Customer Reviews

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

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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 letter and then through the Hebrew, Greek and Roman adaptations and on into English. It was the letter N not the letter S that was originally an Egyptian snake, although Ben Johnson called S, "the serpent's letter," and it is often depicted as such. And it is M that comes from the hieroglyph for water, not, as one might think, W.

There are sidebar mini-essays and longer ones set over gray shading, each one focusing on some aspect of letters and their history, such as "The Alphabet in the Middle Ages," or "The Creation of American Spelling." Sacks does not neglect the sounds of letters and how they have been pronounced over the ages. In so far as possible he gives that history as well. He even explains why some letters are pronounced with an initial vowel sound, S and F, for example; and how others are pronounced with a trailing vowel sound, such as, B and C.

This is a highly visual book written in an infectious style that makes the alphabet anything but boring. It is a beautiful book and one to treasure. I am much impressed.

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 X and Z).

Sacks is often studidly silly as in his discussion of the relationship between C and G:

<< Oversimplifying somewhat, we can say that C stole G's identity. G was the alphabet's original number 3, centuries before C existed. Then, a change: G disappeared and C became letter number 3--similar to G yet lacking in voice. Where had the real G gone? Not dead, but banished from the developing alphabet, G wandered four and a half centuries in limbo, until, its services being at last missed and appreciated, it was recalled to the letter row, to spot number 7 (ousting another letter). There G abides today, staring with who-knows-what emotions at the back of C, four places ahead. >>

Mixed among the letter chapters are numerous separate articles on the stages of the evolution of the alphabet, typesetting, American spelling, lost letters from Old English and Middle English, Baby Language used by Grown-Ups and other interesting side issues.

An article called "A Pecking Order of Scripts" giving the origin and evolution of mixing styles on a page from which our casing system developed is especially well done using an example manuscript and explaining it.

There are also a number of tables giving forms and pronunciation.

One strange defect: there is no table of contents or listing of tables making it difficult to locate a particular article or table. But there is a list of illustrations at the back of the book and a good index.

This is a very enjoyable book for light reading as well as for detailed study.

Language Visible tells the story of the alphabet, one letter at a time. Each letter gets its own chapter and Sacks follows the development of that letter over 4000 years from the origins of the alphabet, through the Phonecians, Greeks, Romans, and through to the modern English alphabet. The concept is good, and Sacks has a knack for making his subject interesting. However, the book starts to become tedious by about the letter M. The book is an adaption of a series of columns that the author wrote for he Ottawa Citizen and has been published almost verbatim with the addition of a few sideboxes of additional material. This results in a lot of material being duplicated in different chapters. Language Visible would have benefitted greatly from a thorough edit that removed duplicate information and made the chapters read more like chapters in a book and less like self-contained newspaper columns.

The book is aimed at people who have no knowledge of the history of the alphabet and does a good job of explaining how the modern English alphabet came to be. There are some factual errors, but they are minor and do not affect the overall histories of each letter. More annoying was Sacks attempts to discuss the influence of pop culture on various letters. His comments on the rock band U2, for example, suggest that he has very little understanding of pop culture in the year 2003.

All in all this book is well worth reading, even if you find yourself skimming through the later chapters in order to find material that was not covered earlier in the book. The book is ideal for keeping on the coffee table so that you can dip into it during breaks in the hockey game. The short chapters also make it
ideal breakfast reading.

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, clear up to the start of the 21st Century. David Sacks also has a whimsical sense of humor. For instance, when discussing the silent P in certain Greek-derived words like "psychiatrist", he makes this humorous aside: "As every schoolboy knows, there can be a silent P in swimming".

Other features I greatly enjoyed include the family tree linking all of the world's major alphabets back to the Egyptians (with the sole exception of Korea's Hangul alphabet, which was invented from scratch). Also, there are tables listing the ancient Phoenician and modern Hebrew alphabets, plus the original Greek, Etruscan and Latin alphabets. Plus, several of the chapters have inset grey boxes, sometimes extending for pages on end, discussing topics like the following:

1) The evolution of writing from Roman times through the Middle Ages, and where lowercase letters come from.

2) The impact of the invention of Gutenberg's printing press on the modern world.

3) Why there is a noticeable difference between British and American spelling.

4) What happened to certain runic letters which appeared in Old English works like Beowulf, but which have disappeared since?

Sprinkled throughout the book are answers to a myriad of other questions as well. Have you ever wondered why are there sign posts saying odd things like "Ye Olde English Pub?" Why does the Spanish J sound like H, while the V sounds like B? How did Julius Caesar likely pronounce "Veni, Vidi, Vici"? Why is it important to mind your P's and Q's? Where did the expression "okay" come from? What does "Beowulf" mean?

I could go on and on ad nauseam but will stop here. Just get the book and read it for yourself. You won't regret it.

"Language Visible" is a delightful combination of history, humor, linguistics, puns, archaeology, and fancy. The thrill David Sacks gets from the subject is evident throughout. I found it thoroughly enjoyable. My family tolerated my frequent comments about some aspect of the history of writing or some other interesting tidbit from the book, and may have been sufficiently intrigued to want to read the book themselves.

The frequent sidebars are at once a fascinating set of trips and an annoying intrusion. They usually present entertaining information, but they usually interrupt the flow of the main text, requiring flipping back and forth to maintain context in more than one flow. There is even one instance of a sidebar within a sidebar, and one where the sidebar is interrupted to resume the main text. A minor annoyance, but still an annoyance.

As I singer, I have a particular fondness for the minutiae of pronunciation, and in this area the book let me down. It was as if the author had never heard of a diphthong or a glide. Given the technical names he used for the various consonant and vowel forms, I found it rather jarring to hear him imply that the American letter name "A" is a pure vowel, to see the French "J" sound presented as having *more* rather than fewer component sounds than the English "J" sound, and to hear him find only a slight similarity between the "U" and "W" sounds. This fault did not detract significantly from the book as a whole, but it rather bothered me in the U-V-W discussion, which are consecutive chapters in the alphabetically ordered book.

This book added greatly to my knowledge of our language's history. Also, a real surprise was the humor that the author put in the book. I certainly did not expect ANY associated with this subject.

Having read several other works on the origins of the alphabet, I have found this one to be both comprehensive and very well writtten. If you're for something that is both an easy read and that covers the subject well, this is it.

O.K., so maybe this book isn't truly "letter perfect." It has its positive points, but it certainly also has its flaws. There are some things in it that I found a bit annoying, including but not limited to, a lot of repetition and --- especially --- the way that the "main" text in the chapters is almost constantly interrupted by those "side" bits. Most if not all of them contain crucial information, but they can be distracting when you're trying to read the "main" text. I think they really should have been placed at the ends of the chapters. And I wouldn't have minded if Sacks had spared us the parts that deal with pop culture, or most of them. I wasn't thrilled with the references to war ("the S of evil," Churchill's V sign, etc.), either. Also, as another reviewer pointed out, there are, in the opening chapter ("Little Letters, Big Idea"), some dubious (and yes, perhaps erroneous) claims, but the rest of the information in the book is (as far as I know) correct, or at least close enough to correct that it won't lead you far astray. One peculiar thing about the book is that it has no table of contents. Another odd thing that I noticed is that in the chapter on the letter K, Sacks states that in German, the letter C is used in the combinations TSCH and CHS, but he doesn't mention the far-more-common CH and SCH (he does mention them in the chapter on the letter C, though). This isn't really a big deal, but to me, as a fan (and self-taught "student") of German, it was very noticeable. I have to agree, too, with a few other reviewers that Sacks is occasionally unclear or "hazy" on pronunciation. It might sound like I thought this book was unimpressive, but au contraire. I found it a lot of fun to read about the evolution of our alphabet and the stories behind our 26 letters (O.K., so they aren't really "our" 26 letters per se, Mr. Technical), and to see the shapes that their ancestors took (even though the "side" bits could be distracting, like I said). I think it's very cool that the book has the tables showing the different alphabets from the different time periods (although I'm not sure exactly how you're supposed to pronounce some of the letters' names). I learned some other letter-related things that I didn't know, as well (like why X is the "unknown letter"). I also find it fascinating that English used to use some symbols (like thorn, wyn [or wynn], yogh, and the "long" S) that it doesn't use anymore, and that it used to use some of its "current" letters in some ways that it doesn't use them now. I appreciate that Sacks includes humor in the book; this keeps it from seeming too serious or "teachy." Even though the book does have its share of shortcomings, I found it to be very, very educational and enjoyable overall. I read through it (or most of it; I skipped a couple of places that were about things that I don't think are very important) in just two or three days. This book definitely does not deserve to be dismissed altogether.

Repetitive because there are 26 letter to the alphabet but if you hang in there you learn a lot about where letters come from and how the changed. Humor is sprinkled throughout.

Who would have thought that a book about our alphabet could be so delightful? David Sacks combines scholarship with affection and humor to make this subject thoroughly appealing.
He presents an overview of the evolution of alphabetic writing, beginning with the earliest known inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt. These were attributed to foreign workers or soldiers who, around 2000 BC, adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to their own Semitic language. From there the new writing spread along caravan routes into the greater Semitic world, passed into the emergent Phoenician culture around 1200 BC, and eventually morphed into the Greek and Roman alphabets.

The advent of printing finalized our alphabet, settling on the "roman" typeface which itself was based on the Carolingian minuscule. (Those of us who have had to struggle through medieval manuscripts fondly remember the legibility and aesthetic beauty of Carolingian minuscule).

The fun part begins with personality profiles of each of the 26 letters of our alphabet. (Samuel Johnson acknowledged only 24, treating J and V as variants of I and U).
Sacks depicts each letter in various handwriting and print shapes and then proceeds to unveil its distinctive "character". Some letters are in constant competition with each other (K,C,Q); others convey primordial sounds (M, as in ma-ma or "m-m good") or basic emotions (O!). The history of R is among the most interesting, going back to a head-shaped letter in the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions. The growling sound gave R the name "dog letter" (canina littera) as early as the first century AD.

Then there are the special letters of Old English, thorn and eth, which denoted the "th" sound but vanished after the Norman invasion of 1066, when Latin-derived French influenced spelling habits.

U has a mournful sound, as expressed in the Latin verb "ululare", or in Horace's line "pulvis et umbra sumus". Its neatly curved shape has been exploited in advertising, as have other distinctive letters (O,Q,V,X,Y etc.) which have had separate careers as free-standing corporate logos or emblems denoting special status.

Each of these chapters is a gem in its own right and a joy to read. I have learned a lot, even from the incidental anecdotes sprinkled throughout the text. The book would make a handsome gift for anyone interested in language and its visible expressions.