John’s Blog

I’ve had this book around for 2 or 3 years — I kept reading a chapter or two, then putting it down. I finally got through it the past few weeks — it’s an interesting book. It’s all about our alphabet, and how it came to be the way it is, in terms of which letters are in our alphabet, how they look, and how they sound. After the introduction, there’s a chapter for each letter — some are better than others, for sure. My favorite is on the letter “E” (always the glory hog, at least in English — see, there E goes again, starting that word) — and how it’s derived from a semitic character that is itself derived from an earlier character that was effectively “hey!” — both in meaning & pronunciation — and that the capital E letter shape itself is really from a person with both arms up yelling (rotate it counter-clockwise 90 degrees — teh end bars are the person’s arms, the middle is the head). Funny.

Anyway, fun book for letter & type nerds.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Web/Tech. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.