A is for Ox: A Short History of the Alphabet

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Lccn 94009779 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL1085880M Openlibrary_edition

urn:lcp:isforoxviolencee00sand_0:epub:238dd880-1991-4490-8774-ef261503d672 Extramarc University of Michigan Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isforoxviolencee00sand_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3516gj17 Invoice 11 Isbn 9780679417118 Over time, what had started out as drawings of animals, objects, and tiny people was simplified into abstract lines that could be jotted down easily. The waves of the ocean became the crests of the letter M, the slithering body of a snake resolved into the twisting letter N, and the bend of an elbow was preserved only as the curve of the letter J. Writing was invented in two different places around the same time 5,500 years ago: Mesopotamia (the region of modern-day Iraq) and Egypt. It was later reinvented, independently, in China and Mesoamerica. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-19 06:02:35 Associated-names Brown, Iain Gordon, former owner Boxid IA40174703 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier And so were its imaginative responses. While some of the exhibits come with a message like David McLiman’s beautiful ‘Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet’ (New York 2006) which highlights the animals on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature; and the niche ‘Rescuing Q’ (2003), Suzanne Moore’s attempt to free the letter from its association with the right wing conspiracy theorists at QAnon to its rightful place at the heart of free thinking questions; most are playful representations that take inspiration from the artists’ own imagination and creative flair. There are miniature alphabet books and pop ups, concertina books, cloth books, and sculptural books, there are letters seen in the shapes of landscapes and letters made from human bodies, animated letters, floral letters, illuminated letters filled with comical characters and large numbers of Amazing Animal Alphabets.The written word, so indispensable to modern society, is easy to take for granted, but writing was a late development in the history of human language. Our ancestors spoke and signed for hundreds of thousands — possibly tens of millions — of years before they devised a technology for representing language in art. Admission is free A Stephen T. Johnson Alphabet City (1995) Leonard Baskin, A Gehenna Alphabet. The Gehenna Press was founded in 1942 and was one of the first fine-art presses in the USA. Alphabetics/an aesthetically awesome alliterated alphabet anthology. The first half of the book gives a general overview of the development of alphabetic languages and lettering in general, focusing in on Europe, while the second half examines the (speculative, in some cases) history of the shape of each letter in the modern English alphabet. There are many illustrations and examples. Incredibly, the people who invented the world's first alphabet may very well have been illiterate. Their inscriptions didn't follow the format of Egyptian writing, nor did they import any sounds or meanings from the earlier writing system as they likely would have done if they had learned hieroglyphs first. Sometime around 750 BC, ancient Greeks learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians and added one last innovation: vowels. To do it, they simply took letters representing consonants that didn't exist in Greek and reassigned them to vowel sounds.

Five of our letters (F, U, V, W, and Y) all came from the same ancient semitic letter "waw", which meant "peg". Hence, "F is for peg". "A", on the other hand, came from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph which resembled the head of an ox. Hence, "A is for ox", which gives the book its name. Each letter's mini-chapter takes us through its development into Greek, Etruscan, Roman, medieval Carolingian, 15th century humanist, and eventually modern forms. I was also surprised to learn that several of our letters were not quite into their modern shape when the 1700's began, although the "f"-like form of the letter "s" reminded me that I already knew about at least one case like that. So here in memory of the all those games I played with my dad is my own curated ABC – some images from the exhibition, and other favourites from my own collection. I hope you enjoy it. urn:lcp:isforoxshorthist0000davi:epub:58de0463-dd63-48b0-aae5-d2f92cde7793 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isforoxshorthist0000davi Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t03036j2g Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781845671365 This combination of direct representation, sound-substitution, and the occasional extra sign for clarification enabled hieroglyphs to represent the entire Egyptian language. Because each symbol could have several different meanings, though, hieroglyphs were a very challenging writing system to read, and it took years of dedicated study to master the system. Enter the Canaanites Some letters were rotated, so that today the ox horns of the letter A point downward instead of upward and the hands of a man held up in praise reach sideways as the arms of the letter E.Canaanite miners used their new alphabet to write on mine walls and to inscribe gifts to Hathor. The text on this statuette, running from upper left to lower right, seems to read 'mt l bʿlt,' meaning 'gift for the lady.' From Althebräische Inschriften vom Sinai by Hubert Grimme, 1923. (Public domain) Next, they took the hieroglyph that looked like a house, which in Canaanite was called bayit, and designated it as the sound b. They continued until they had 27 letters — enough to represent all the consonants in their language. The first half traces the development of the alphabet as a system of writing, representing (more-or-less) one symbol per sound. Specifically it covers the Latin alphabet as used in modern English, rather than, say, modern Greek or Cyrillic, from hieroglyphs though other forms such as cuneiform as they developed around the Mediterranean region, mainly for use in trade. Photographs and illustrations give a clear comparison of the different types of script. Taking the ox-head glyph, for instance, they decided it would represent the first letter of the word for ox in their language, ʾalef. So, the ox head became ʾ, a sound made in the throat that we don't have in English.

With a small number of symbols that can represent an unlimited number of words, alphabetic writing caught on around the world, and nearly all modern alphabets, from Arabic to Devanagari, Thai to Cyrillic, are descended from proto-Sinaitic. For some reason, I always assumed that the alphabet more or less arrived as a set, stepping onto the stage of history as a group of 26. I never really gave the matter much thought, of course, or I would have realized that it could not possibly have happened that way, but it wasn't until I read this book that I learned how they came about. Some evolved out of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, some came from Phoenician, and others from early Semitic. This little book, after an introduction to the general lay of the historical (and prehistorical) land, takes us through the development of each one.

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Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9242 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000386 Openlibrary_edition Fanfare is a 19th century term used to describe the ornate gold-toothed bindings of the period from 1570-1640 The Illuminated Alphabet G is part of An Illuminated Alphabet and is from a 15th century Italian prayer book