English is by no means the only example. Roman letters today convey the sounds of other tongues that Cicero never heard of: Polish, Zulu, Azerbaijani, Indonesian, Navajo–and about 100 more, all in daily use. The Cyrillic alphabet works equally well for Bulgarian and Mongolian as for Russian. Arabic letters, devised originally to show the Arabic language, provide writing in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and other places where people don't speak Arabic. Behind such facts lies the letters' ability to leap across languages.
The more I dug into this, the more important it seemed. I was finally getting the idea that the letters have a kind of genius–a genius for showing the sounds of speech. Because they denote the smallest particles of sound ("t," "p," "m," "u"), letters in quantity are beautifully flexible and precise. They can be arranged in endless combinations, as necessary, to capture sounds of words. This allows the letters to be fitted from one language to another: You could easily write English phonetically, in the letters of Hebrew or Cyrillic. (Bored office workers at computers do it idly.)
"People don't understand this concept," I recall thinking. "This isn't being taught at school."
I had learned a new respect for the alphabet, and from this point–for it was just a beginning–I proceeded to dip into other aspects of the story: typography, phonetics, the individual letters' use in brand names and design, the whole psychological message of letters in certain presentations. What I uncovered was a trove of wisdom and lore worth celebrating. And worth sharing.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
Full Story
