{"id":1334,"date":"2009-06-03T22:14:23","date_gmt":"2009-06-04T03:14:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=1334"},"modified":"2009-06-03T22:18:30","modified_gmt":"2009-06-04T03:18:30","slug":"alphabets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=1334","title":{"rendered":"Alphabets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;World Book Encyclopedia&#8221;, when I discovered that each alphabetically ordered volume began with the history of its eponymous letter.<\/p>\n<p>For example, the lower case &#8220;a&#8221; derives from a pictogram of the head of an ox (the ancient Semitic word for ox was <i>&#8220;aleph&#8221;<\/i>).  Over the course of several thousand years the pictogram was gradually simplified and stylized, like so:<\/p>\n<p><center><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/aleph.jpg\"><br \/>\n<\/center><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I still do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=1334\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Alphabets&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1334"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1340,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions\/1340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}