h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: The Development of Our Alphabet - A1299477
Author: Gnomon - U151503

This entry arose as an answer to a question many moons ago in Askh2g2, "Why is the alphabet in the order it is?".

The entry uses three diagrams which are off-site. I hope they can be blobbed easily and added to the entry.

Fascinating informative and convincing.

Space needed in between "Runic" and "wen"; s and e needed in the second last sentence or so (reprent).

The j was interchangeable for a good while with i, as v was with u; in writing Roman numbers in lower case (e.g. in Henry VIII's time) the last i would be habitually lengthened giving viij for eight. Do we know when they started being pronounced distinctly differently? You suggest 17th century . . . but regional differences have always persisted, and there must have been a lot of indeterminate middle ground (unlike the chicken and the proto-chicken ).

I got some odd looks reading half of these examples out loud, Gnomon... But I like it. It gives me all sorts of information I find interesting I didn’t know before.

I hesitate to correct spelling here because I spell Americanly, not Britishly, but is it sylllable or syllable in the second sentence?

“But it appears that the idea of an alphabet, with one symbol per sound” Not so sure about this. A long vowel and a short vowel are each assigned one symbol (unless it is a phonetic spelling) but have distinctly different sounds.

2nd Millennium BC --> second millennium BC
“Waset (the modern-day Luxor)” Do you mean “ Waset (in what is now Luxor)”

In regard to the figures, you could simply link to them in the text. So instead of-

Figure 1 (linked)

The figure shows the Phoenician alphabet.

It could be-

This site (linked) shows the Phoenician alphabet.

1st Millennium BC --> first millennium BC
"wery" instead of "very" --> ‘wery’ instead of ‘very’
3rd Century --> Third century

I think the space in between the runic and wen is technically a browser problem (in most browsers), but how about inserting a courtesy   ?

Looks like a keeper.

I think this great (as expected from your good self!) there are many entries on various alphabets in the EG and this will help tie them altogether with links to them.

Mort (Recently having subbed an entry on the phonetic alphabet!)

Another very nice piece from our favorite sundial-part.

It tickles my own sense of humor to think of the 'new' letters invented by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel). Proof that language, and the writing of it are in there deep is seeing kids laugh at this. I remember thinking of this book strongly when I learned Japanese kana.

I find the pronoun 'our' in the title peculiar, even though H2G2 clearly bills itself as an English-only site. I can imagine someone Russian or Greek reading a Google-translation and finding the article temporarily incomprehensible and maybe a bit smugly incomplete, even though I very much doubt that is Gnomon's intention.

Hi Everbody! Thanks for your comments. I'll work through the typos later.

My history of J and U is obviously incomplete - I'll see what I can find. I presume Recumbentman is right that regional variations would have had the sound at the start of the word "jam" as a "y" sound in some parts of the country and a j sound in others.

The use of "our" in alphabet: I was going to call it "the Roman alphabet" but I realise that a lot of people would not know what sort of alphabet is used in Rome. I know h2g2 is supposed to be a world guide, but I didn't think I had to cater for it still being comprehensible when translated into other languages such as Russian! I'll think about this some more.

One sound per symbol: I know that modern English has some letters that represent more than one sound (for example 'i') while some sounds need more than one symbol to write (for example, 'th'). But in most languages and for most of the history of English, the alphabet was basically one sound per symbol.

In regard to the figure links, I don't want the links to remain as links to (my) external web site. I want them converted into blobs and included in the text. It would read much better if people could see the shapes of the letters as they read, rather than having to open up a separate window. It also makes more sense for the pictures to be part of h2g2 rather on a separate site which I maintain.

The developement of *our* alphabet? Surely it's the development of the English alphabet?

Since the entry is in English, I'm assuming the people reading it are English speakers.

But not everyone is, and as you mention further down, English is about the only language in the world to use the alphabet you describe with no added letters.

OK, I'll change the name to "The Development of the English Alphabet".

No don't! It's used by many western languages. "Our" is just right, both because the House Rules say write in English (thus limiting the claim of "our") and because the "our" can be mentally expanded as desired by the reader. It's a BBC site, after all, let's not get hung up on unnecessary universalism, which is impractical anyway.

To soothe nitpickers you could say "one symbol per sound, more or less".

I've changed it back to 'Our Alphabet'. I've added a parenthetical 'more or less'. Thanks.

Another fine entry Gnomon

Regarding the introduction I would be tempted to suggest you refer to the the three types of writing as 'strategies' (following the description of the growth of writing in Jared Diamond's 'Guns Germs and Steel').
It would bear mention that no system of writing exists *purely* as alphabetic, ideographic (or the synonymous 'logographic') or syllabic, and will often also use the other strategies to a lesser extent.

Egyptian hieroglyphics, as you mention, although principally ideographic, did contain many syllabic signs as well as an alphabet of signs for each consonant used in conjunction with the hieroglyphs.

The English alphabet could reasonably be said to include ideograms in the form of the (Arabic) numerals and symbols such as & £ % @.

You could say that the 'ideal' of the alphabet has a symbol for each sound/phoneme, but that most alphabets faced with the conflicting need for simplicity have fewer symbols, and make some symbols stand for more than one sound, or represent sounds by combinations of symbols eg 'th' and 'sh'. That would be a good place to mention A1921178 The International Phonetic Alphabet.

Typos:
sylllable > syllable

Whatever the reaon, G has been > Whatever the reason, G has been

they used the Runicwen > they used the Runic wen
(Jodan already suggested two of these I think)

Pimms

"The English alphabet could reasonably be said to include ideograms in the form of the (Arabic) numerals and symbols such as & £ % @" -- hmmm.

& and @ are complete words (et and at) slightly reduced; £ is an L, short for Librum; % is a scribbled form of /00 to mean "divided by 100". No real ideograms there; we need to go to smileys or Wingdings for those.

Reminds me -- I must request a "pointing hand" smiley (left and right).

Fascinating entry

I uncovered some extra information on the letter F last night, so I've rewritten the derivation of the letter F slightly.

Gnomon I was surprised by your 'throwing stick' meaning for gaml. Other sources invariably seem to give the meaning as 'camel'. You may be able to fill in some of the blanks in your table by reference to the following site:
http://davidmyriad.tripod.com/phoenician.alphabet.index.html
for instance sade is I believe the same as tsadik meaning (apparently) 'fishhook'

Pimms

I've been fairly cautious in giving the meanings of the Phoenician names. A lot of articles about Phoenician give conflicting names, without saying where they got them from. But recent scholarly opinion is certainly that gaml is not a camel as was thought formerly but is a boomerang.

Only last night, I read a book which claimed that meaning of the Phoenician hé is "hey!" a shouted exclamation. The "proof" was that a very early inscription shows a man with hands in the air. But there's no reason to believe (or at least no reason was offered) that the man with arms raised was the same symbol as the backwards E of hé.

So I've left plenty of gaps in the table, where I don't consider the provided names to be reasonable.