The first half of the book gives a general overview of the development of alphabetic languages and lettering in general, focusing in on Europe, while the second half examines the (speculative, in some cases) history of the shape of each letter in the modern English alphabet. There are many illustrations and examples.

A drawing of a reed could mean "reed," but, since the Egyptian word for reed was ỉ, it could also stand for the sound ỉ in other words. The writing system operated on the same principle as a rebus puzzle, in which you might use a picture of a bumblebee as a substitute for the verb "be" because they sound the same. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-10-04 16:48:32 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA1113501 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor People from Canaan — modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan — often travelled to wealthy, neighbouring Egypt to seek their fortunes. Canaanites worked across Egypt in a variety of occupations and even made their way to a remote, windswept plateau in the Sinai desert called Serabit el-Khadim. Next, they took the hieroglyph that looked like a house, which in Canaanite was called bayit, and designated it as the sound b. They continued until they had 27 letters — enough to represent all the consonants in their language.

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Over 3,500 years ago, a few of them seem to have had the idea to adapt the writing system to their own language, and the way they repurposed hieroglyphs was inspired. Over time, what had started out as drawings of animals, objects, and tiny people was simplified into abstract lines that could be jotted down easily. The waves of the ocean became the crests of the letter M, the slithering body of a snake resolved into the twisting letter N, and the bend of an elbow was preserved only as the curve of the letter J. The written word, so indispensable to modern society, is easy to take for granted, but writing was a late development in the history of human language. Our ancestors spoke and signed for hundreds of thousands — possibly tens of millions — of years before they devised a technology for representing language in art. These early scripts weren't alphabets, but they weren't simple picture-writing, either. All Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance, were images of objects and animals in the real world, but they didn't always represent those objects directly. urn:lcp:isforoxviolencee00sand_0:epub:238dd880-1991-4490-8774-ef261503d672 Extramarc University of Michigan Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isforoxviolencee00sand_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3516gj17 Invoice 11 Isbn 9780679417118

Incredibly, the people who invented the world's first alphabet may very well have been illiterate. Their inscriptions didn't follow the format of Egyptian writing, nor did they import any sounds or meanings from the earlier writing system as they likely would have done if they had learned hieroglyphs first. Lccn 94009779 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL1085880M Openlibrary_edition Hathor was one of the most important goddesses of the Egyptian pantheon. Among her many jurisdictions, she presided over the gemstone turquoise, which is why she was worshipped at this temple in the mining settlement of Serabit el-Khadim. David Roberts, 1839.(Public domain)This new type of writing that matched symbols to single sounds, instead of whole words or groups of sounds, was eventually named after the first two letters in the system: ʾalef-bayit, or alphabet. Other hieroglyphs represented strings of sounds. A goose could stand for the word "goose" gb, the sound gb, or — followed by a glyph of a seated god — the name of the earth-god Geb. Fanfare is a 19th century term used to describe the ornate gold-toothed bindings of the period from 1570-1640 The Illuminated Alphabet G is part of An Illuminated Alphabet and is from a 15th century Italian prayer book So here in memory of the all those games I played with my dad is my own curated ABC – some images from the exhibition, and other favourites from my own collection. I hope you enjoy it. Admission is free A Stephen T. Johnson Alphabet City (1995) Leonard Baskin, A Gehenna Alphabet. The Gehenna Press was founded in 1942 and was one of the first fine-art presses in the USA. Alphabetics/an aesthetically awesome alliterated alphabet anthology.