This is the history of the development of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, and it’s an interesting one, too.

I was expecting something different – maybe more a roll call of each letter, going into its development. Instead, it was more academic, and more enlightening than I had expected.

The book also concerns itself partly with the origins of written language, the move from pictographs to syllables to letters.

And about English, where the letters came from (Etruscans, we think) and where it went from there. He also takes a side trip into what he considers the perfect alphabet, Korean.

This is a short book but lots of fun, and makes me want to read more about the development of the alphabet. Anybody know a good book?

For more of my book reviews, go to Ralphsbooks. ( )

There is just so much that we don't know -- cannot know -- about the development of the alphabet. But the evidence that there is, combined with much speculation, begins to create a version of the story.
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Like a lot of books with high-concept titles, this one isn't really true to its billing. It is not a biography or even a history of the alphabet as we English-speakers know it. It's a survey of all the alphabets that have battled it out over the history of humankind -- a broader editorial scope that is challenging to sum up pithily. Certainly there's an emphasis on all things A to Z, but with a lot of time spent on Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and so forth. (The Korean material is especially interesting.) It's a fascinating, relatively quick read.

One side note: there's a fascinating side bit in here about Thomas A. Sebeok, a retired professor from Bloomington, Illinois, who developed a plan for how to mark for thousands of years that a given spot is poisoned by nuclear waste.

Showing that no symbols could do the job, he determines that the best plan, if any, would be to create an "atomic priesthood" whose sole role would be to maintain the continuity of this important information, generation after generation.

Even though I've followed the Long Now organization for many years, I only now have connected Sebeok's plan with the group's projections, and with Neal Stephenson's novel, Anathem, which features a priesthood quite similar to the one described here.

According to this post from the Long Now, Sebeok was not on the minds of the group's founders, even though there are striking parallels in their perspectives:

http://blog.longnow.org/2008/07/16/communication-measures-to-bridge-10-millennia...

Very well written ( )

Alphabet > History