The magic squiggles

         I'm currently re-reading my copy of Richard Fermage's "ABECEDARIUM" (subtitled "Some Notes On Letters"), simply because the other day I was punching words into the screen, and I thought - geez, I'm addicted to 26 squiggley symbols! Which got me onto - where the hell did it start? - all this writing business? So I dragged it down off the shelf and got stuck in. Made notes. And Googled stuff.

    

        While we (Homo Sapiens) have been "talking" since about - well, actually the experts can't agree on that one, but it's been somewhere between hundreds of thousands of years, and a few million. Doesn't matter, communicating via the spoken word has been around for a long time.

        But the written word is a surprisingly new human innovation, from only about 3500 BC, that's no more than 5,500 years ago. (About the same time as they put a round thing on an axle). But it's said that writing has been the greatest of human accomplishments. Amen to that. And it had such an impact that just about every early culture has a myth that attributes writing as a gift from God. Or Gods. So wondrous (and powerful) (and dangerous!) was it seen to be that in most instances its early use was only in the hands of the "priests".

        Okay, obviously it didn't just "arrive" ready-to-go one day, but evolved over about 3,000 years, during which time it travelled the globe and mutated many many times, to become the nearly 400 alphabets that exist today, each made up of from 12 letters (a tribe in New Guinea) to 74 (Cambodia), servicing some 7,000 languages.

        To augment oral storytelling, it all started with some caveman drawing on the wall, wanting to depict how him and a couple of mates brought down an Auroch. In time this "picture-writing" (Iconographs) was refined to Heiroglyphics (as used by the early Egyptians and Chinese). Then came the major step, when this evolved into Phonetics, where the symbol could represent more than just the object - the "sun" symbol could also mean such things as "day" and "warmth" and "light".

        But then the first true breakthrough came when the Phoenicians and Hebrews began using symbols to represent the sound of syllables - the first writing building blocks! - which meant a massive reduction in the characters needed. And once it kicked off, the idea spread like wildfire throughout the world, and went on mutating.

        Which brings me to the one I'm addicted to - the 26 letter "Roman" alphabet (used by some 130 countries in nearly as many languages). The Greeks acquired it from the Phoenicians (about 1200 BC), added vowels, and came up with the real biggie - true Alphabetics! - the creation of a handful of symbols where each simply represented a single sound, not a thing. (And those weird punctuation mark things (- ! ? " , . ) which don't have a sound at all, but are a - what? - an action? - an inflection?)

        Then about 700 BC the Romans scored it off the Greeks (and all the time there was the whole left-to-right or right-to-left on the page thing going on) and they dropped the Greek's alpha, beta, gamma, theta, etc names. But the Romans only had 21 letters in the early stages but crucially had the 5 Greek vowel sounds, although only wrote in the uppercase version even though the Greeks had lowercase, probably because it meant only straight lines, handy when incising onto stone.

        Finally, the 26-letter version we know today, arrived in the 15th century when 3 letters - J, U, and W - were added from Old English. Job done.

        So, there ya go.

            Cheers....

                    T.R.E.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>