Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z by David Sacks

From the Publisher

David Sacks has embarked on a fun, lively, and learned excursion into the alphabet–and into cultural history–in Letter Perfect. Clearly explaining the letters as symbols of precise sounds of speech, the book begins with the earliest known alphabetic inscriptions (circa 1800 b.c.), recently discovered by archaeologists in Egypt, and traces the history of our alphabet through the ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans and up through medieval Europe to the present day. But the heart of the book is the twenty-six fact-filled “biographies” of letters A through Z, each one identifying the letter’s particular significance for modern readers, tracing its development from ancient forms, and discussing its noteworthy role in literature and other media. We learn, for example, why letter X may have a sinister and sexual aura, how B came to signify second best, why the word mother in many languages starts with M. Combining facts both odd and essential, Letter Perfect is cultural history at its most accessible and enjoyable.

The New York Times

Sacks's quirky style makes the book as fun to read as it is enlightening … Sacks's obsession with language is contagious, and I can imagine few readers whose lives would not be enriched by what he calls his ''voyage of discovery.'' — Julie Walton Shaver

Publishers Weekly

Following up on his Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World, Sacks here delves into the origins of the Roman alphabet. Its beginnings appear to lie with Semitic-speaking mercenaries in Egypt, who borrowed from their overlords' hieroglyphics to create a system of sound-representing signs, many of which survive today in the Hebrew alphabet. Along the way, the Indo-European Greek language borrowed the Semitic alphabet of the Phoenicians, which when transmuted by the Romans gave us 24 of our 26 modern English letters. The bulk of the book offers beautifully illustrated capsule biographies of all 26, including J and V, which did not enter regular usage until the 17th century and were not standardized until the 19th. Beyond initial "A", the Sacks covers the first letters of several of the words for God; M, which begins an extraordinary number of the words for "Mother"; and "O," which requires the most shaping by the lips. There are essays on lexicographers (Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, among others), on printing, and on how the letter X came to stand for the unknown in mathematics because Descartes's printer was running out of Ys and Zs to print all of the mathematician's equations. Such anecdotes, and the care evinced throughout, make this a demanding gem of popular linguistic history, and any book that includes a chapter called "The Birth of `V'ness" certainly avoids taking itself too seriously. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Joining the sizable field of popular cultural histories of the Roman alphabet published in the last ten years (e.g., Johanna Drucker's The Alphabetic Labyrinth and John Man's Alpha Beta), this contribution by Sacks (The Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World) is distinguished by its remarkably long and broad view of the topic and its omnivorous sense of fun. Sacks starts with a clear and appealing discussion of the genealogy of the letters we use every day, from the earliest known alphabet inscriptions found recently in Egypt through the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and Romans up to the present. He then devotes a chapter to each letter, discussing its development from ancient forms, attempting to identify and document its unique significance, and collecting a dazzlingly diverse array of facts that include its role in literature, media, and culture. From discussions of the letter A's role in meat grading, bond rating, student ranking, and punishment for adultery to Z's exotic associations with Zorro, Sacks makes the history of the alphabet a joy to read. Recommended for most libraries.-Paul D'Alessandro, Portland P.L., ME Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An always clever-but rarely too clever-educational and entertaining history of the alphabet. Canadian journalist Sacks became fascinated with the history and use of written language while researching The Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World. Although he educated himself by delving into scholarly research on alphabets, he decided to build this work around an approachable gimmick for a lay audience. After a sweeping 40-page introduction to the origins and evolution of written language, Sacks devotes a chapter to each of the 26 letters used in the English language, which is based on the Roman alphabet. He characterizes each of the letters as extremely important or less important in daily usage, surmises how that degree of importance arose, explains whether the connotations of each letter are mostly positive or mostly negative, and sprinkles in various tidbits, ranging from surprising to downright edifying. The letter A, which, of course, comes first, frequently carries the connotation of "best," as in a school grade of A or a Grade-A food product, but sometimes the connotation is negative, as with the scarlet letter A. The Roman alphabet is not alone in starting with A; most alphabets open with it or with its near equivalent. (Sacks explains writing systems that are not alphabetical, such as Chinese and Japanese, but does not dwell on them.) A, though, is not the most frequently written letter; E and T carry that distinction, in large part because they both appear in the oft-used word "the." Skipping to the last letter, Sacks calls Z a consonant that "can seem racy or elusive or just plain disadvantaged." The potential indignity of being the alphabet's caboose is compounded by one realweakness-Z is, on average, the least-used letter in printed English." But it sure can increase a Scrabble score when used skillfully. A refreshing combination of erudition and breeziness. Agent: Lisa Bankoff/ICM

Product Details

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

Preface

This book attempts a voyage of discovery among the letters of the alphabet. Like islands of an archipelago, the 26 letters will be visited and explored, one at a time. Each island’s geography and local lore will be examined briefly, also its relationship to other islands in the navigational stream. Some islands may prove more lush or lofty than others. But any one will yield substantial mental nourishment to visitors, along with glorious vistas onto language, literature, and history of the past 4,000 years.

Where do our letters come from? How did they get their shapes, their assigned sounds, their sequence, immortalized in our “Alphabet Song”? Why do we use “Roman” letters for English–also for Spanish, Czech, Turkish, Swahili, Vietnamese, and many others–while some languages (Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hindi, etc.) use different types of letters? What is a letter, exactly? What’s an alphabet? These are among questions to be answered with authority and zest.

And smaller questions, perhaps more intriguing. Why is X the unknown? What is The Story of O? Where did Irish rock band U2 get its name? Why does “mother” start with M? What’s Q’s source of pride? Which two letters came last to the alphabet? (Answer: J and V.) Why is Z called “zee” in the United States but “zed” in Britain and other Commonwealth countries? Which animal did A originally symbolize? (An ox: the A’s legs were horns, pointing upward, 3,000 years ago.)

Every letter has its own chapter here. Typically, the chapter briefly explains the letter’s origin in ancient NearEastern alphabets, including the Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B.C. (In this aspect, the book has benefited from a spectacular archaeological discovery made public in A.D. 1999 that placed the alphabet’s invention in Egypt, sometime around 2000 B.C.) Each chapter traces its letter’s history through ancient Greece and Rome, medieval England, and subsequent stages, and discusses the letter’s noteworthy roles in literature, traditional iconography, modern marketing and pop culture, and other categories. V for Victory. Presidential “Dubya” (W). Xbox, X-Files, X-Men.

Each chapter tries, where possible, to find the letter’s single chief significance for modern readers–its “personality,” as expressed through speech or visual media. For instance, letter A means quality. B is forever second best. C is inconsistent in sound: Its troubles with commitment stem from an unstable childhood. O’s shape can be highly inviting. S is the letter of the serpent, whether for evil or for nature. N needs your nose for pronunciation. And H, phonetically, barely qualifies as a letter at all.

Beyond the letters themselves, this book is partly about languages: English first of all, but also Latin, Greek, ancient Semitic tongues (of which Hebrew is the closest modern equivalent), medieval and modern French and other Romance tongues, and German, all relevant to the story of our 26 letters. While I don’t speak every one of those languages, I have background in a few and have strived for accuracy in research.

The book uses language topics as the key to explaining the alphabet. Letters are images of language: They were invented, around 2000 B.C., to show tiny sounds of speech. Letters, when combined correctly, re-create the sounds of words (whether in English, ancient Greek, Arabic, Russian, etc.). If you take the spoken tongue as your starting point–any language outside of a test tube was spoken long before it began to be written–and you picture an alphabet being fitted to the language, like clothing, amid adjustments, then the history and meaning of the letters become suddenly clearer.

Some books on the alphabet have viewed the letters primarily as items of visual design. Visual, indeed handsome, they surely are. But that approach makes it tough to explain how a letter got its sound(s), especially regarding irregularities. Why does C go soft in pronunciation before E, I, or Y? Why does J mean the sound “j” in English but “h” in Spanish and “y” in German? Such questions are easier to answer if you begin with the language sounds, not the written symbols.

Yet this is no textbook. It does not deal exhaustively with the subject, and I hope it is never boring. Facts are pursued with an eye toward what is enlightening, surprising, fun. The aim is to inform and entertain. I hope to convey how fascinating these 26 little shapes can be, how they contain within themselves thousands of years of culture and history.


The basis for this book was a 26-part weekly series that I wrote about the letters of the alphabet for the Ottawa Citizen newspaper (Ottawa, Ontario). The series covered one letter per week, from January to July 2000.

But the first inspiration dates to 1993, when I was at work on my one previous book, the Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World (Facts On File, 1995). Facing a huge assignment beyond my rudimentary knowledge, I was anxiously researching the ancient Greeks.

One topic was the Greek alphabet, including its origin, sometime around 800 B.C. I had learned in college that the Greeks, with no writing of their own at the time, acquired their alphabet by copying it from the Phoenicians (a Semitic people famed as seafarers, based in what is now Lebanon). I could have written those words on an exam–“the Greeks took their alphabet from the Phoenicians”–without understanding what that meant. I had always imagined some imitation by analogy: that the Greeks, impressed by the Phoenician letters, had gone off and invented two dozen letters of their own, to be Greek letters.

But my studies of 1993 taught me differently. The Greeks had copied more literally than that. (Pardon the pun.) The Greeks didn’t copy just the idea of the Phoenician alphabet; they actually copied the Phoenician letters and started using them to write Greek.

Does it sound trivial? At the time, the realization stunned me. The ancient languages of Greek and Phoenician were as different as English and Arabic. Greek was (and is) a language of the Indo-European family; its modern relatives include English, German, Spanish, and Russian. The Phoenician tongue, now vanished, belonged to a separate language group, Semitic, whose major modern representative is Arabic, although Phoenician itself was probably closer to Hebrew. Semitic and Indo-European languages do not sound at all alike; their vocabularies are unrelated. And yet . . .

The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters; the earliest working Greek alphabet, probably 26. The first 22 letters of the Greek list were nearly identical to the Phoenician in sequence, shapes, names, and, usually, sounds (with the exception of five vowel letters, which the Greeks had invented by reassigning certain Phoenician letters to symbolize vowel sounds). In later centuries the Greeks would adjust their alphabet away from the Phoenician model. But around 800 B.C., it seems the Greeks picked up Phoenician letters, made some changes and additions, and began writing.

What if a bunch of illiterate Anglo-Saxons in A.D. 600 had gotten their hands on the Arabic alphabet and started using it to write Old English? Could they have done so? I wondered. Wasn’t that basically what the Greeks did?

There must, I thought, back in 1993, be more to these letters than I understood. How could Phoenician letters be so adaptable? Logically, wouldn’t most of them be unusable for Greek, since the two languages were so different?

Eventually I moved on from the ancient Greece book, got a day job, and turned to a new mental interest: the history of the alphabet. I had never studied it before, but felt compelled to do so now. There seemed something fundamental here that I had missed in my education.

What I found was that alphabets have routinely jumped from language to language, across all sorts of language barriers, down through history, thanks to the adaptability of letters generally. Our Roman alphabet in English is the product of four such leaps: After being copied from Phoenician letters, the Greek letters were copied, in turn, by a different people, the Etruscans of Italy (around 700 B.C.). Etruscan was a tongue as different from Greek as Greek was from Phoenician, yet the letters adapted easily: They now became Etruscan letters, for showing Etruscan speech. Then the Etruscan letters were copied by other Italian peoples, including the Romans, whose language, Latin, was totally unlike Etruscan. Again the letters had made the jump. As Rome conquered Italy and lands beyond, the Roman alphabet became the writing of Roman Europe. Surviving the empire’s collapse (around A.D. 500), Roman letters were fitted to newer tongues, including primitive English (around A.D. 600). Today those letters have grown up to become our own.

English is by no means the only example. Roman letters today convey the sounds of other tongues that Cicero never heard of: Polish, Zulu, Azerbaijani, Indonesian, Navajo–and about 100 more, all in daily use. The Cyrillic alphabet works equally well for Bulgarian and Mongolian as for Russian. Arabic letters, devised originally to show the Arabic language, provide writing in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and other places where people don’t speak Arabic. Behind such facts lies the letters’ ability to leap across languages.

The more I dug into this, the more important it seemed. I was finally getting the idea that the letters have a kind of genius–a genius for showing the sounds of speech. Because they denote the smallest particles of sound (“t,” “p,” “m,” “u”), letters in quantity are beautifully flexible and precise. They can be arranged in endless combinations, as necessary, to capture sounds of words. This allows the letters to be fitted from one language to another: You could easily write English phonetically, in the letters of Hebrew or Cyrillic. (Bored office workers at computers do it idly.)

“People don’t understand this concept,” I recall thinking. “This isn’t being taught at school.”

I had learned a new respect for the alphabet, and from this point–for it was just a beginning–I proceeded to dip into other aspects of the story: typography, phonetics, the individual letters’ use in brand names and design, the whole psychological message of letters in certain presentations. What I uncovered was a trove of wisdom and lore worth celebrating. And worth sharing.