letter M belonging to
the category of consonants known as labials, from the Latin word for
“lip.” This sound is formed at the lips and it does not require
any deft use of the tongue, and no need of teeth. Also, it is simple
enough to be made by an infant as young as three or four months.
While this baby articulation is just for play, it is interpreted
universally as an attempt by the infant to address the mother.
Other
alphabet musings may include: Why is an O round? Its distinctive
shape goes back to ancient Egypt where its painted image was a human
eye. This was later adopted by Semitic people calling it ayin.
“eye” in their languages. Why does X symbolize an unknown
quantity? This process began when Réné
Descartes wrote his treatise La Géométrie
in 1637. While he assigned the letters X, Y and Z to symbolize any
three unknowns in a geometric equation, he favoured X and when
other mathematicians started to use the letter X to designate an
unknown varaible, this practice became entrenched.
Of
course, any discussion of the letters of the alphabet should end with
a discussion of why we say “zed” in Canada, Britain and other
Commonwealth countries whereas the Americans say “zee.” The
Romans called this letter zeta and
it has been passed into modern Italian. Although “zed” became the
official designation in England, other variants such as “zad,
“izzard,” and “zee” crop up in British writings into the 19th
century. Both “zee” and “zed” were exported to American with
“zee” dominating in the North and “zed” in the South. The
matter was fairly decided when New Englander Daniel Webster wrote his
American Dictionary of the English Language
in 1828. Webster ordained that henceforth the letter was to be
pronounced “zee.”
Howard's book from
Happy to Homosexual and other mysterious semantic shifts will
be published in March 2013.
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