Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World

by John Man

Book Overview

The idea behind the alphabet - that language with all its wealth of meaning can be recorded with a few meaningless signs - is an extraordinary one. So extraordinary, in fact, that it has occurred only... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 076076610X
• ISBN13: 9780760766101
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Short, fun overview of the history of Western alphabets (with a side trip to Korea)

This book is a brief overview of how writing in general, and the alphabet in particular, got going. As other (mostly more negative) reviews note, the style is conversational and not "straight-through" in any way. I don't mind the diversions, though, as they are mostly used to illustrate a point or sometimes to explain the archeology behind particular pieces of knowledge or conjecture about how the alphabet got going. The author does take a significant diversion to explain the Korean alphabet's history, which is fascinating, but he then returns to the West and talks about Greek, Roman (with neat explanations of how their alphabet came from the Etruscans), and Cyrillic. And that's about it. For a short book, that works, but it's too bad there couldn't be more on how we ended up with some other major alphabets worldwide (Arabic, Devanagari and related Indian scripts, the scripts of Southeast Asia, and the odd scripts like Georgian and Armenian). Overall, a fun, quick, and informative read.

highly informative

"Alpha Beta" is the story of a revolutionary idea -- that instead of using symbols to represent words, or even to represent syllables, each symbol could represent a single sound, and thereby reproduce a language in only two or three dozen symbols, rather than hundreds or thousands. John Man tracks the development of alphabets from the ancient Middle East and their spread across the world.Man's basic theory is that the alphabet is a revolutionary idea. It is not, he says, necessarily a BETTER way to record information than syllabic/pictographic scripts, but it is certainly a different way, and one that requires a fair degree of abstraction.He further posits that writing systems have a great deal of inertia once established, since literacy is associated with knowledge, power, and social status. Those who have put effort into learning a complicated system of writing, such as Chinese ideograms or Egyptian hieroglyphics, resist the establishment of a new system. Therefore, the alphabet is likely to have developed in fringe societies of the Middle East, those who did not want their writing to be beholden to either Egypt or the great powers of Mesopotamia, which used cuneiform writing.Man also discusses the spread of the alphabet system, with much attention given to the development of the Latin alphabet by way of the Etruscans, Greeks, Phonecians, and probably the Hebrews. He also talks a little about the theory of alphabets and their inability to ever completely and accurately represent a language, if only because pronunciation changes. (The chapter on the Korean Hangul alphabet is particularly interesting, both in terms of alphabet design and the reluctance of the Koreans to adopt the new system over Chinese ideograms.)Man is a little vague in places, and spends a fair amount of time spinning speculative fictions about the transmission of the alphabet through the Mediteranean. However, he is fairly careful to stress that he is only speculating, and nobody has solid evidence for much of the history of our alphabet.In short, this is a fascinating book, and a wonderful introduction to the study of writing systems and the history of literacy. While not as in depth as I might have prefered, it does cover a vast range of time and space, and offers interesting directions for further reading.

Quite interesting indeed.

I was indeed quite surprised to find so many negative comments about this book from other readers' reviews. Indeed personally I found this book quite interesting, just to mention how the author proposed the interesting theory of the evolution of the character "a" in the chapter of "Letters in the Wilderness". And I like the chapter of "Into Sinai" which proposed another theory of how a biblical figure (Mose) was created. I have no way to tell if his theories are with or without facts, but it's interesting to read.

An Unconventional and Stimulating Look at Expressing Ideas

If you are like me, this book will surprise you. I expected something like 26 chapters with each saying something about each letter of the alphabet and its origin. Instead, the book tries to find the earliest precursors of the modern alphabet, and connect the dots from there to the use of modern languages on the World Wide Web. In doing so, the book relies on a combination of interesting conjecture, reviews of well-established but little-known scholarship, and cutting-edge, in-process research that will be new to most readers who are not in linguistics. In reading Alpha Beta, the insights you get will be different from what you expected. An alphabet works well because it fits a lot of languages equally poorly. As such, it is a form of "fuzzy logic" that mathematicians love. Korea has developed the alphabet that is most closely connected to its base language. Most alphabets succeed because of the military and commercial strength of the culture that favors them, rather than how good they are. The mixtures of ancient alphabets, languages, and religions are much more complex than you probably ever imagined. The process of taking an oral tradition, and making it into a written one is also powerfully explained (as happened with both the Bible and Homer's masterpieces). I graded the book down because it tended to tell me more than I wanted to know about how each of the cultures evolved, and less than I wanted to know about the details of how an alphabet's creation solved specific language problems.After you finish this book, think about what the potential benefits could be of reforming the alphabet to eliminate more of the confusions inherent in expressing English. What would make it easier to be precise in this language, while making the language easier to learn?Make your point clearly!

A fun romp through the history of the alphabet.

Cohesively and convivially written as a review of the roots of our modern alphabet, "Alpha Beta" is a pleasure to read. The author infuses the work with his enthusiasm for the alphabet both in its role as a technology and as a cultural icon. The transmitted wisdom on the origins of the alphabet and the latest evidence from the archeologist's brush & trowel are presented with well narrated places, events, and participants.The author clearly has his favored theory on the evolutionary origins of A-to-Z and the single criticism I can level at the book is it's exclusive presentation of the Proto-Sinaitic path of development from Ancient Egyptian. Some background on other possible lines of descent would have made the work stronger by their refutation.The book is packed with interesting details and unexpected ripple effects regarding alphabet usages. The Hebrew alphabet's success in promulgating monotheism is examined as an important effect of the adoption of alphabets. The conditions under which some alphabets "like to buy a vowel" and others do not are also explored.This is a highly enjoyable read - both entertaining and educational - which I can heartily recommend.