Andrew Shirota

“My lords, for more than half an hour you've not stopped questioning me about some fantastic story or other; one could in fact say that you're babbling, or rambling. By babbling, I mean, that you're talking nonsense; by rambling, that you're saying nothing at all.”
― Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

“vowel” coming via medieval French from the Latin adjective vocalis, “using the voice.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“The Gezer Calendar is a limestone inscription from the mid- or late 900s B.C., thought to be the earliest survival of written Hebrew. Discovered in A.D. 1908 at the site of the ancient city of Gezer in what is now southern Israel, the “calendar” briefly lists the months of the year by farming duties.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean “boat” or “to sail”—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant “there,” not “an owl and a reed.” Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for “there.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z