Customer Reviews

Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The development of alphabets, and specifically of the western alphabet, is not straightforward. But John Mann makes it even more confusing than the subject is all on its own. Rather than try to make steps and pieces link up in an understandable manner, the author jumps around, adds lots of tangential anecdotes that could be intereting but aren't relevant, and drags things out. I have the sense that what might have made a good magazine article or two have been padded, a lot, to make it book length.

The book would benefit greatly from some illustrations and diagrams. There are two appendices, but they aren't referenced in the text and the reader won't even discover them unless you look to see how much farther you have to read.

The author, for some reason, has decided that the western alphabet owes its beginnings to the epics of Homer, and proceeds to reassert that throughout the book, although the justification for that assertion never does become clear or strong. Nor does the distinciton between cuneiform and other forms of writing.

There are a lot of interesting bits of information in the book, just not put together as well as they should be.

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.

This is a book written by an author who seems to be very much out of his element. He begins with a lengthy discussion of Chinese characters, which is logical enough, except that he really doesn't have even a basic understanding of them. Much of what he says about Chinese characters is fundamentally misinformed. He argues that Chinese characters persisted because of the "conservative" nature of Chinese culture, when in fact this form of writing persisted because it is very well suited to the nature of the Chinese language. This undermines some of the succeeding points he tries to make about writing, where he argues that hieroglyphic writing persisted because of the "conservative" nature of Egyptian culture.
He includes a brief and pointless chapter about memes, in which he fails to make clear why he is even discussing it. It strikes me as filler.
He does include a fair amount of Mediterranean history, which is reasonable, but he scatters it among the information he is presenting about the alphabet. The result is that it is hard to follow the relationship between historical events and the development of the alphabet. This material comes across as insufficiently considered. There certainly is a fascinating story buried here, but Man fails to dig it up, dust it off, and show it to us.
Finally, I would say that Man fails to deliver on the title. The focus of the book is the development of the alphabet, rather than how the alphabet changed the world.

You would be hard pressed not to agree with other reviewers who seem near unanimous in their sense of frustration with the author's meandering style which unfortunately obscures some interesting points. Instead of holding up and walking us through a clear thesis, the author continually digresses into various minutiae about ancient Mediterranean history, archaeology, and linguistics, coupled with an awkardly placed chapter, two-thirds into the book, compariong and contrasting the dynamics of biological and cultural evolution.

This being said, I feel it only fair to tell you what the book attempts to convey. John Mann sees the alphabet (by which he really means the modern Roman alphabet used widely in western civilizations) as a peculiar artifact of human invention and whose origin and spread were hardly accidental. According to him, the evolution of the alphabet was shaped by dynamics similar to those which cause heridity, variation, and selection of genetic traits among species. His foil is the work of Yale classics scholar Eric Havelock whom Mann characterizes as holding up the ancient Greek alphabet as the paragon of literary perfection and the underpinning of Greek genius.

Mann then proceeds to dismantle this image of the ancient Greek alphabet, showing the debt the Greeks owed to older civlizations, notably the Phoenicians, through a complex process of evolution initally shaped by the needs of recording trade transactions in a mechanism more efficient than Egyptian hieroglyhpics or Sumerican cuneiform, and later by the needs of an emerging culture (the Hebrews) whose ideology required literacy under a strogn charismatic leader (Moses).

It would be neither fair nor accurate to represent John Mann's arguments on the origins of the alphabet as based on biblical claims. In fact, he is cautious to point out the such claims are generally not substianted by available evidence, much of which however was gathered by archaeological expeditions exploring such claims. Unfortunately, the discussion of this topic is too full of digression from the book's purported central thesis to be worthy of the few interesting insights it does bring.

Having described the archaeological finds around the "Asiatic" script which was contemporary with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mann shows links between this script and that developed in the mysterious eastern Mediterranean state of the second millenium known from Egyptian sources as Ugarit, one of several~~ rival Phoenician ports of that ancient period. Again, the central thesis in the book gets lost amidst a welter of minutiae, albeit not uninteresting, about this civlization.

In the next step towards completing the jigsaw puzzle he presents, Mann shows the links between the Phoenicians who had their alphabet around 1200 BC and the ancient Greeks whose early alphabet is not evidenced till 800 BC. But before leaping into this discussion, Mann inserts the seventh chapter of the book whose title "The Selfish Alphabet" takes off from biologist Richard Dawkins' book "The Selfish Gene" and in which he develops a curious argument about the evolution of cultural artifacts as language and religion which he likens to the so-called memes, the famous term that Dawkins coined in his 1976 book. Mann admits his own struggle in seeking his "Grand Unified Theory of Culture" and does humbly invite the uniterested reader to proceed to the next chapter where he continues his exposition on the transmission of the alphabetic tradition from the Phoenicians to the Greeks.

Lest you think that Mann has a narrow focus on Western civilization, you might be interested to discover his special interest in Mongolian culture and history. In fact, his fifth chapter provides an absoluting fascinating account of the development in fifteenth century Korea of an alphabet which Mann, quoting British linguist Geoffrey Sampson, describes as QUOTE one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind UNQUOTE

With this chapter,in which he shows this Korean script drew from the Mongols, Mann tries to butress what seemed to me to be one of his key points: that the invention of the alphabet was a rare intellectual achievement whose impact was independent of technology and which has linked many civilizations. Referring to the thirteenth century adoption by Mongolian leader Chingis Khan of the alphabet of the Naiman people he had conquered, Mann proclaims grandly QUOTE He [Chingis Khan] ordered his staff to adopt the script of the newly conquered Naiman tribe, who wrote taking a system from the Uighurs, who inherited ot from an Iranian culture, Sogdian, who had taken it over from Aramaic, who had it from old Hebrew: in effect, the script familiar to the Israelites 3000 years earlier UNQUOTE Full circle back to his argument on the origins of the alphabet.

The appendices provide some interesting set of transliterations across different alphabets, a historical timeline, and a fairly extensive biobliography. I was truly sorry to find this intriguing book handicapped by its cumbersome style, let alone some likely questions about the scholarship.

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!

I found this book quite informative and intriguing in parts but it also included some very dodgy logic and a style of English which makes USA Today read like Shakespeare.

I found Man's central hypothesis that the Roman alphabet is the most efficient way of transferring the spoken word to written format hardly credible.

His analysis of Chinese and the merits of Chinese characters versus the alphabet is facile and the Japanese language is not given a mention. However, neither are Arabic nor any of the Indian languages, so I suppose speakers of those languages should not feel discriminated against. More irritatingly, the extermination of the Mayan written heritage by the Spanish might suggest to some (but not to John Man) that efforts to diffuse the Roman alphabet in Central/South America were not totally meritorious.

Man certainly has collected some interesting snippets of knowledge about how the Roman alphabet developed but too often the ideas are not fully developed, or the train of thought sputters out midway.

The whole book would have been better in the hands of a Simon Singh or Simon Winchester, where the intellectual rigour could have been maintained without the silly anecdotes about the author's childhood experiences.

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.

The motive of this book is very fine, but its factual presentation is the exact opposite.
Starting with the first chapter, John Man's intention to initiate his audience into the ancient Chinese writings brought confusion to both himself and his audience. Information about the ancient Egyptian writings are not better. They were presented in hazy haphazard manner. It is easy to lose patience with the very first part.
The author had scarcely understood his topic before rushing into teaching his audience.
Nevetheless, I must add that if the needed homework is accomplished, Mr Man would come up with a better book: a very interesting piece. But as regards the current situation, most readers would get lost in this book. It is that confusing!

I love this book, and I think anyone with a passing interest in linguistics and language evolution (as well as art history) will as well. Man does delve into minutiae, as other reviewers have suggested, but I enjoy minutiae, myself. I think the book was cleverly and humorously written, making it an easy read, and I look forward to Man's next project.

On a visceral level, most educated people understand how important reading and writing are, though it often seems that both are out of vogue as anything more than functional tools these days. Still, no matter how the literary may mourn (and I count myself as one of these), there is something to be said for the simple functionality of these twenty-six shapes that define the "Roman" alphabet. As John Man reminds us, it is this concept of alphabet as a subset of writing--since writing can exist without an alphabet--that allowed civilization to develop in the way that it has.

As a teacher of math and science I have often given more thought to the development of number than I have to the development of the alphabet; and yet, both subjects are equally intriguing and important. Both have contributed to the rise of our modern culture in different and important ways. I am fascinated by many of the things that Man has to say about the development of these important symbols. For example, it is interesting to think about how the leap was made from "symbol as word" to "symbol as sound" which is at the heart of the leap to the alphabet. Then there is the paradigm-shift that has to take place as younger cultures appropriate the concept and develop it. It is an incredible story.

And, for the most part, Man tells it well. It seems a little brief at times but it is a good overview of a complex subject that is still advancing day by day. Anyone interested in writing and language would be foolish not to take a look at this most readable book.