Wonderful stuff

         The more I read on the evolution of alphabets (there's still some 150 different ones alive and well today) the more I'm fascinated by the whole idea of it. Can you imagine a group of boffins 4,000 years ago sitting around trying to agree on what squiggle to use for a speech sound? Take the simple sound 'puh' for instance, they sure had a struggle to nail that one down, as the Etruscans and the Canaanites had a go, then the Phoenicians, who handed it on the Greeks who handed it on to the Romans who settled for what a lot of us use today. And all the while they were simply trying to "capture" the sound of 'puh' on the page (clay tablet, papyrus, stone, whatever). Yep, truly wonderful stuff.

        And what about 'duh' ? ....

.... although 'mm' had a better ride ...

        But they're all like that, weird symbols trying to be a fundamental piece of how we speak. Geez I love this stuff! Latch onto a copy of "The Abecedarium" if you can, well worth the journey.

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        Something else I fell over - do you know (I surely didn't) where the "Uppercase" and Lowercase" thing came from? In the early days of moveable typesetting (late 1600s) they used a sloping table a bit like a draughtsman's thingo today - well, before it all went computerised - with the letters arranged in cases to the side, with the 'majuscule' in the upper half and the 'miniscule' in the lower half - the Uppercase and the Lowercase. There ya go, another totally useless piece of information!

   

        Okay, time to get back to turning these magic squiggles into something that looks like absorbing, illuminating literature. Failing that, a half decent story.

        Cheers.....

                        T.R.E.

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