Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z

by David Sacks

Book Overview

A fun, lively, and learned excursion into the alphabet--and cultural history. Letters are tangible language. Joining together in endless combinations to actually show speech, letters convey our... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0767911725
• ISBN13: 9780767911726
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Broadway Books
• Length: 395 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

accessible, light, and fun

In the first section Sacks explains the latest discoveries and research on the history of our alphabet, which is more electrifying that it might sound. The portraits of each letter flow from historical to pop-cultural references for an overall accessible, light, and fun read.

Language Visible

This book was a fantastic survey of the history and origins of the alphabet. It covered the origins and development of the roman alphabet letter by letter, and was an engagingly fresh and accessible read with great humour and an introductory level of detail. I would highly recommend this book for any reader who has a casual interest in language history, linguistic development, grammar, and communications. My only reservation about this book is that it provoked in me a burning desire to find out more about the great vowel shift and the evolution of upper and lower case lettering, and my small obsession is driving the librarians in my area nuts trying to satisfy my interests. A wonderful read. I was hooked.

Beautiful, delightful, and highly informative

Scrabble players take delight. Linguists and lovers of the phonetic stand up and cheer. In this original and delightful book the letters take on their own personalities as author David Sacks reveals their origins and their transitions from ancient tongues into modern English.Combining classic erudition (Sacks is the author of The Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World) with contemporary references and allusions--such as "p" being for "Puff Daddy" and "w" for President George W. (Dubya) Bush--David Sacks brings the alphabet to life and reveals its long and twisted history.The sounds and shapes of the letters are explored in minute detail. We can trance the evolution of the letter "a" from its Phoenician origins as the symbol for an ox to its use by Hebrews as "aleph" to its incorporation by the Greeks as "alpha," and know that A was always first. We can see how the letter "e" (the most frequently used letter in the English language) was once shaped like a stick figure man in Egypt around 1800 B.C. in a long dead Semitic language, and how it became the logo for Enron (tilted up so that it supposedly symbolized "ascent and power"). Sacks reveals that one such Enron sculpture sold for forty-four thousand dollars at an auction in September 2002. Why does X stand for the unknown and not Z? Sacks has the answer. How did G become C when the Greeks had gamma as the third letter of their alphabet? Indeed why do we have an alphabet at all? Why do we have alphabetic writing instead of the nonalphabetic kind as used by the Chinese and others? Sacks answers these questions and hundreds of others. He is obviously a man who takes delight in esoteric detail and in learning for the sake of learning, but he writes like a popular artist, not like a pedant. He takes delight in contrasting the old with the new.The way the book is structured invites us in without preliminary. There is no table of contents, but there is an index. The "chapters" are not numbered. (They are lettered, of course!) The beginning word of each chapter is the same as the focus of its subject matter. Thus the chapter on A begins, "Associated with beginnings, fundamentals, and superiority," while the next chapter has "Below the best or second in sequence."A form of each letter in some specialized or historic typeface and/or some information about it graces the offsetting page of chapter beginnings. An emblem from the Department of Agriculture for "Grade A" is one example; an embedded M in an illustration from the Mad-Hatter's party in Alice in Wonderland is another; and three zees penned by American type designer Frederic W. Goudy is still another. Each letter has a personality tag: there is the "Dependable D," the "Gorge-ous G," the "Exzotic Z," etc.There is a Preface and an introductory chapter entitled, "Little Letters, Big Idea." The morphological history of each letter is illustrated showing the progression in many cases from the Egyptian hieroglyph to the Phoenician let

A Thoroughly Enjoyable Read

I first heard about David Sacks' book "Language Visible" after reading a favorable review in Discover Magazine some months back. Being a long-time linguist by hobby (my day job is computer programming), I couldn't resist buying the book in hardback, even though normally I hate spending that much money. I was not disappointed.As the author points out on page ix of the preface, this is not intended to be a text book. No doubt expert linguists will be able to point out inaccuracies in the text, or quibble over some of the author's conclusions. For me, on the other hand, this is a veritable treasure trove of fascinating little nuggets of information on our familiar letters. Some of these are things I've known from childhood, looking at the big dictionary in the school library at the start of the section for each letter, where there would be diagrams showing the evolution of the symbol from ancient Phoenician up to the present day. I've picked up other bits of trivia along the way while doing research on historical topics such as the pivotal Battle of Hastings in 1066. Having it all together, under one figurative roof, on my own bookshelf, is priceless.True, the book focuses on the English language, but by necessity it also talks about German, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as earlier languages stretching back to Latin, ancient Greek, Hebrew and Phoenician. With a little ancient Egyptian thrown in for good measure. For that is another nifty thing about this book: it takes advantage of discoveries made as recently as 1999, linking our familiar alphabet to certain exotic-looking Egyptian hieroglyphs. The introductory section tells how a group of Semitic people living in Egypt some 4000 years ago hit upon the ingenious idea of using easily remembered hieroglyphic symbols to represent individual sounds, strung together to form words. All of a sudden ordinary people, be they butchers, bakers or bricklayers, could learn to read and write in a matter of days. Literacy was no longer the exclusive domain of scribes, kings and priests.The main part of the book consists of 26 articles, one for each letter, which were originally published in the Canadian newspaper "Ottawa Citizen" over a period of 26 weeks. While they've been edited somewhat for the book, to include such things as page references to related topics, they don't appear to have been completely rewritten. This is made evident by a certain amount of repetition from one chapter to the next, as might be expected given how a person reading the original "M" newspaper article might not have seen the "A" article published three months earlier.Actually, this suited me just fine: as quickly as I plowed through the book, devouring the whole thing in less than a week, things had a way of running together, so the repetition came in handy. Some day soon I'll have to reread it all ....Besides tracing the history of the letters, the chapters also go into their cultural significance in English,

Fun with Letters

David Sacks doesn't feel like an expert here.He's hazy or slightly wrong on pronunciation on occasion and sometimes writes things that just aren't quite what a true expert might write.He repeats that old untruth that the Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet instead of correctly stating that the Greek extended the use of letters for vowels that were already being used in some circumstances for vowels by the Phoenicians. It is possible that the first Greeks to learn the Phoenician alphabet never realized that it theoretically contained consonants only.Not quite correct is: "Amazingly, with the sole exception of Korea's Hangul script (invented in isoldation in the mid-1400s A.D.), all of today's alphabetic scripts have a common origin." But all that's needed is to insert the words "commonly used" before alphabet scripts to avoid one bringing up John Dee's Enochian script, Deseret, Shavian and various other non-Latin invented alphabets.Yogh is introduced as an invented Old English letter which is not really right but it is too involved here to say why not. The sample given for Old Enlish letter wynn looks too much like a _p_ (perhaps because it is?)Sacks barely escapes tumbling into the false legend that the Chinese script is not largely sound based.But mostly Sacks is very right, throwing out facts amusingly and accurately and sometimes going out of his way to debunk standard legends.I've seen far worse by supposed experts, probably because this kind of book falls between disciplines.Sacks mixes genuine scholarship with an unpretentious style making heavy material seem delightfully light. There are no documenting footnotes but Sacks is not intentionally presenting anything that is not easily checked.Despite the errors I've mentioned I'm very impressed by the accuracy and obvious care and enthusiasm shown in this book. Sacks is excited by what he's finding out, almost always does get it exactly right and he wants you to share his excitement. It's all a bit casual and gosh-wow! a style which might be annoying to some. But he carries if off for me at least and it's nicer than putting the reader to sleep.I already knew most of what Sacks writes but found his presentation and style made it seem fresh again. And perhaps because he's not an expert he's very good at putting in details that experts often leave out.The center of the book is twenty-six chapters, one covering each letter of the English alphabet. He provides for each its origin and development from the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions if it was found there and from the later Sinaitic inscriptions if not, tracing its form through Phoenician, Greek and Latin and providing examples of the changes in shapes and pronunciation it has undergone on the way.Sacks adds examples (often very amusing) of how the letter is used distinctively in modern English and of the feelings that the letter arouses. For letters (and their sounds) do arouse feelings, some seeming familiar, some trite, some exotic (like