Alpha Beta

by John Man

The idea behind the alphabet - that language with all its wealth of meaning can be recorded with a few meaningless signs - is an extraordinary one. So extraordinary, in fact, that it has occurred only once in human history: in Egypt about 4000 years ago. "Alpha Beta" follows the emergence of the western alphabet as it evolved into its present form, contributing vital elements to our sense of identity along the way. The Israelites used it to define their God, the Greeks to capture their myths, the Romans to display their power. And today, it seems on the verge of yet another expansion through the internet.

Tracking the alphabet as it leaps from culture to culture, John Man weaves discoveries, mysteries and controversies into a story of fundamental historical significance.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Language, Linguistics, Reference, Writing, Cultural

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 24, 2000

About the author

John Anthony Garnet Man is a British historian and travel writer. His special interests are China, Mongolia and the history of written communication. He takes particular pleasure in combining historical narrative with personal experience.

He studied German and French at Keble College, Oxford, before doing two postgraduate courses, a diploma in the History and Philosophy of Science at Oxford and Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, completing the latter in 1968. After working in journalism with Reuters and in publishing with Time-Life Books, he turned to writing, with occasional forays into film, TV and radio.

In the 1990s, he began a trilogy on the three major revolutions in writing: writing itself, the alphabet and printing with movable type. This has so far resulted in two books, Alpha Beta and The Gutenberg Revolution, both republished in 2009. The third, on the origin of writing, is on hold, because it depends on access to Iraq.

He returned to the subject of Mongolia with Gobi: Tracking the Desert, the first book on the region since the 1920s. Work in Mongolia led to Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, which has so far appeared in 18 languages. Attila the Hun and Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China completed a trilogy on Asian leaders. A revised edition of his book on Genghis Khan, with the results of an expedition up the mountain on which he is supposed to be buried, was upcoming in autumn 2010.

The Terracotta Army coincided with the British Museum exhibition (September 2007- April 2008). This was followed by The Great Wall. The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan combines history and leadership theory. Xanadu: Marco Polo and the Discovery of the East was published in autumn 2009, and Samurai: The Last Warrior, the story of Saigō Takamori's doomed 1877 rebellion against the Japanese emperor, was published in February 2011.

In 2007 John Man was awarded Mongolia's Friendship Medal for his contributions to UK-Mongolian relations.

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 3 out of 5]

A narrow goal - trace how the alphabet came into being - becomes a meandering story, complex and multifaceted, yet is drawn together pretty well. I know John Man from his history of well known figures (Atilla, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, Marco Polo); groups (Ninja and Samurai) and Chinese landmarks (the great wall, the terracotta army, the Gobi Desert). I have read five of his previous books and own a few more. I enjoy the wide sweep that he gives his topic, picking at the seams and circling back on his arguments. They usually incorporate aspects of travelogue with history in short readable chapters, not too heavy.

He does a pretty good job on this one, as complex and challenging as the task is. There are parts where he goes a bit speculative, creating 'possible' situations to explain finds or events, also some speculative reasoning behind the inconsistencies of the 'facts' of the bible. The author tracks the development of various written forms of language - and is careful not to get drawn into the separate spiral of oral language development, which would probably be even more complex.

There is a strong focus on what is borrowed from earlier scripts, what is changed and what develops, where the written language is used and what for. There are discussions on whether written language changes are driven top down or not (change requires control and motivation; alternately writing is the charge of scribes and artisans, not kings); and we are told about numerous alphabets - Egyptian hieroglyphics, proto-Sinaitic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, Etruscan before the Roman alphabet reaches parity with our modern alphabet. On the way she examines the Slavic alphabet (which becomes Cyrillic - which incidentally I learned how to say, when I discovered it was named after Brother Cyril) and the clever Korean alphabet - the letters of which reflect the position of the tongue in pronouncing the sound of the letter!

There are some interesting historic insights along the way, and the reading is easy and straight forward, however for me the learning doesn't hang about long, so this could be more of a reference book than a once-read narrative. The speculative stories went on a bit long for me, which dropped a star, whereas other places the detail felt clipped, or too far from the point of the narrative, which dropped me back another star.

3 stars.

[David]

Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World

by John Man

I checked out Alpha Beta from the library of the Archangel Michael Greek Orthodox Church library where we gather sometimes for our Greek conversation class.

First, I read a little about the author, John Man, who seemed like he might be a rather interesting writer. I, as we all have probably, wondered where “X” came from or “Q” for example, but Man didn’t cover individual letters so much. Instead, he tackled the evolution of our alphabet as a whole interspersed with a few interesting diversions on history.

I like this sort of thing and found some useful information. I probably could have hopped around Wikipedia or Britannica and have accomplished more. I had hoped that he might enlighten me on how Chinese script developed, since he has experience with China. He did however explain a little about Mongolian script. His bit on what the Mongolians had done piqued my interest more in what kind of man Genghis Khan was really like. He also introduced an interesting perspective about the script of Korea.

I have to say, in my view, that almost any subject is best appreciated and learned if introduced and discussed in its historical setting: such as mathematics, or U.S. politics, or art, music, etc. It's almost mandatory with the field of philosophy. This book would serve as a pretty good introduction to how the West got its alphabet.

John Man did show, but not as deeply as I would have liked, how our alphabet originated and tracked over many centuries and many cultures to where it is now and has become universal if not cosmological. I think he could have done a better job of this. As Moses (who is discussed here) might have said about the author, “The works of Man is the measure of Man.”

[Marc Weidenbaum]

Like a lot of books with high-concept titles, this one isn't really true to its billing. It is not a biography or even a history of the alphabet as we English-speakers know it. It's a survey of all the alphabets that have battled it out over the history of humankind -- a broader editorial scope that is challenging to sum up pithily. Certainly there's an emphasis on all things A to Z, but with a lot of time spent on Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and so forth. (The Korean material is especially interesting.) It's a fascinating, relatively quick read.

One side note: there's a fascinating side bit in here about Thomas A. Sebeok, a retired professor from Bloomington, Illinois, who developed a plan for how to mark for thousands of years that a given spot is poisoned by nuclear waste.

Showing that no symbols could do the job, he determines that the best plan, if any, would be to create an "atomic priesthood" whose sole role would be to maintain the continuity of this important information, generation after generation.

Even though I've followed the Long Now organization for many years, I only now have connected Sebeok's plan with the group's projections, and with Neal Stephenson's novel, Anathem, which features a priesthood quite similar to the one described here.

According to this post from the Long Now, Sebeok was not on the minds of the group's founders, even though there are striking parallels in their perspectives:

http://blog.longnow.org/2008/07/16/co...

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.

John Man is good at a certain kind of popular history book, as I’ve noted before. There are often elements of travelogue, and it’s usually a very easy read, with quite short chapters and not too many long quotations from sources or anything like that. It’s not the most rigorous scholarship in the world, but it’s a good way to get a handle on a subject and get an initial idea of whether you’re interested in reading more. Sometimes there are interesting titbits about newer scholarship that might be a bit more controversial — you catch the drift.

Alpha Beta, then, is Man’s take on the alphabet. Other people have mentioned expecting that he’d just discuss each letter in turn and where we picked it up from, but Man is somewhat more ambitious: he’s after the origin of the Roman alphabet as we know it, and more generally the origin of writing as a form of expression. He has some very interesting points, including about Korea’s hyper-rational alphabet that is designed to be ideal for writing down the language. (Though I do wonder if that will stick after a few centuries of use and language change.)

He has a whole bit on the influence of the alphabet on monotheism that made surprisingly little impact on me and I only remembered when checking over the Amazon reviews to refresh my mind to write this — although actually, I think what he wrote was more the other way round, that monotheism had an impact on the emergence of the alphabet, because he wrote about how useful it can be for an emerging social group to adopt an alphabet. The Mongols (a pet topic of his, clearly, since he’s written books on Genghis and Kublai Khan, etc) were also an example in that context.

Overall, it’s an interesting if not exactly exhaustive read.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

While this is not a history of the twenty-six individual letters of our Roman alphabet, Man’s slender volume instead focuses on the idea (or meme) of an alphabet. More specifically, he deftly maneuvers between the development of pictorial writing systems, syllabaries, and finally alphabets first by way of Ancient China, the Near East, and then the early cultures of the Mediterranean. Of course, he doesn’t cover much new territory in the bulk of this volume that hasn’t already been explore or elaborated on elsewhere in both the academic and lay-reader world. (David Sacks’ well-written Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A-to-Z covers the same ground but in greater detail.)

If I were to sing praises to any part of Man’s book, I more than happy to single out the last two chapters, “Why We Don’t Write Etruscan” and “The Limits to Growth.” In the first, Man takes us on an interesting historical detour as he recounts the explosive growth in the field of Etruscan studies starting in the seventeenth century after it lay relatively unknown for almost two millennia. Of course, much about these people still remains a mystery, as very little survives the careless and wanton destruction of their antiquities by both ancient Romans and the Enlightenment treasure hunters and scavengers. In the last chapter, Man sheds light on just how and why the Western and Eastern Europe split when the latter adopted the Cyrillic alphabet – and why several, including Romania, later switched. (Which recalls the same reason modern Turkey, under Ataturk, ditched Arabic script for Roman.)

Man’s style balances both an effective readability with condensed scholarship that can please both the neophyte and the well-read.

[John Isles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an easy-reading account of the history of alphabets, the ancient peoples who used them, and their modern discoverers. In the course of the story the author introduces his thesis crediting the alphabet for the rise of monotheism and indeed much of western civilization; but these ideas seem to be undermined by the use of alphabetic scripts for example in polytheistic Hindu India, and the ascendency throughout most of history of the alphabet-free Chinese civilization.

I had quite a few quibbles on points of detail. In Latin there's no such word as literariensis (p. 14); the word the author seeks is 'litteratus.' Euboea is the third-largest island in the Eastern Mediterranean (after Cyprus and Crete), not second-largest (p. 197). 'De Etruria Regali Libri Septem' means 'Seven Books Concerning Royal Etruria,' not '... the Kingdom of Etruria,' since it wasn't a kingdom (p. 241). Claudius did not introduce the letter F (p. 261); he did introduce three new letters, but they were all later dropped (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia...). Twice the author quotes Pliny, without a reference; he doesn't say whether he means Pliny the Elder, author of the Natural History, or the letter-writer Pliny the Younger. Several other errors noted might charitably be considered misprints.

[Andrew Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brisk account of history of the alphabet, from its Egyptian versions, through Sumerian cuneiform, the Phoenician alphabet, its Greek adoption, followed by the Etruscan version, and finally its Roman version used now. Well paced and interestingly written, provides a good overview how our Roman alphabet has originated.

My Notes:
The cuneiform writing system was in use for more than three millennia, through several stages of development, from the 31st century BC down to the second century AD. It was well suited to record Sumerian, because was built on a skeleton of syllables and four vowels. (p.41)

The Sumerians were succeeded by Akkadian Empire, which adopted Sumerian cuneiforms to their own Semitic language. (p.43)

The Sumerian poem "Epic of Gilgamesh" refers to a king of Ur, who ruled around 2100 BC. It was discovered in 1850 and translated in 1870s. It cast a new light on the Bible about a story of the Flood (p.45).

The Rosetta stone, weighting 762 kg, was discovered in 1799 during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. It was inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. It took twenty years to decipher it (p.51).

In 1928 a Syrian farmworker discovered remains of necropolis of a Phoenician capital known as Ugarit. Their alphabet, aside the letters that represent Ugaritian sounds, had a similar sequence to Roman: a, b, d, h, j, k, l, m, etc. and were used around 1300 BC. (p.169)

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. (p.198)

The Etruscan civilisation was an ancient civilisation created by the Etruscans, a people who inhabited Etruria in ancient Italy. The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. Etruscan civilisation dominated Italy until it fell to the expanding Rome beginning in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars. Rome's first historical king, Tarquinius, was no Roman. In 509 BC Rome turned republican and threw the last Etruscan king out (p.257).

[Yibbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully readable book about a confusing subject or group of subjects. I had never given any thought to how our alphabet developed, or the depth of study it requires. For instance, did you know that there is a whole sub-specialty dedicated to the various pronunciations of r, or that they still can’t read Etruscan? Once you think about it the alphabet is really a very confusingly inadequate thing. After all, there are so many sounds that it can’t represent, but to have a symbol for every sound is impractical also. So why does it work?
How did it come to be? Unfortunately, there isn’t enough historical documentation to give us solid facts. That doesn’t stop researchers from manufacturing their own stories around the scanty few facts that have been uncovered. Those facts are really fascinating even if they are open to opposing interpretations. The dating of each of these evolutions is especially contested.
This is where I disagree with several of his theories. He approaches the historical record as a modern secular historian would. Because of its literary importance, he discusses the Bible quite a bit. He does not accept any miraculous even or timeline that doesn’t fit with current secular theories. I am a conservative Christian so I accept the Biblical record as correct, and that secular historians just haven’t found the evidence of it yet. Remember the Hittites? Anyway, there was a large section where he speculates quite freely about an alternate history of Israel. He is quite honest about it being his personal theory and that his method leaves the text open to interminable interpretations.
The rest of the book focusses on the evolution of the Roman alphabet from the Phoenician scripts, through the Greek, and to the modern day. That was really interesting.
For an introduction to this topic, this is a great book. The style was very engaging.
As I remember there was one curse word. There was a section that discussed Greek homosexual practices. That section is brief and there are no intimate details, but just be warned it's there.

[Grace Wiles · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a 3.5

I was pleased with the way that Man actually engages readers in what we feel ought to be a long and tedious history of the Latin alphabet. He injects a good amount of “fluff” — fun information that’s not super relevant to his thesis — for the sake of maintaining the reader’s attention on his page, which is good, but it also means that these nearly 300 pages could have been something like 100. Idk. I’m glad I read it!

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a strange and beautiful thing — to think that our entire civilization, our stories, our revolutions, our love letters, our holy texts, our treaties, and our text messages — all trace their lineage back to a handful of scratches and symbols, slowly morphing across clay, parchment, and pixel. John Man’s Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World is an ode to that astonishing inheritance.

Man, equal parts historian and storyteller, gives language the grandeur it deserves and the intimacy it demands. His voice is curious, erudite, and tinged with awe — the kind of tone you imagine from someone who still feels childlike wonder when looking at an alphabet chart. Yet the book isn’t sentimental.

It is a clear-eyed, thrilling history of how letters became the scaffolding of thought itself.

Man begins not with the Greeks, but further back — to the Phoenicians, the forgotten architects of our symbolic DNA. He draws connections between the alphabets of the ancient Mediterranean — Egyptian hieroglyphs, Semitic consonants, and the Greek introduction of vowels — and the later Roman refinements that gave birth to the Latin alphabet. Nevertheless, what is so compelling here is not the chronology; it’s the humanity that glimmers through it.

We meet traders and priests, kings and scribes — each playing their part in transforming symbols into sound, and sound into civilisation. The story of the alphabet, Man reminds us, is also the story of democratisation.

Hieroglyphs belonged to elites, to the initiated few; alphabets, on the other hand, brought writing to the many.

They turned speech into something that could be owned, copied, and argued with.

Reading about the evolution of letters feels strangely emotional. “A,” that sharp-angled beginning of everything, once represented an ox’s head. “M” — waves of water. “O” — the eye that sees. Each letter carries a fossil memory, a ghost of something once tangible. Man resurrects those ghosts with a historian’s precision and a poet’s affection.

What elevates Alpha Beta from mere linguistics is Man’s insistence that alphabets are not neutral. The spread of the Latin alphabet across Europe and beyond was a story of empire, conquest, conversion, and capitalism. When missionaries brought letters, they also brought gods; when colonisers inscribed maps, they redrew destinies.

In tracing the rise of the Western alphabet, Man implicitly tells the story of globalisation’s earliest machinery — the written word as coloniser. But he doesn’t moralise. Instead, he invites reflection: every word we write is both a gift and a ghost, an echo of some long-forgotten decision made on a Phoenician trading route or a Greek island millennia ago.

And yet, there’s wonder too. The alphabet was also liberation — freeing thought from memory, allowing it to travel beyond the limits of the tongue. Without it, there is no Plato or Shakespeare, no Descartes, no Dickinson, no Derrida. The alphabet democratised immortality.

Man’s chapters flow like a travelogue — from the desert inscriptions of the ancient Near East to the monastic scriptoria of mediaeval Europe, from Gutenberg’s printing press to the sleek sans-serifs of the digital age. He has a knack for detail that anchors abstraction: you can almost smell the ink, feel the roughness of papyrus, and hear the clatter of type in a Victorian print shop.

His section on typography is particularly hypnotic — tracing how letterforms became both aesthetic and ideological. The evolution from Gothic blackletter to the clean lines of Roman type mirrored Western civilisation’s shift from mysticism to rationalism, from collective faith to individual clarity.

And when Man turns to the digital age, he’s wistful but not alarmist. He notes that our screens are still bound to those same ancient shapes — A to Z — suggesting that, even in our emojis and abbreviations, we remain tethered to Phoenician DNA. “The alphabet endures,” he writes, “because it is the simplest possible miracle.”

When I first read Alpha Beta, during the season of Diwali, last month, it felt less like reading a history book and more like tracing my own mind. I began to look differently at every line I wrote on a page, every word I typed. It was as if I could feel the ghosts of millennia vibrating beneath each letter.

The book also hit a strange emotional chord — a mix of humility and awe. We take our alphabet for granted, yet it is the quietest, most constant companion of our species. Man’s narrative made me grateful for literacy itself, that everyday magic that lets us preserve thought beyond flesh.

Somewhere between anthropology and autobiography, Alpha Beta reminded me of the fragility of meaning — how a tiny curve or stroke can change worlds. It is humbling, knowing that our entire civilisation rests on such brittle beauty.

What I admire most about John Man’s approach is that he refuses to separate intellect from imagination. His prose has rhythm — almost musical — and he lets etymology sing. He finds poetry in paleography, sensuality in syntax. Reading him, you realize that the alphabet is not just a tool of reason but also of desire — each letter a small gesture toward immortality.

And there’s a philosophical undercurrent running through the text: if our letters shape our world, do they also shape how we think? Does the alphabet teach us linearity, causality, and narrative? Would thought itself look different if we’d evolved with another system — say, ideograms or pictographs?

These questions make Alpha Beta quietly radical. Beneath its historical calm lies an epistemological earthquake: language is not a mirror of the world; it creates the world.

What Impact Did the Book Have on Me?

It re-enchanted the ordinary. I began to see letters everywhere — in cracks on walls, branches against the sky, and the patterns of light through blinds. The alphabet, once invisible, became intimate again.

The book also deepened my empathy as a reader and teacher. Understanding that each letter carries a story — of migration, adaptation, survival — makes every word feel like a small civilisation. I became gentler with language, more patient with its histories, and more alert to its silent revolutions.

Moreover, perhaps most profoundly, it made me question permanence. The alphabet feels eternal, but it is not. Civilisations vanish; scripts die. That fragility — that constant negotiation between endurance and oblivion — is what gives writing its pulse.

Why Should You Read This Book Today?

Oh, this one is easy. I wholeheartedly recommend it to all. Why? Simply because we are living in a time when language is dissolving — emojis replacing words, AI generating paragraphs, and attention spans fracturing into fragments.

In such an age, Alpha Beta is both a reminder and a warning: our letters are not just tools; they are the architecture of consciousness.

Reading this book today is an act of cultural renewal. It reconnects you to the invisible machinery of thought.

It makes you aware that every time you write, you are participating in a lineage older than empire, older than art—a lineage that began when someone, somewhere, decided that an ox’s head could mean a sound.

It is a story about the origins of meaning, yes — but also about how fragile meaning remains.

My Final Verdict:

John Man’s Alpha Beta is part history, part love letter to the alphabet — and through it, to the human mind itself. It reminds us that civilisation began not with the sword, but with the stylus.

If you’ve ever loved books, words, or the sheer miracle of expression, this is your scripture.

If you’ve ever forgotten how miraculous the written word is, this is your awakening.

Man teaches us that our 26 letters are not mere symbols. They are, in his phrase, “the DNA of thought.”

And in realising that, you begin to see the alphabet not just as a tool — but as the oldest poem we ever wrote, and the one we’re still writing.

[Jo Coleman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a proper rambling professor book and as such I can't really decide whether it should have five stars or two. Half the time he is explaining cuneiform and the spread of the Cyrillic alphabet brilliantly, and half the time he is giffing on about anecdotes from his schooldays. I will be keeping it around for the excellent appendix of all the alphabets.

[Remington Purnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alpha Beta is the equivalent of asking your grandmother what the depression was like but she ends up talking about her brother's socks for three hours instead. Not about the alphabet at all, but its sins are forgiven because it's still interesting and well-written.

[Christopher Rush · Rating 1 out of 5]

Take your pick: "complete shash," "utter piffle," "an embarrassment to humanity in every conceivable way," "an insult to people who think, have thought, or have accidentally bumped into people who have," "bigoted propaganda," "unbridled Antisemitism" (the only acceptable form of racism in academic circles, apparently), and possible more, but I am wholly tired of thinking about this thing (calling it a "book" is more than I can presently bear). I've read a few disappointing books this year, but man, this has to be the worst. As many have said, the wholly misleading title is less relevant to the content than had it just been called "Pages with Words on Them: Maybe."

Statistically, most of this book is about the Eastern world, and like most of his coterie, Man lambastes the Western world and apotheosizes the East. Except for that "insignificant" people group, the "Asiatics," Man's embarrassing epithet for the Jewish people. Yes, he calls them an "insignificant" people multiple times. Perhaps one should notify the hundreds of thousands of people who have dedicated their entire existences to exterminate said people group that they are, in reality, "insignificant." I mean, honestly. His entire section on Israel was so surfeited with vitriolic arrogance, it's incredible it got passed anyone posing as an editor. Calling the Bible "Semitic legends" is one thing, but saying there's no archaeological evidence for Abraham and therefore none of the Bible is true is an embarrassment to all thinking and pre-thinking entities. I suppose there is archaeological evidence for Chingis Khan, Julius Caesar, and all the other famous people of history whose existences by which we have but anecdotal evidence to go. Their thigh bones, for example. Or dental records. Chariot licenses replete with photographic identification, no doubt.

Fortunately, Man's summary of what the Bible says is so wholly inaccurate it could potentially be laughable over time, but while I was reading it (a generous term) I felt a spiritual kinship to King David, one of the earliest kings of this "insignificant" people, and likely experienced what Shepherd David felt internally when he first heard the cacophonous tones of that tall fellow from Gath. Laying all that aside, this book surely must be embarrassing even to an atheist. In one chapter, Man admits multiple times our understanding of Egyptian history and chronology is largely inductive, i.e., wholly made up, using the same high-quality techniques paleontologists use to tell us from bones how some dinosaurs were colorblind and disliked R&B.

As admirable as it is he admits our understanding of pre-historic cultures is as tenuous as a successful guppy-holding contest during a nor'easter aboard a capsizing schooner, he utterly elides all his waning credibility by declaring "since the Bible doesn't fit into our timeline for Egypt, the Bible is completely wrong." Man is so afraid of admitting the potential boons of Judaism or Christianity, he goes so far as to water down the work done by the widows Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint as having "made peace" among the Huaorani after their husbands were killed - and then he has the gall to imply his ethnolinguistic work among the Huaorani was even more important than what they did! Honestly. Topping all this (and, painfully, far more), he tells us at the very end of this diatribe the efforts of Tyndale (and by extension Wycliffe Bible Translators, SIL, and all the others) to translate the Bible into all the languages of the world as "anthropologically dangerous." Yes, Mr. Man, telling different people groups what other people groups believe in their own languages is dangerous - maybe you should have thought about that when you tried to tell us Westerners how much better Easterners are?

As I said before, this book has almost nothing to do with the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. Most of the book is about how great the Chinese language and script are, how great Egypt's hieroglyphics were, how horrible Rome was for pretending the Etruscans didn't exist (and everything Etruscan is incalculably superior to everything Roman), and Cyrillic is even better than Times New Roman - and all the people who use Cyrillic, especially Stalin, are infinitely superior to people who use Roman letters (except for Man and his friends, no doubt). Man spends about 17 pages scattered throughout to eventually get to the origin of the Latin alphabet. He spends no meaningful time discussing "how 26 letters shaped the western world," which one would think he would have gotten around to, since that is the subtitle of this thing. Perhaps it's a mis-translation from the original Mongolian.

He does spend an uproarious several dozens of pages telling us authoritatively how people have guessed about the origins of the Egyptian alphabet. "Since this symbol is an ox, and that sound also begins the word for 'mother,' it's quite likely all ancient Egyptian scribes used the ox symbol when they wanted to write the letter 'm.'" It's about that sensible. All of which, he admits, is pure speculation. So much of this book is Man selecting whatever made-up origin stories he prefers from his friends and telling us in rather acerbic ways how it's probably right. Thus, when cultures such as his friends and Eastern cultures make up entire narratives to explain things without any proof, it's okay. When Israelites do it, it's an attack on everything pure and decent in the world. Seems somewhat of a double standard.

I suggest you don't read this book. It doesn't have much of anything to do with the origins or influences of the Roman alphabet. All influences have apparently been detrimental. Man has nothing accurate or respectful to say about cultures of which he doesn't approve; and when he relates anecdotes about Eastern rulers sacrificing thousands of victims, he laughs it off as something people sometimes do, goofy old tyrants. I can't understand why some people love this book. Oh, wait. Yes, I can.

Usually I give away (or when feeling mercenary sell or trade in) books I know I'm not going to read again and ones my children will likely not need or want, but I just can't give this to any other human being. I don't know anyone I dislike enough to give him or her this thing. I'll return it back to the earth, allowing it to nutrify the subterranean universe. Avoid this thing.

[Richard Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first three quarters of this books is awesome. It answers a bunch of half-formed questions I've always had but didn't know how to ask. The scholarship is excellent; the narrative is entertaining; the information is useful and engaging.

Until it isn't. I swear the last chapter was meant to lead into something wonderful that he forgot to write. We're learning about the Glagolitic alphabet and the history of the Russian church and the invention of Cyrillic letters and their spread to Mongolia and then... you reach the appendices. The book just stops, without summation, like a stream soaking into the ground. Maybe my copy is missing a chapter or something.

Oh, well. The first 6 or 7 chapters in particular are worth the price, and then some. His discussion of the alphabet as a sort of evolutionary winner really makes sense, and I'd like to see more historians follow up on that theme and expand his ideas. Same with the Etruscan to Latin alphabet discussion--I'd like to see more of that. Still got questions there.

In any case, I'm interested enough to look up his other books. Maybe he's got another gem.

[Bernie4444 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good supplement to The Iliad and the Odyssey

There are quite a few books on the 26 letters and how they shape the Western world. Concentration is usually the impact of phonetic alphabets on the thought processes and recordings of people, especially in the Western world.

This book is not much different other than the fact that it has more supplemental information from the point of view of the author (John Man) a historian and a traveler. Because this has his unique and put there is a great section on Greek literature including the Iliad and Odyssey as it relates to being written down; John Man consequently gives supplemental information that is useful for people planning to read either the Iliad or the Odyssey.

If you just bought this book for the history and impact of 26 letters, then you will find appendices one and two to have very useful graphs for that purpose.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than just a book about the development of the alphabet, Alpha Beta incorporates the development of languages and histories of the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern parts of the world and how alphabets impacted evolution. I was not aware that Constantine changed his name before he died to Cyril which was then used to describe the form of writing we now know as Cyrillic. John Man's writing style makes it fun to read; not all dry facts. He weaves in myths and popular bible stories making it all come together with more relevance.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was looking for a book about language, and I found it, kind of. This book includes many helpful and informative pieces of historical context to the development of the alphabet and others, but unfortunately is also loaded with unhelpful and irrelevant historical stories, anecdotes, and snippet biographies. About 2/3 included Greek myths, Biblical retellings, the lifetime accomplishments of this leader or that leader, with a weak and hard to follow connection to the overall language aspect that I am interested in. Would not recommend.

[Karen Carlson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the main topic of the book - the history of the alphabet - hard to follow, particularly in the later chapters. However, I found many of the individual topics (distractions from the main topic) very interesting - the development of the Korean alphabet and the proposal of an Atomic Priesthood in particular.
FMI see my blog post at A Just Recompense.

[Reem Ka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so glad that I went back to the bookstore and bought this book. It is an essential read for all of us since we are using the alphabets on a daily basis. It gives you a clear idea on the originality of the different alphabets used by different cultures. The author did an excellent work by explaining the story of how the alphabet came into being. 5 stars out of 5.

[Robert Monk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slight, but amusing. If one knows a bit about the development of language already, there's not much to be found here.

[Sweemeng Ng · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good history on western literacy.

[Tsholo Mothibi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, lyrical and absolutely sublime

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the linguistic development story I was expecting but a really interesting analysis of how power, conquest and imperialism led to written language.

[Stephen Bywater · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meandering, but thoroughly engaging.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and readable account of the history of writing and alphabets. As a general history, it is recommendable.

[Ebbi · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is well-written and engaging, I recommend

[Preposterone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thorough, though some lengthy digressions. Could be more international

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but didn’t quite go into the detail I wanted, while providing too much in other areas. Would still recommend as worthwhile for those interested in how things came to be.

[Oona · Rating 2 out of 5]

De meeste stukken konden me niet echt boeien en ik heb de rode draad niet weten te spotten

[Sohini Bhattacharyya · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Man is one of my favourite authors. Alpha Beta was informative, but lacked flow. A clear conclusion or stance seems missing. Will possibly re-read this book to figure out if I understand it better then.