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Title: Language Visible : Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z by DAVID SACKS ISBN: 0-7679-1172-5 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 19 August, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent book, but hazy on pronunciation
Comment: "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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautiful, delightful, and highly informative
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Not carved in stone?
Comment: Actually, the first alphabet writings were carved in stone around 1800 BC. However, the alphabet has been evolving and changing ever since. It was not until the early 1800s that the letters j and v became official letters of our now 26-letter alphabet. (They did not tell us about this in elementary school.) We could have just as well had a 22-letter or 30-letter alphabet. About the same time that j and v were included, the thorn expressing the th sound, was lost. I found when visiting Iceland that it is still used there. Other letters have been lost through history. Could we lose a few more? The author is absolutely correct about the relative unimportance of the h. In my native Brooklyn, the h sound is rarely used, e.g. there can be pronounced dere.
I had wondered where the y came from. Now I know that the Romans imported it based on the Greek upsilon for use with words of Greek origin. The author missed mentioning my favorite y-word, syzygy, which has three of them.
There is some repetition in the book as well as an inconsistency. The language brought to England by the conquest of 1066 is referred to in different chapters as old French, medieval French, or Norman. I believe that the last is probably correct. There are still a few Norman speakers on the Channel Islands. On the island of Jersey they have Norman felines called cats in Norman as are ours, not French chats.
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Title: The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0198607024 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman ISBN: 140004085X Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: 07 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Washington's Crossing (Pivotal Moments in American History) by David Hackett Fischer ISBN: 0195170342 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Iceland's Bell by Halldor Laxness, Philip Roughton, Adam Haslett ISBN: 1400034256 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible by Keith J. Devlin ISBN: 0805072543 Publisher: Owl Books (NY) Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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