Quotes About Alphabets

Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.

When I was awarded a fellowship in poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts (for "Alphabets"), I felt myself suddenly (vaingloriously) equal to my Crow, which would be - I knew at once - Rat.

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.

According to J. Naveh, the Semitic alphabets originated with Proto-Canaanite (eighteenth to seventeenth centuries BCE), from which there was derived around 1300 BCE the Proto-Arabic script, the ancestor of the systems used in the South Arabian and Ethiopic scripts.

It is important to stress that carving on wood or stone is a fairly laborious process and that the kinds of things recorded using the runic alphabets tended to be short and of a different nature from texts that can be easily written only in manuscripts.

To be an actor, I had to learn Marathi. I used to always grudge why there are so many alphabets in Marathi.

Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don't even have to think about reading once we've learned how to do it.

We stalk the truth as poets, sensualists, a duality, limited insanity. We labor in our muse, carving alphabets of experience into our hearts.

[H]is gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet - or seem likely to do it in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.

But, Mr. Grewgious seeing nothing there, not even a light in the windows, his gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet- or seem likely to, in this state of existence - and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.

Alphabets therefore encourage an atomistic conception of meaning and, by extension, of the universe

What surprises historians of language is that Arabic has been able to preserve a morphology already exemplified by Hammurabi's code in the nineteenth or eighteenth century B.C., and a phonetic system which perpetuates, apart from one single sound, the very rich sound range borne witness to by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered.

Many modern alphabets, including ours, retain with minor modifications that original sequence (and, in the case of Greek, even the letters' original names: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and so on) over 3,000 years later. One

Later I will see there is a poem on the back of each wing. Poems that are not about us, but are about trees and teacups, fields and glances. Not about us, but about the things we hold dear. The moments we both collect by living our lives, together and alone. Rearranged alphabets, dream-remnant wonder, the seat of our love.

I see people doing things in their Blackberrys, and I need paper. Lines. Alphabets. I need to see it. It's so elementary, man.