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

by David Sacks

Letters are tangible language. Joining together in endless combinations to actually show speech, letters convey our messages and tell our stories. While we encounter these tiny shapes hundreds of times a day, we take for granted the long, fascinating history behind one of the most fundamental of human inventions -- the alphabet.

The heart of the book is the 26 fact-filled “biographies” of letters A through Z, each one identifying the letter’s particular significance for modern readers, tracing its development from ancient forms, and discussing its noteworthy role in literature and other media. We learn, for example, why the letter X has a sinister and sexual aura, how B came to signify second best, why the word “mother” in many languages starts with M, and what is the story of O.

Packed with information and lavishly illustrated, Language Visible is not only accessible and entertaining, but essential to the appreciation of our own language.

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

395 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

American linguist living in Canada.

Reviews

[Punk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read three books about the origins of what's often called the Roman alphabet. The first was terrible. The second was more helpful but also more focused on God's role in the alphabet. I read this one last and it was exactly what I wanted. It has an introduction about alphabets and what they are and how they work (and writing systems that aren't alphabets and how they work), then it goes through each letter and traces its history from Egypt to England: Its likely origins, what it looked like, how it changed over time, the sounds it made/makes, and how it's used in Indo-European languages today, complete with images of specific examples of historical writing. Sacks also does a decent job of writing about speech and sounds in a way that made sense to me, in addition to using a bunch of technical terms that I mostly ignored.

Originally published in the Ottawa Citizen as a weekly series, the chapters tend to repeat themselves on the basic facts, but I actually appreciated the repetition. It meant I got a real feeling for how and when the alphabet spread from place to place, but also that I could take my time reading this or even, if I were a different sort of person, read it out of order without missing something. It also does an excellent job of referring you back to previous chapters wherever there's overlap, with page numbers and everything.

The only real problem here is the layout, which is awful. It has a lot of great charts, diagrams, photos, and illustrations, but sometimes the sidebars overwhelm the main text. At one point a sidebar butts in and there's a thirteen page break in the text, just like, mid-sentence. At thirteen pages that's no longer a sidebar.

This doesn't have end notes and there were times I wanted Sacks to cite his sources, but that was mostly for my own curiosity. It has a complete bibliography, including some interviews conducted by the author, as well as illustration credits with page numbers for all images, and an index, which should have been more thorough. I know this book mentioned Julius Caesar more than twice, but when I checked the index for the part that talks about how both kaiser and czar came from Caesar, it was nowhere to be found.

A well written and accessible pop history that taught me a lot about the alphabet and how information moved around back in those heady BC days. A five star book with three star formatting. If you only read one book about the alphabet that I have also read, make it this one.

[Ensiform · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the title says, this is a look through the story of the Roman alphabet. But the title notwithstanding, Sacks illuminates not just "our" alphabet, but the journey its ancestors, from the Phoenician to Etruscan to the Greek to the Roman to Old English, took to get there. Scratched into rock, carved into Roman marble, inked by medieval monks and formed into uncials, then printed, the alphabet's history spans four thousand years, and Sacks traces the journey of each of our 26 letters across those millennia. The narrative of the initial chapters gets a bit convoluted at times, when one digression is followed or even split by another digression and the main text continues several pages later. This is an odd and distracting editorial choice, and even made me hesitate to continue; why not just make these lengthy pieces their own chapters or sub-chapter so the text isn't interrupted? However, once the letter chapters start, the book finds a good flow, and it is an absolute treasure trove of fascinating facts. There's information on the evolution of letter shapes, the evolution of letter names and pronunciation, how regional accents affect spelling, frequency of letter use in various languages, the letters' cultural meanings today — Sacks has read and studied everything, it appears. His book is deeply researched and thorough, dripping with erudition, every page packed with information. Yet Sacks conveys this information in a light, readable prose style, with amusing asides and pithy quotes by medieval grammarians.

[Kirsten · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received this book from someone who didn't finish it, on the chance that I would.
I won't.

Me, reading:
Oh, this chapter is quickly interrupted by an inset. A seven page inset? Well let's find the rest of my paragraph and finish it. Right, now back to the inset. Hang on, this inset is interrupted mid-paragraph by a 2 page nested inset! Alright, let's finish that paragraph and the rest of the inset, then the nested inset... now, where was I? Right, page three of the actual chapter.

I assume these special boxes and graphics are to break up the text and keep the reader going, as in a textbook. After all, who would want to read a whole long chapter on lexicography? But the answer is: me. I'm an adult and no one is forcing me to read; I chose to be here, you don't have to trick me into staying.

The problems with these sidebars are many. Much of the history is here, but broken up and spread throughout the chapters, so that often it seems to have at best a tangential relationship to the chapter topic (here I am in the chapter on 'B', reading about the Etruscan lack of the vowel 'O'). Also, the smaller / more nested the box, the more the font changes. It's awful hard to read lightly shaded 8 point italic when we're talking about individual letters. Is that a lowercase k? a b? Wait is it a Hebrew character? For fun I showed someone the (tiny) map of Phoenician territories and asked them to read a place name for me - any place shown. They couldn't. Maybe that information isn't important - but then why include the map at all? Finally, each separate narrative - chapter text, inset, nested graphic - seems to assume that I won't read the others, and is thus increasingly repetitive. Unfortunately the most interesting details have been in the sidebars, and without them the chapters are only maybe 8 pages long, so I'd have to keep reading them.

My biggest grievance is in the tone. Too often it's assumed that avoiding technical terms is the way to make a book 'accessible.' Let's say you introduce the concept of a glottal stop. You explain the sound, and when it's used, and that we don't have it consistently our language or in our orthography, but others do, etc... thereafter, you can refer to it as a glottal stop. Refusing to, or calling it some weird unidentifiable other sound thingy or whatever, does not make your text accessible or lively, it just makes me think you think I'm stupid. And maybe I expect more scholarly speech from linguistic books, but I don't think that's the problem. Yes, there's an extra annoyance when I already know the terms, but I've run into this in various other books on topics in which I'm hardly an expert, and it bothers me every time.

All that being said, I do applaud the interest and research. This might be a decent book for a very casual reader or someone hunting for cocktail tidbits. And I might look up one or two topics that I'd like to read more about - I just won't read them here.

[Allebara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot rate this highly enough. Full of so many bizarre facts about things you never considered - why letters are called as they are, what words came from French vs German and why, how alphabets were made etc etc. Will read it again at some point so I can try to remember more of what I read!

[Biblio Curious · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect for your purse or book bag! This book is a great errands accessory and conversation starter. A lot can be learned from people's reactions to things and this book is a portable social experiment.

It has 26 chapters, one for the history of each letter. Lots of pictures and humor. There's such a variety of information: trivia, history, humor, linguistics. All of it is presented in essay format that reads like a TV Series.

My copy has been out in the rain, chewed on by a puppy, on a ferry and in countless bathrooms. Reactions ranged from sudden linguaphiles to linguistic knuckle-draggers.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating history of the English alphabet, broken down by letter. Sacks tells you who first created the letter (to the best of our knowledge), how it was used and pronounced in its original language, and how it came to be drawn and pronounced as it is today. A wonderful book for nerds. Now being published under an alternate title, Letter Perfect.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Language Visible is a most excellent book. Finally, all my questions about the alphabet are answered: why we have hard and soft Gs, two sizes of letters, and two different styles of printing lowercase a. Now I know why the Spanish J is pronounced as the English H and why C is duplicated by K and S. It feels like I have been waiting for this for years.

It is written in an informal, conversational style, with the occasional dip into irreverence. Originally a series of magazine articles, there is a lot of redundancy. The same concepts are explained over and over again, in each chapter were they might apply. I did not mind this, however, because I found many of the concepts difficult to grasp. For me, it was very useful to have mouthfuls like fricative and bilabial defined in Chapter F and again in Chapter V and again in Chapter S and then again. Also fascinating were his many practical examples, demonstrating to the reader how one sound can change into another.

I found this book to be informative and addicting. It has well earned its place on my bookshelf.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely enjoyed this -- a truly fun read. Full of information and hearty doses of linguistic geekness. Gets a little crazy here and there (hard to tell it all fresh 26 times and writing about sound variations proves precarious), but it's ultimately a splendid read from A to Z. 😉

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! I was frequently sounding out phonemes and giving little tidbits of information to my wife. She wasn't as into it as I was. Lots of great information, very readable.

[Cathryn Conroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talk about getting into the weeds! If you're passionate about words, then you're probably interested in letters, and if you're interested in letters, then you may also be interested in their history. This book isn't for everyone, but I found it fascinating.

Prodigiously researched and written by David Sacks, this is the detailed and comprehensive—okay, meticulous—history of each of our 26 letters. Read this book to find out the origin of each letter and how each one got its shape and sound. And then there are the specific fun facts to know and tell: Why is X the unknown? Where did the Irish rock band U2 get its name? Which two letters were the last to be included in the alphabet? (Spoiler alert: The answer is J and V.)

Each chapter is a little biography of the letter, and Sacks offers each letter's chief significance for modern readers—such as A meaning quality and B always being second best. Our alphabet is one of those spectacularly successful inventions. Says Sacks, "Judged on longevity and extent of modern daily use, it compares with the wheel." Why? Like the wheel it transformed the ancient world, it is still with us, and it has never been superseded.

Most importantly, the alphabet gave power to all the people, allowing them to learn how to read and write—and that is still true today.

Our alphabet has a long and storied history beginning in Egypt around 2000 BCE, but even greater credit goes to the Phoenicians in 1000 BCE where about 19 of our letters can be traced directly to Phoenician counterparts. We also have to give thanks to the Greeks, the Etruscans, and the Romans. And in 1066 when the medieval French Normans invaded and conquered England, they brought French vocabulary and spelling rules to England, too.

Some fun facts (read the book for many more!):
• The word "alphabet" combines the first two Greek letters' names: alpha and beta.

• All our original letters began as pictures. A was pictured as an ox. The A's legs were horns pointing upward some 3,000 years ago. A is regarded as the most primitive word sound and is typically the first sound said by a baby.

• Among the 26 letters, S ranks about eighth in frequency of use in printed English, but it is No. 1 as an initial letter. That is, more of our words start with the letter S than any other.

• Fully one third of all English words begin with one of three letters: S, C, or P.

• O is the only letter whose name creates its shape on the speaker's lips.

• The letter with the most calming effect is L. Think of the feeling inspired by "lull," "lullaby," "lollipop," and "la-la-land."

• The letter T is the second most-often-used letter in print after E. But the "T" section of a dictionary isn't especially thick because T occurs more often at the middle or end of words than as the first letter.

Do take time to smile at the chapter titles—one for each letter. They are quite amusing! Some include: "C of Troubles," "F is For—Forget It," "T Party," and "Living with Your X."

While the book is heavy on history—sometimes very, very heavy and even a bit cumbersome—author David Sacks treats the subject with humor. My eyes might glaze over at times, but then I am suddenly laughing out loud.

[Vaishali · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I did not read the book in its entirety… a rarity for me.

Reason: it’s far too convoluted to follow, with an annoyingly conversational tone rather than crisp scientific sets of research building upon one another.

You know… a book.

Getting through the first 25 pages was cumbersome. With so many large boxed “footnotes” -some well over a page long- you are forced to flip back and forth in between pages to try to grasp Sacks’ logic. If there is one, it is nonlinear… which does not help the sincere reader. Each box could have been fleshed out into a full-blown chapter, which I would have wholeheartedly welcomed.

In addition, Sacks promises that each letter of the English alphabet will get a chapter apiece. That, by the way, is a tantalizingly smart and original premise… the book I wanted to read. Instead, “A” finally makes its grand entrance 50% of the way into the book.

Inside each letter, one must plumb through some sticky meandering of Sacks reminding you that a certain letter looks like an umbrella, a cartoon character, or whatever … as if you’ve never seen a letter before in your life :) Awkward and unnecessary. A chronological listing of events? Apparently overrated. Nope. Just throw an idea together with another one, colloquial run-on sentence after run-on sentence… and eventually you are able to sell a teenager’s messy bedroom in the form of a book. Ugh. Was that his target audience?

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5...it is a good history of the alphabet, informative, generally not too technical, sometimes even funny. Its strategy is to take each letter as its own short chapter, which can mean overlap and a lot of repetition, which can be boring. I was also occasionally irritated at his condescending tone, though I understand he has to talk down to his more generalized readers. But it was a good read and I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in words and language studies.

[ayla · Rating 3 out of 5]

if I didn’t have to read it for class I would have liked it more

[Allie D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the perfect before bed read. Interesting but not so enthralling that I couldn’t put it down. The author shared some really interesting facts about the history of the alphabet letter by letter. The writing was not too technical, but did offer plenty of detail.

[Bruce Bean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z
By David Sacks (2003)

David Sacks's Letter Perfect attempts to tell the story of the alphabet through twenty-six individual chapters, one for each letter. The book's fundamental premise proves sound: the alphabet represents one of humanity's most consequential inventions, and tracing its evolution from Egyptian hieroglyphs through Semitic adaptation to Greek refinement and Roman standardization illuminates the development of literacy itself. Unfortunately, Sacks's execution undermines his ambitions. The book reads like a collection of weekly magazine columns awkwardly assembled into book form, lacking cohesive narrative structure and analytical depth. For some readers Letter Perfect will prove a disappointment.

The Core Story

Sacks establishes that the alphabet originated when Semitic tribes in Egypt adopted hieroglyphs not as pictorial symbols but as sounds, enabling them to write down their own Semitic language. This revolutionary simplification occurred around 2000 BCE, transforming writing from a system requiring hundreds or thousands of symbols into one manageable with fewer than thirty.
The alphabet then migrated from the Phoenicians to the Greeks around 800 BCE, a transfer that proved transformative. The Greeks added vowels, which Semitic writing had largely omitted, creating the first true alphabet capable of representing speech with precision. From the Greeks, the alphabet passed to the Etruscans and Romans around 700 BCE.

Sacks traces how "a great deal of change was affected during the Roman Empire as the Romans adapted Greek letters, words and sounds." The Dark Ages brought further evolution, and the invention of printing imposed new standardization pressures. The Norman invasion of 1066 introduced "many French words and pronunciations to the language," fundamentally reshaping English orthography.

A striking detail: "The Roman alphabet has 23 letters. Even Samuel Johnson's dictionary in the late 1500s had only 24, no J or V." Johnson's alphabet thus ran "H, I, K" and "T, U, W," treating J as a variant of I and V as a variant of U. The modern twenty-six-letter alphabet represents relatively recent standardization.

The Structural Problem

The book's organization by individual letters creates inherent difficulties. Each chapter must stand somewhat independently, resulting in repetitive explanations of background context and loss of narrative momentum. The approach suits serialized magazine publication, where readers encounter one letter weekly, but fails in book form where readers progress continuously through all twenty-six chapters.

This structure prevents Sacks from developing sustained analytical arguments about the alphabet's evolution. Instead of tracing how phonetic systems emerged from pictographic writing, or analyzing why certain sounds proved difficult to represent, or exploring the political and cultural forces that shaped standardization, Sacks provides disconnected vignettes about individual letters.

Missed Opportunities

The alphabet's history raises questions Sacks barely addresses. Why did alphabetic writing, once invented, spread so successfully compared to other writing systems? What social and economic conditions enabled Semitic tribes to make the conceptual leap from hieroglyphs to phonetic symbols? How did literacy rates and educational practices change as writing systems simplified? What role did the alphabet play in the development of democracy, philosophy, and law in ancient Greece?

Sacks gestures toward these questions but never pursues them systematically. His letter-by-letter approach encourages antiquarian trivia over historical analysis. Readers learn isolated facts about individual letters without understanding the larger patterns of linguistic evolution.
The book also suffers from inadequate attention to the relationship between spoken and written language. The alphabet represents sounds, but sounds change over time while spelling often does not. English orthography's notorious irregularity reflects centuries of phonetic evolution frozen in outdated spellings. Sacks mentions this phenomenon but never explores its implications for literacy, education, or language standardization.

The Norman Impact

Sacks identifies the Norman invasion of 1066 as a crucial moment when "many French words and pronunciations" entered English. This understates the transformation. Norman French didn't merely add vocabulary; it fundamentally reshaped English grammar, pronunciation, and social stratification of language. The division between Germanic words for common things (cow, pig, sheep) and French-derived words for their meat (beef, pork, mutton) reflects the power dynamics of Norman rule.

Similarly, the inconsistencies in English spelling often reflect attempts to represent French sounds using an alphabet developed for Latin. The letter combinations that seem arbitrary to modern readers made sense in their historical context. Sacks mentions this but doesn't develop the analysis readers need to understand why English spelling proves so challenging.

The Printing Revolution

Sacks notes that "printing had an impact" during the Dark Ages, but this severely understates printing's transformative effect. Before Gutenberg, manuscripts were copied by hand, introducing variations with each transcription. Printing imposed standardization, freezing spelling conventions and making dictionaries possible. The relationship between printing technology and linguistic standardization deserves sustained attention Sacks never provides.

What Works

Despite its limitations, Letter Perfect does convey the basic evolutionary path of the alphabet from Egyptian hieroglyphs through Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman adaptations to modern forms. Readers unfamiliar with this history will learn something valuable about the origins of the writing system they use daily.

The detail about Johnson's twenty-four-letter alphabet reminds readers that even seemingly fundamental elements of literacy are historically contingent. The letters J and V are modern additions, not ancient fixtures. This recognition should prompt awareness that writing systems continue evolving, responding to changing linguistic and technological conditions.

Critical Assessment

Letter Perfect fails as both history and linguistics. As history, it provides inadequate context about the social, economic, and political forces driving alphabetic evolution. As linguistics, it offers insufficient analysis of the relationship between writing systems and spoken language.
The book's magazine-column structure prevents development of sustained arguments or analytical frameworks. Readers encounter disconnected facts about individual letters rather than coherent explanation of systematic patterns. The approach might work for casual browsing but frustrates anyone seeking genuine understanding.

More fundamentally, Sacks never articulates why the alphabet's history matters beyond antiquarian interest. What does understanding alphabetic evolution teach us about language, literacy, cognition, or cultural transmission? How does recognizing the contingency of our writing system inform debates about spelling reform, literacy education, or language preservation? These questions remain unaddressed.

The book's brevity, which might seem a virtue, actually compounds its problems. At magazine-column length, each letter receives inadequate treatment. A longer book with more comprehensive analysis would better serve readers than this collection of sketches.

Recommendation

For readers seeking serious treatment of alphabetic history, linguistics, or writing systems, Letter Perfect proves inadequate. Better alternatives exist that provide both accessible narrative and genuine analytical insight. Sacks's book might serve as light introduction for complete novices, but even casual readers deserve more coherent organization and deeper engagement with the material.
Sacks had worthy material to work with—the alphabet's history genuinely fascinates and illuminates broader questions about human communication and cultural evolution. But his execution, hampered by awkward structure and superficial analysis, squanders the opportunity.

Letter Perfect reads exactly like what it apparently is: weekly columns assembled into book form without the revision necessary to create genuine coherence. The result serves neither readers seeking entertainment nor those pursuing understanding. The alphabet deserves better than this perfunctory treatment, and readers interested in its history should look elsewhere for satisfaction.

Read Letter Perfect only if you have exhausted superior alternatives and seek merely a brief, disjointed introduction to alphabetic evolution. Otherwise, invest your time in works that treat this important subject with the analytical rigor and narrative coherence it deserves. The story of how humanity developed efficient writing systems that enabled the preservation and transmission of knowledge across generations merits more than disconnected magazine columns masquerading as a book.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book on the history of the English alphabet, but I also learned a lot about the other Roman alphabets of Europe. There is a lot of repetition, which the author does his best to avert, but many letters have the same history (Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Roman alphabets). The book layout and design is particularly bad in the beginning. But that all said, much of the material is fascinating if you are at all interested in language and writing/lettering. I'm very glad I read it.

[Natalie aka Tannat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would not recommend reading the book from cover to cover in one sitting, since the design that allows you to jump from one letter to another out-of-order means that there is some repetition that could become tedious. However, it's an accessible book filled with interesting details about the evolution of our Roman alphabet over the millennia. At least check out the chapters on F, G, T, U, Y, and maybe Z. Plus some more.

[Jenn Golden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved every jot and tittle of this book devoted to our alphabet and how it got to us from the Phoenicians, through the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, and Norman French. It was part history, part psychology of brand names, part linguistics, part conversation starter, and all fun.

I would not, however, recommend reading it in one sitting cover to cover. It's better enjoyed as a chapter here and there.

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, delightful, and highly informative

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.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is

[The Final Chapter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mid 2. Sachs provides a sporadically excellent description of the historic development of the alphabet. As opposed to a system based on actual visual representations of the word, pictographs, or writing systems based on symbols to represent words, logograms, the recognisable series of 26 letters can re-combine to form countless patterns of phonemes. Such flexibility can also be transferred across different languages, making the alphabet one of history's most enduring legacies. From it's emergence in Egypt around 2,000BC, probably as an aid to the humble masses of mercenaries and slave labour from semitic cultures in the Near East excluded from the mysteries of hieroglyphics, this small collection of symbols is easily memorised, and has thus become the vehicle for mass literacy. It was adopted by previously illiterate societies and spread through conquest, cultural politics, and as a corollary of trade. Though the Arabic alphabet is associated with Arabic culture, it serves other tongues such as Farsi in Iran or Pashto in Afghanistan. Even in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the adoption of an alphabet can signify desires to espouse modernism, such as Ataturk's switch from the Arabic to Roman alphabet in 1928, or the similar exchange by the trio of ex-Soviet republics of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan from Cyrillic to Roman. The adoption of an alphabet has also led to tragic cases which have spelt historical division - Serbo-Croat has shared features, but due to the rivalry of medieval missionary churches, is written in Cyrillic by Serbs and in Roman by Croats. Similarly, Hindi and Urdu are fundamentally the same but use different script. The author also provides commenatry on the history of attempts to rationalise the spelling rules of English and how the latter may conflict with how our letters have come down to us. Interestingly, he illustrates how American and British spellings diverged. Noah Webster was an American patriot, who took a hiatus in his studies at Yale to serve in the american war of independence, and became acquainted with both Washington and Franklin. Determined to contribute to American identity and unity, he argued that distinct American spellings would end cultural subservience to Britain. Thus, he introduced many spellings, many of which endured, in his dictionary published in 1828. The first traceable progenitor of most of our letters, due to the presence of sample script, is the Phoenician alphabet, which traversed the Near East and Mediterranean between 900-700BC. They were the innovators in seafaring and traded luxuries from the east for raw materials from the west, and composed a collection of trading ports in modern-day Lebanon who extended their influence to trading posts around the Mediterranean shores. Though the script had no vowel letters, being regarded as being of less import than consonants, the transferability allowed it to be adapted wholesale by the Greeks around 800BC. Sachs provides a letter-by-letter synopsis of the most interesting facts surrounding the alphabet, and the origins of some expressions. With regards to our letter 'A', the author reveals that it's progenitor was the Phoenician symbol 'aleph' which was representative of the head of an oxen, and phonetically was equivalent to the glottal stop which graces Cockney accents. It would be the Greeks who would turn the symbol through 90 degrees to our more familair upright position, and change the pronunciation to 'ah'. The author also details how this letter has become commonly identified with its primary position in the alphabet, denoting rank and supremacy. Moreover, Sachs reveals that the expression 'A-okay' has entered usage as the result of a case of mishearing and misinterpretation - during the first manned orbital NASA spaceflight, a simple response of 'okay' from Alan Shepard became misreported and seemingly captured a niche as classifying excellence. Our letter 'B' similarly stems from a Phoenician counterpart denoting 'house' and being named 'beth' - hence Bethlehem can be translated as 'house of bread' and Bethesda as 'merciful house'. Sachs lists the complexity in terms of pronunciation of 'c' when combined with other letters, with scholars as early as the 1550s suggesting spelling being closer tied to phonetics, with this particular letter drawing the ire of dramatist Ben Jonson in his posthumously published english Grammar of 1640. Likewise Benjamin Franklin proposed in 1768 that the letters C,J,W and Y be abandoned with their values assigned to other letters or other symbols. Indeed, the author reveals that in both Phoenician and Greek alphabets, the third letter was their equivalent of our letter 'g' and that 'c' evolved from Etruscan interpretation of the former letter that they did not possess, and gained prominence in the Roman alphabet - though until the later period of the Roman Empire it was pronounced as a 'hard c' so that Caesar would have been pronounced 'Kye-sar'. Today the majority of 'soft c' words such as 'grace' or 'cellar' entered our language through Norman French. The letter 'e' is by far the most commonly encountered in our language representing 15 different vowel sounds, while the diminutive form of the letter has now become enmeshed with technological progress through representing 'electronic' in 'email' or 'e-commerce'. As Sachs explains, it is also unique in appearing to denote silence by a uniquely English spelling rule. When 'e' appears at the end of a word preceded by a string of letters formed by a vowel followed by a consonant, signalling that the previous vowel sound is long. Thus, we can distinguish 'fat' from 'fate' and 'wine' as against 'win'. This aspect was introduced in the late 1600s to simplify the chaos which characterised spelling in the language as a result of proposals made a hundred years earlier by the Elizabethan grammarian and headmaster, Richard Mulcaster,tutor of Edmund Spenser and Thomas Kyd. Amazingly, the original Semitic meaning of this letter was 'hey' and was represented by a stick figure with arms raised denoting surprise. The very pronunciation of 'f' as a fricative has perhaps led to its denoting swear words and negative concepts such as 'failure' with Cicero calling it the 'unsweetest sound' in Latin, which is ironic as the symbol 'f' historically denoted the sound 'w', there being no 'f' sound in the Phoenician language. It would be the Romans who would associate the ltter with the sound we know today. The transplanting of 'g'g by 'c' as third letter in the alphabet also entailed the latter serving as symbol for both sounds, until in the later Roman empire 'g' was reintroduced in its now familiar spot. With regard to 'h' many early grammarians questioned its true value as a letter, and the author suggests that in other languages it would be an accent mark accompanying another letter, as it is in modern Greek. The history of 'i' and 'j' are interconnected with the former serving as the latter's symbol until late Medieval Europe. In fact, both lower-case 'i' and 'j' are inventions which accompanied the rise of the printing press in the fifteenth century to make script more distinguishable. The modernity of 'j' is also evidenced by the fact that Samuel Johnson in his renowned dictionary of 1755, though recognising its role in spelling, does not include the letter within the alphabet - hence Johnson's listings under 'i' include words such as 'jabber' and 'jealous'. Those who seek to rationalise the spelling rules of English have recommended the abandonment of both 'c' and 'q' for the more purely phonetic 'k'. Sachs reveals that this unnecessary complexity has been bequeathed to us by the Etruscans who introduced three distinct symbols for 'k' which are the forebears of 'c', 'k', and 'q'. Being a labial sound 'm' is one of the most accessible sounds to infants and some linguists theorise that just as babies learn to imitate adult sounds, so could baby sounds have influenced the development of adult words - hence the word for 'mother' can be 'mama' in English or Swahili or 'ma' in Chinese or 'maa' in Hindi. As the letters pass the reader by, Sachs seems to lose impetus, finding true points of interest harder to come by, thereby making the read less engrossing in the second half.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished reading this non-fiction volume last night; as promised, in quite exhaustive detail, it tells of the development of the alphabet, and specifically that of the English (or American, if you will) alphabet. And being a relatively literate person, I very much enjoyed this book.

Not all languages use alphabets (using a finite string of letters, which may or may not include vowels, to form words, sentences, and weblog entries); the Egyptian hieroglyphics is the obvious ancient example, and many Eastern languages (Chinese and Japanese) do not use alphabets to form their words. However, as the author explains, Phoenicians took the Egyptian hieroglyphics and made an alphabet, suitable for their language. The Etruscans took over the Phoenician alphabet, then the Greeks took over the Etruscan alphabet, then the Romans took over the Greek alphabet (with each set of peoples adjusting the letters to fit the sounds that they wanted). At this point J and U were not in the alphabet. As the Romans roamed, other peoples adopted their alphabet, using some letters more than others. As late as the time of Shakespeare the letter Y was used interchangeably with I, the letter Y (with a curlique) was used for the now obsolete letter Thorn, which was used for TH (that's where Ye Olde Shop comes from), and an adjusted F was used more or less interchangeably for the letter S. After the time of Shakespeare the Great Vowel Shift occurred (before this time, "what immortal hand or eye / shaped thy immortal symmetry" rhymed).

The author then goes through each letter in, naturally, alphabetic order, explaining where it came from (and how it was used in antiquity), and how the shape of the letter changed over time. By the time we get to Z (called Zee on this side of the water, and called Zed by most Commonwealth countries, thanks mostly to Daniel Webster, who when he composed his dictionary wanted an American, as opposed to English, language) there is not much that one does not know about the alphabet.

This book was quite fascinating to read, and even in the Kindle edition the illustrations are excellent. I loved this book, and would very much recommend it to those who love language.

[Douglas Summers-Stay · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's very rare that I want to reread a popular nonfiction book-- the whole point is the interesting new facts you never knew before, and that's all gone after the first time you read it. But I enjoyed this one so much the first time, I picked this up at a used bookstore and just reread it, and it still holds up.
The book has 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. It goes through the history of each letter-- what the pictogram originally stood for, why it stands where it does in the alphabet, why the lower-case and upper-case versions look the way they do, the relationships it has with other letters, why it makes the sound it does, and what the letter has come to mean by itself-- the semantics of the letter (X for unknown, Q for weird, A for beginnings and Z for endings, etc...)
I've often gone looked through images showing the transformation of the alphabet from the original Phoenician through Greek and Latin. But--
why did the letters have the changes they did? Why did we add U, V, W, X, Y, and Z on the end, and why do so few words start with those letters? Why did we slip in G and J, and why do they look like C and I with little extra tags? What happened with I becoming J and Y? Why do we say "bee" "cee" "dee", but "eff" instead of "fee" and "aitch" instead of "hee"? Why are there multiple pronunciations for some letters? What's up with the different ways of writing lower case a and g? This book is the first place I found answers to these and many other questions I've had about the alphabet for a long time.
Sometimes the book is titled "Letter Perfect"-- it's the same book, just with a different name.

[Bernie4444 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever wonder why “J” is the last letter in your typeset drawer?

A warning about this book.
"How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree?)"
Yep, once you have seen the light there is no going back. After reading this book you cannot simply read without thinking about where the letters and words came from and their original intended meanings.

The question of where language came from and how it evolved is not a new subject; nor is there any lack of books on the subject. However, if you are going to read only one book then let it be “Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z” The book is filled with graphs and charts of where, how, and when the language changed. The primary concentration is on English (to my relief) however it cannot be isolated from other languages similar and different.

It would take a book to describe the details of this book. You will want to buy this book to see how the history of language changes with the history of the world.

There are no real chapters other than the pages for each letter of the alphabet. Then there is a bibliography, interviews, illustration credits, index, and about the author (one paragraph.)

[Mbuye · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thoroughly researched, beautifully presented history of the Roman alphabet traced back from Egyptian hieroglyphics to Phoenician origins, thence to Greek to Etruscan and Latin, from which most European languages owe their development. Each individual letter has its own, sometimes idiosyncratic, sometimes baffling story, as in the case of the letter 'C', which seems to forge a new sound each time, and yet cannot be replaced by any other letter. My tablet refuses to aksept alternate spellings for Kalifornia, reseive, speshial, ets, underlining each word with disapproval. Sacks provides a vast array of supporting scripts taken from archeological evidence, inscriptions on stone, as well as mediaeval manuscripts. He fails not to observe Charlemagne's influence on the language (was there anything that Charlemagne did not influence?) and in particular, on lowercase script, or how the seeming f of Gothic texts became an S, and why.

Sacks notes, with a kind of wry humour, the characteristics of each letter, such as the versatility of C, or the ubiquitous nature of E, or the docile dependability of D, to the sad fate of F, which to the Roman statesman Cicero "was the unsweetest (insuavissima) sound in Latin."

[Tamás Szajkó · Rating 5 out of 5]

Az ábécé tipikusan az a dolog, amit annyira alapvetően adottnak veszünk, hogy nem is igazán vagyunk képesek belegondolni annak zsenialitásába és a mögötte megbújó évezredes munkába, így nagy köszönet, hogy Sacks-nek, hogy ezt a piszkos munkát elvégezte helyettünk.

A szerző olyan óriásit nem akar markolni, de azt amit akar, azt makulátlanul végigviszi: egyrészt kapunk egy rendkívül részletes, de mégis kiemelkedően érdekes áttekintést az ábécé kialakulásáról és sorozatos átvételeiről, másrészt pedig az egyes betűk kalandjait egy-egy külön fejezetben is áttekintjük. A két szál persze akaratlanul is összefolyik, de ez nem is igazán gond, hiszen amellett, hogy itt alapvetően történelmi tényeket követünk, akaratlanul is elkalandozunk a nyelvészet és a történelem végtelen zsákutcáiba, ami persze azt is jelenti, hogy nehéz nem folyamatosan feltévedni a wikipediára olvasás közben.

Összességében rendkívül szórakoztató olvasmány volt, és bár nyilván kell egy kis perverzió ahhoz, hogy az ember a betűkről akarjon olvasni (persze olvastam én már a szótárkészítésről is jó könyvet), ha megvan az érdeklődés, akkor ez egy hibátlan kaland.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable. There is rhyme and reason to which letters are in the alphabet, how they got there, and how they changed their shape, order, and pronunciation over time. I was amazed by the nuances involved in vocalizing letter sounds, and how, despite having English as my mother tongue, I had never realized the many different ways those vowels and consonants are pronounced in everyday speech. While reading in a coffee shop I suspect I contributed to early departure of the person next to me as he apparently overheard the crazy man quietly vocalizing different sound combinations to hear, for the first time, the differences between voiced and unvoiced, or labials and dentals. There is something to be said for a book that makes you pause and contemplate the the deep history of what you casually speak or write, knowing the letter forms stretch back to 2000 BCE, and the spoken word roots themselves may go twice as far, into the dim reaches of Indo-European language. A very interesting book and good history.

[Lorinda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Never judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, I did just that with this paperback and I regret it. The main text may be interesting but the publisher Broadway Books (a division of Random House) does not care if the reader is able to read what is written in the lengthy text boxes or the maps or the extensive descriptions that accompany the drawings of ancient letter forms.

It is ironic that a book with the title "Letter Perfect" is the exact opposite. Who makes these decisions at a publishing house? Sure, the book might have been more expensive set in a readable font size but at least a buyer could have read the book.

Fortunately I ordered another book on the topic at the same time: The Story of Writing, Second Edition, by Andrew Robinson (published by Thames and Hudson). It has a different content emphasis but all the text in all situations is clear and I can read it! It also has excellent illustrations and tables.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars. I still don’t get why we needed pages in each chapter about all of the words that letter is used in and associated with; presumably anyone reading this in English is an English-speaker and has a sense for those things themself. Those associations also feel haphazard and subjective—they’re hardly a survey of every association a letter has. Stick to the history! That said, the letter history was solid, if presented rather piecemeal and growing repetitive as the book went on. I enjoyed learning the evolution of the alphabet—that’s why I picked this up to begin with.

Also this is an awful title. What on earth is “letter perfect” supposed to mean? That’s not an expression. No one says that.

[Shanti · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main problem with this book is that it wasn't as interesting as I though it would be. I feel like Sacks could have done a lot with creating a cohesive flow, but it would have worked better as a serial series in a newspaper (which is how it originally started). While some of the facts were interesting, I felt like the story of the alphabet for each letter was basically repeated over and over, and so information- for example, I think he informed us what the unical style was about 20 times- was unecessarily repeated, and long, info heavy box sections just interrupted the flow of the text.

[Becca Housden · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was an interesting overview into how the alphabet developed to become the one we recognise today. It was great to have the letter formations included so you could track its progress, and the way the book was laid out with a chapter for each letter was particularly effective.
However, I felt some parts of it a little repetitive due to this layout, with the majority of letters having the same path to today. Additionally, the extra boxes of information were just as disruptive as they were informative, breaking up the main body of the text, sometimes for multiple pages.