Alphabets occupy a strange place in our consciousness of language. They are the bottom of the syntactic totem pole, lower even than words, let alone phrases, sentences, epistolary novels. Letters are the humble bricks we use to build the great cathedral, so to speak.
And yet they have their own fascination. I was quite young when I first realized that each letter of the alphabet has its own story to tell. I was perhaps seven years old, reading through the old “World Book Encyclopedia”, when I discovered that each alphabetically ordered volume began with the history of its eponymous letter.
For example, the lower case “a” derives from a pictogram of the head of an ox (the ancient Semitic word for ox was “aleph”). Over the course of several thousand years the pictogram was gradually simplified and stylized, like so:
Each letter of the alphabet has a similar but different story to tell. When I was a child, I loved the idea that in each word of the English language there are alternate tales, counter narratives, hidden histories, waiting to burst through the ostensible text.
I still do.
And the letter Waw (or ‘Vav’ in modern, inaccurate parlance) means literally ‘pole,’ and looked like a stylized one in the paleo-Hebrew you are mentioning, and still does. I had a great big smile on my face the day I learned that one (years after leaving yeshiva…)
-e
Do you know where the alphabet might be found in full? This is very cool!
I read a very interesting book on the subject by David Sacks called _Letter Perfect_. I learned how the alphabet got the order it did (why are most of the rarely used letters at the end? What’s the deal with Q?) and about the earliest known alphabetic writing (Semitic soldiers in Egypt.)
The alphabet is a kind of fossil, containing clues to its own history.
http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Perfect-Marvelous-History-Alphabet/dp/0767911733/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244115415&sr=8-1
Doug, thanks for the link.
Have you read The Phantom Tollbooth? It’s not about the evolution of letters, but it is about the plastic element to words. An amazing book.