Quotes from David Sacks

The alphabet was an invention below stairs.

The designs involved two abiding techniques by Roman stonemasons. First, certain parts of each letter was subtly widened – one leg of the A, two opposite sides of the O – in contrast to others. This gave the shape a sense of perspective and graceful solidity. The second technique was to add small finishing strokes (we call them serifs) at the letters' end points. Clear examples include letters E, G, H, S and T.

An anonymously written piece about 1900 has the letter H complaining to the Cockneys that it has been banished "from 'ouse, from 'ome, from 'ope, from 'eaven; and placed by your most learned society in Hexile, Hanguish and Hanxiety.

Likewise, India's Hindi and Pakistan's Urdu are fundamentally the same tongue, only using Devanagari script in India, Arabic letters in Pakistan. And Yiddish, while not exactly German, is closely akin to it. Yet Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, and German in Roman ones.

The Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B.C. would become the great-grandmother of our own. About 19 of our letters can be traced back directly—in their shapes, their alphabetical sequence, and, for most, their sounds—to Phoenician counterparts. Ours is not the only descendant. As shown in the "Family Tree of the World's Alphabets" (this page), the Phoenician alphabet has been the source for nearly every subsequent alphabet, past and present.

The Phoenicians were a dynamic Iron Age people, based in what is now Lebanon. Today they are remembered as the best seafarers of the ancient world. In the 700s B.C. they spanned the length of the Mediterranean with a seaborne trade network, exchanging luxury goods from the East for raw materials from the West: Babylonian textiles, Egyptian metalwork, and Phoenician carved ivory were traded for elephant tusks from North Africa and bars of silver and tin from Spain.

The Phoenicians were Semites, akin in ethnic group and language to the ancient Jews. Phoenician speech would have sounded much like ancient Hebrew. Israel—the Jewish kingdom of David and Solomon—

Our word "Phoenician" comes from ancient Greek. Phoinikes, "red people," was what the Greeks called them, probably in reference to their copper skin color.

Johann Sebastian Bach presumably had other things in mind when, in about 1723, he wrote his "Air on a G string" (actually so named by a later arranger.) Part of a larger piece for string quartet, the "Air" includes a violin solo that fits entirely on the G string, the lowest of the violin's four strings.

vowel" coming via medieval French from the Latin adjective vocalis, "using the voice.

The Gezer Calendar is a limestone inscription from the mid- or late 900s B.C., thought to be the earliest survival of written Hebrew. Discovered in A.D. 1908 at the site of the ancient city of Gezer in what is now southern Israel, the "calendar" briefly lists the months of the year by farming duties.

Writing in Egypt began around 3000 B.C. The official system was hieroglyphics ("sacred carvings"), revered as the gift of the scribe god Toth.

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the

Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean "boat" or "to sail"—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant "there," not "an owl and a reed." Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for "there.

Modern experts now believe the alphabet was invented sometime around 2000 B.C. by Semites who dwelled as foreigners in pharaoh's Egypt;

In his wonderful 1529 book on the alphabet, 'Champ Fleury,' (French Renaissance scholar and type designer Geofroy) Tory deals gently but firmly with H: "The aspirate is not a letter; nonetheless it is by poetic licence given place as a letter.