My
sincere lifelong lovers, the 26 gems who influence the world
Wouldn’t we like to know every detail about someone
or something we love very much?
More so wouldn’t we like to understand, interpret
and infer or inject greatness to justify why we love that person or thing?
More so, when that thing has not only been attracting
us but also silently ruling the world.
The thing is this love is made of 26 gems who have been
used extensively to describe everything in the universes all our gods,
sciences, philosophies, technologies, diseases, historical events, imaginary stories
etc.
They have been used for everything from transferring
wisdom to triggering wars.
You guessed it right, it is my love affair with the
26 letters of the English Alphabet and the obvious childlike inquisitiveness
threw up a lot of questions in me.
What is unique about this love affair is that
when some of these 26 characters make love among themselves they are so lovely
that our loyalty in love can never be assured as we jump from word to word and
enjoy their company.
Very often they get together in love and impact
and influence our thoughts, lives and sometimes they motivate, instigate and awaken
a whole humanity towards some action or idea. They are the unquestioned
triggers for many events in history.
What makes them so
potent and irresistible?
Do they have any
inherent mysterious potential?
Or have they acquired
special powers due to many historical events and activities that have enhanced
their status?
Probably if we take a journey or make a
pilgrimage or have a love affair with them we may end up sailing in a vast
universe of multiple stars and many planets studded with many beautiful natural
sceneries each beholding our attention with total intensity or sometimes
intense totality. One thing is certain that they manifest immense influence on
human race.
After all the
jumping, juggling and jaunts with lesser numbers than 26 to more numbers than
26 [A] ultimately the English alphabet has for
some good reason settled at 26 [probably destined to be in the
company of most vital number like the atoms of oxygen that sustain life to be a
eight (8) knowing well the greatness and numerological superiority of the
number 8] [1]
"Writers spend three years rearranging 26
letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day
by day."(attributed to Richard Price)
These
26 gems are collectively called Alphabet but what is the etymology [origin] of
this word ‘alphabet’ itself. It is from Latin, from the names of the first two letters
of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. These Greek
words were in turn derived from the original Semitic names for the
symbols: aleph ("ox") and beth ("house").
So thus if we go on investigating the ancestry of letters, like the etymology
of many words, it throws up lot of interesting tales and history.
Without getting clear and convincing answers
for the why, what, and how etc our lives would be unimaginative, dull and
passive like inanimate objects.
It is not only in questioning but exploring to
seek the answers for these whys, what and how, whatever source they emanate
from and in all possible ways, is what educates and emancipates mankind.
In this process of enquiry, we must steer clear
of impenetrable jargons, lukewarm sea of half-baked theories, the illusion that
life and its meanings and problems can be reduced to some specific straitjacket
dogma, and delusions of fettering axiomatic certitudes like something is said
to be so and therefore, it exists so, a sort of quoddamodotative [things
existing in a certain manner] justification, and a whole lot of other such
aspects of the culture of escapism, social or religious restrictions,
indifference, lies etc.
Out of this ubiquitous
trinity of why, what and how, let me take up only why here.
The word why is a
magical word. Small children use it to keep their parents talking on and on
without end. Unfortunately, it is not only to keep their parents talking but
also out of inquisitiveness. Inquisitiveness is what produces a wide range of
characters starting from an eavesdropper, a scandal monger or a clandestine
voyeur or a gossip giant or a spiritual mediator or a social inventor, an
unrelenting scientific brain etc. So the type of reply a parent gives to a
child’s enquiry of a why? (out of inquisitiveness) will produce such a “deep”
impression that, the child’s mind would start using the question why to get a
particular expected answer and also produce any of the above referred
characters depending upon the parent’s reply.
Very often parents
tend to give clever replies like a tourist guide who, when once, a lady asked
him “How a row of fine rock formation were piled up”, said “they have been
piled up here by the glaciers”. When she anxiously asked him “Where are the
glaciers?” he replied “Madam, they have gone back to get some more rocks”. Such
replies are often the result of ignorance, half-knowledge or impatience or all
of these.
I, for one, would
rather like to go to the maximum extent possible to find the answer for all the
whys that arise in me, for, I am also susceptible to grammatolatry [worship of
letters and words]. Thus, I cannot just blindly worship letters and words in a passive
acceptance and leave unanswered the whys which haunt me. [I did a similar study
for why the words of the week are named after planets in all the languages and
why they follow the same order and it threw up very interesting astrological
truths, a science or pseudo science the world has decided to put it in the back
burner {2}]
Now let
me get to face the questions first.
Why
they are only 26 alphabets?
Why are
they in that specific/particular order?
Why are
they in that shape?
What is
their origin or their origins?
Why
they have such specific sounds?
Whether
all these are interrelated or influence one another especially their shape,
sound, orders of the letters etc?
What is
the mystery behind this intertesselation [complex interrelationship]?
One
thing is certain their combination [of the letters] drives all professionals
into verbomaniacs [crazy of words].
Once
the questions have emerged, then, the doubts arose, because of the very nature
of the questions, as to what subject/subjects will get us the answers to these
questions?
And to
get answers to all these whys, do we need to study acoustics?
Do we
need to study some of its hidden esoteric geometrical powers?
Do we
need to study logography in which a written sign represents a single word?
Do we
need to study phonology?
Do we
need to study orthography?
Do we need to study ideography,
in which ideas or concepts are represented directly in the form of glyphs or
characters?
Do we need to study
Euphonics [ incidentally there are some very interesting books on this subject]?
[2a]
Or is
it due to The
Bouba-Kiki Effect [3]
or Bouma shape?
Or do we need to study the science of sequence?
Or do we need to study history of linguistics?
Or is there a subject called alphabetology?
Or do we need to cull out evidences from
archaeological surveys?
Or can we trace their origins by some quirky
logic to semiotics [study of signs and symbols] or sphragistics [study of seals
and signets]?
Let
me confine myself here to the origin of the western oriented languages from
which English has emerged, and this English language remains as the
unquestioned and unvanquished ruler.
All
these many languages which existed before English was born and grew into the
most beautiful, intelligent and powerful personality and also all these languages
have contributed to the shape, sound, order etc of the English alphabet.
Even
here there is lot of controversies, as is obvious when we trace the antiquity
or origin of anything that has become great, powerful and successful for almost
a few centuries and luckily unlikely to be dislodged from its position of
prominence for many more centuries.
Whatever be the
controversies can we ever imagine a world without the English alphabets or the
English language?
"The alphabet has
generally been considered as the revolutionary breakthrough in
the development of writing and literacy and thus as the writing
system that is superior to any other. The advantages of the alphabet
seem obvious, indeed. It is easy to learn, because it has fewer units than any
other writing system; and it is applicable to any language, thanks to its phonemic character.
Yet the story of the alphabet is not as simple as that, as careful
investigations clearly show. . . . [A]lphabetic writing is subject to
historical changes, and it is at least questionable whether or not the
structural advantages of the alphabet are preserved throughout these changes
and in the course of the historical development of the phonological and
the orthographic systems of a language."
(Florian Coulmas and Konrad Ehlich, Introduction. Writing in Focus. Walter de Gruyter, 1983
(Florian Coulmas and Konrad Ehlich, Introduction. Writing in Focus. Walter de Gruyter, 1983
The Origin
“We use the letters of
our alphabet every day with the utmost ease and unconcern, taking them almost
as much for granted as the air we breathe. We do not realize that each of these
letters is at our service today as the result of a
long and laboriously
slow process of evolution in the age-old art of writing.”-
Douglas C. McMurtrie
The most important,
vital and lovely relationships are always taken for granted as they form an
intrinsic part of our life, we do not stand apart or stay away from them or
isolate them and notice or label their
presence or significance. It is so with alphabets, air and parental love and
affection. In case, if we don’t have them or they are misplaced, displaced or
short on supply then we realize their significance, sometimes too late
A
single alphabet wrongly placed can trigger danger and disaster, there are like
the blood passing through the nerves in brain you do not notice their
importance until it clots or causes a hemorrhage. This is very well said by Vera Nazarian in ‘The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration’, “Each letter of the alphabet is a
steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and
stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters”.
“In about 1500 B.C.,
the world's [Western world or perhaps what
is known to the author] first alphabet appeared among the
Semites in Canaan. It featured a limited number of abstract symbols (at
one point thirty-two, later reduced to twenty-two) out of which most of the
sounds of speech could be represented. All the world's alphabets
descend from it. After the Phoenicians (or early Canaanites) brought the
Semitic alphabet to Greece, an addition was made that allowed the sounds of
speech to be represented less ambiguously: vowels. The oldest surviving
example of the Greek alphabet dates from about 750 B.C. This is, via Latin and
gives or takes a few letters or accents, the alphabet in which this book is
written. It has never been improved upon."(Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word.
Oxford University Press, 1998) [what is in brackets and in italics mine]
The Greek Alphabet
"The Greek alphabet was the first whose letters recorded every significant sound element in a spoken language in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few diphthongs. In ancient Greece, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you'd never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous."
(Caleb Crain, "Twilight of the Books." The New Yorker, Dec. 24 & 31, 2007)
"The Greek alphabet .
. . is a piece of explosive technology, revolutionary in its effects on human
culture, in a way not precisely shared by any other invention."
(Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton University Press, 1981)
(Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton University Press, 1981)
"While the alphabet is
phonetic in nature, this is not true of all other written languages. Writing
systems . . . may also be logographic, in which case the written sign
represents a single word, or ideographic, in which ideas or concepts are
represented directly in the form of glyphs or characters."
(Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth. Thames, 1995)
(Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth. Thames, 1995)
Two Alphabets
"English has had two different alphabets. Prior to the Christianization of England, the little writing that was done in English was in an alphabet called the futhore or runic alphabet. The futhorc was originally developed by Germanic tribes on the Continent and probably was based on Etruscan or early Italic versions of the Greek alphabet. Its association with magic is suggested by its name, the runic alphabet, and the term used to designate a character or letter, rune. In Old English, the word run meant not only 'runic character,' but also 'mystery, secret.'
"As a by-product of the Christianization of England in the sixth and seventh centuries, the English received the Latin alphabet."
(C.M. Millward, A Biography of the English Language, 2nd ed. Harcourt Brace, 1996)
The Dual Alphabet
"The dual alphabet--the combination of capital letters and small letters in a single system--is first found in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814), Carolingian minuscule. It was widely acclaimed for its clarity and attractiveness, and exercised great influence on subsequent handwriting styles throughout Europe."
(David Crystal, How Language Works. Overlook, 2005)
The Alphabet in an
Early English Dictionary
"If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to understand, and to profit by this Table, and such like, then thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without book, and where every Letter standeth: as b near the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end."(Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabetical, 1604)
"According to one
view, the alphabet was not invented, it was discovered. If language did not
include discrete individual sounds, no one could have invented alphabetic
letters to represent them. When humans started to use one symbol for one
phoneme, they were making more salient their intuitive knowledge of the
phonological system of the language."-(Victoria
Fromkin, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams, An Introduction to Language,
9th ed. Wadsworth, 2011)
The Lighter Side of the Alphabet
"Educational
television . . . can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child
discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out
of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens."-(Fran Lebowitz)
Mellisa
wrote the following in the article in September 2013 ‘On the Origin of the English Alphabet’ which eased a great part of
my search and study.
“This Origins of
Alphabetic Writing dates back nearly four thousand years, early alphabetic
writing, as opposed to other early forms of writing like cuneiform (which
employed the use of different wedge shapes) or hieroglyphics (which primarily
used pictographic symbols), relied on simple lines to represent spoken sounds.
Scholars attribute its origin to a little known Proto-Sinatic, Semitic form of
writing developed in Egypt between 1800 and 1900 BC.
Building on this
ancient foundation, the first widely used alphabet was developed by the
Phoenicians about seven hundred years later. Consisting of 22 letters, all
consonants, this Semitic language became used throughout the Mediterranean,
including in the Levant, the Iberian peninsula, North Africa and southern
Europe.
The Greeks built on
the Phoenician alphabet by adding vowels sometime around 750 BC. Considered the
first true alphabet, it was later appropriated by the Latins (later to become
the Romans) who combined it with notable Etruscan characters including the
letters “F” and “S”. Although ancient Latin omitted G, J, V (or U)*, W, Y and
Z, by about the third century, the Roman alphabet looked very similar to our
modern English, containing every letter except J, U (or V)* and W.[*V and U
have a complicated shared history. Both were used throughout the Middle Ages,
although they were considered a single letter until quite recently.]”
[Don’t miss
to read the full article in the link provided for many interesting information]
[4]
The
Evolution
Any
evolution goes through lot of metamorphic twists, turns, tribulations before
triumphantly growing into something great.
The English alphabets are, therefore no exception to
this natural process.
Here Athena,
ACORN MEDIA U.S. had this interesting
contribution
“The
Evolution of the English Alphabet
Not only has the
English language evolved greatly over the last 1500 years, but so has the
alphabet itself. Although the modern English alphabet contains 26 familiar
letters, it took some fascinating twists, turns, and dead-ends to arrive there.
After the 6th century,
when Christian monks began transliterating Anglo- Saxon into Latin characters,
they hit a snag. Anglo-Saxon contained a few sounds that Roman letters could
not accommodate. So the monks borrowed three old runes: ð (eth, usually for the voiced1 "th"
in the middle of a word, as in "breathe"), þ (thorn, usually for the unvoiced "th," as in
"thumb"), and Ƿ (wynn,
for our w). The presence of those runes is just one reason why Beowulf and
other Anglo-Saxon manuscripts look so strange now. Another, less obvious reason
is the absence of jand u. In this case, though, the monks
didn't know what they were missing, since those letters did not exist in the
classic Latin alphabet.
We generally have the
Normans to thank (or to blame, depending on your viewpoint) for the disappearance
of ð, þ, and Ƿ. Through their influence, the runic holdovers gradually faded
away, although ð still survives today in Ireland. In a way, þ survives,
too–albeit in a corrupt form in the names of faux-quaint establishments such as
"Ye Olde Ale House." Anglo-Saxons spelled the definite article
"þ e," and copyists and early typesetters eventually resorted to y as
a close approximation of þ. As late as the 1600s–well into the era that
linguists consider Modern English–yt often appeared in printed
texts as an abbreviation for "þ at" ("that"). As for Ƿ,
copyists had already begun phasing it out even before 1066, substituting vv instead; the French-speaking
invaders finished it off during the 12th century.
How did u and j come to join the exclusive
club of 26? The distinction between i and v began in the Middle Ages, when
scribes used the roundbottomed letter within words and the pointy version for
the first letter of a word–"vpon," for example. Differentiating
between v as a
consonant and u as a
vowel, each with distinct sounds, didn't begin until the 18th century. The
letter j grew out of
a flourish, when medieval monks took to adding a tail to i at the end of Roman numerals.
As the representation of a distinct sound, it invaded England along with the Normans.
With characteristic
ingenuity, Benjamin Franklin tried to improve this hodgepodge of symbols by
proposing a revised alphabet in 1768. He deleted c, j, q, w, x, and y because
other letters represent those sounds. And he added six letters of his own invention–including
a stylized scripth for the
voiced "th" once represented by ð. Although Franklin's alphabet never
caught on and the inventor himself eventually lost enthusiasm for it, his
friend Noah Webster incorporated some of Franklin's ideas in the famous Blue-Backed Speller, taught to
elementary students for more than a century.[he called it the “Franklin
Fonetic”]
In phonetic
terminology, "voiced" indicates that the sound is produced via
vibration of the vocal cords, while a voiceless (or unvoiced) sound is not.” [5]
Like
all beauties and power centers these 26 gems were also subject to multiple tampering, testing , criticism etc but yet
they overcame all that and survived to be present and permeate into our lives .
Not only Benjamin Franklin there were many others who wanted them to change for
some reason but they[ the alphabets] decided to stop at a particular point of
evolution and then let the individuals and the world to relate, rejoice and
revel in their relationship with them. Here
are some others who also wanted vehemently these gems to change.
Ben Franklin's Warning
"[Benjamin] Franklin felt that the ever-widening gap between spelling and pronunciation was leading the language down a denigrating path toward a logographic orthography, in which symbols represent whole words, not a system for producing sound units, as in c-a-t. He considered languages like Mandarin ghastly for their memorization requirements, an 'old manner of Writing' that was less sophisticated than a phonological alphabet. 'If we go on as we have done a few Centuries longer,' Franklin warned, 'our words will gradually cease to express sounds, they will only stand for things.'"
(David Wolman, Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling. Harper, 2010)
Spelling Reform
"Like such ideological forefathers as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, [Edward Rondthaler] wants to clear up the whims of spelling by adopting a more phonetic version of English, one where words are written as they sound and pronounced as they are written. . . .
"'The kee to ending English iliterasy is to adopt a speling that's riten as it sounds,' he writes in his fashion."
(Joseph Berger, "Struggling to Put the 'Ortho' Back in Orthography." The New York Times, Apr. 23, 1994)
According to Henry
Rogers, "Writing is
systematic in two ways: it has a systematic relationship to language, and it
has a systematic internal organization of its own" (Writing Systems,
2005).Examples and
Observations:
"In our study
of writing systems, we might assume that there is a simple,
one-to-one relationship between written symbols and language:
for example, that a writing system has a distinct symbol for each phoneme, and
that these symbols are used to write utterances . In such a situation, an automatic
conversation would, in principle, be possible between writing and language.
Anyone who has learned to write English, however, is more than aware that
this situation does not hold for English. We need only consider such pairs
as one and won with exactly the same pronunciation and
very different spellings to confirm this. There are, to be sure, some writing
systems which are fairly regular, but none is perfect. Varying degrees of
complexity are the norm."
(Henry Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell, 2005)
(Henry Rogers, Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach. Blackwell, 2005)
Transparent and Opaque Writing Systems
"In contrast to transparent systems, in which the letter corresponds one-to-one to the sounds of the language, in opaque writing systems the correspondence between the sounds and letters is not one-to-one. Two writing systems that tend toward opacity are Russian and French. However, English is usually considered the opaque writing system par excellence."
(Barbara M. Birch, English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom, 2nd ed. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007)
The First Writing
System
"So far as we know, the first true writing system was invented by the Sumerians, in what is now Iraq, about 5200 years ago. The use of writing spread out from there, and writing was much later independently invented in a few other places, including at least China and Mexico. . . .
"In a true writing system, any utterance of the language can be adequately written down, from On this day the King crushed his enemies to I love you, snugglebunny. If you can't write down anything you can say, then you don't have a true writing system."-(Robert Lawrence Trask, Language: The Basics, 2nd ed. Routledge, 1999)
While
the users and lovers were busy suggesting and wanting these 26 gems to change
in several ways they [alphabets] have on the contrary effected great changes as
usual influencing and impacting many domains of our lives as is explained in
this link. [6]
The story of English
alphabet itself and especially its entire process of evolution into what it is
today have been studied by no one in greater depth than David Sacks.
So no article by any lover of these 26 gems
can afford to omit some observations from David Sacks and to get the ultimate
history and story of English alphabets everyone must read the three extraordinarily
researched books by him a]Language Visible, b] Letter Perfect and c] The
Alphabet.
So, I too would like to quote from him the
observation on some aspects of evolution of the alphabet made by him,
“What I found was that alphabets have routinely
jumped from language to language, across all sorts of language barriers, down
through history. Our Roman alphabet in English is the product of four such
leaps: After being copied from Phoenician letters, the letters of the Greek
letters were copied, in turn, by a different people, the Etruscans of Italy
(around 700 B.C.). Etruscan was a tongue as different from Greek as Greek was
from Phoenician, yet the letters adapted easily: They now became Etruscan
letters, for showing Etruscan speech. Then the Etruscan letters were copied by
other Italian peoples, including the Romans, whose language, Latin, was totally
unlike Etruscan. Again, the letters had made the jump. As Rome conquered Italy
and lands beyond, the Roman alphabet became the writing of Roman Europe.
Surviving the empire’s collapse (around A.D. 500), Roman letters were fitted to
newer tongues, including primitive English (around A.D. 600). Today those
letters have grown up to become our own.
English is by no means the only example. Roman letters today convey the sounds of languages that Cicero never heard of: Polish, Zulu, Azerbaijani, Indonesian, Navajo—and about 100 other major tongues. The Cyrillic alphabet works equally well for Serbian and Bulgarian 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.”
English is by no means the only example. Roman letters today convey the sounds of languages that Cicero never heard of: Polish, Zulu, Azerbaijani, Indonesian, Navajo—and about 100 other major tongues. The Cyrillic alphabet works equally well for Serbian and Bulgarian 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.”
I would like to share
some more glimpse into his other gems in those books to give you an idea of the
depth of his studies
“A has about a dozen possible sounds in English.
Here are six: “ Was Allan’s pa all pale?”
(or you may find only five A sounds
there ,depending on your regional accent.)
If asked at a dinner party to define the word
“consonant”, someone might venture, ”well, I know it’s not a vowel…..”…vowels
are pronounced from the vocal cords with minimal shaping of expelled breath,
consonants are created through obstruction or channeling of the breath by the
lips, teeth, tongue, throat, or nasal passage, variously combined. Some
consonants like B, involve the vocal cords; others don’t. Some, like R or W,
flow the breath in a way that steers them relatively close to being vowels.
We get the term “consonant” via medieval French from
as ancient Latin ,consonans,
“sounding along with” the idea is that
while vowel sounds can be pronounced on their own ( “Eee! I owe!”), a consonant
normally can be pronounced only with a vowel before or after. Try saying the
“b” sound alone and you‘ll probably wind up cheating, tacking on a vowel sound:
“bih”.
This rule isn’t bulletproof. A few consonants can
more or less be pronounced alone, particularly those with a continuous sound,
like F or Z. Still you’ll need effort not to relax into “fih” or “zuh” at the
end.”- David Sacks
Why
is the alphabet in alphabetical order? [7]
The beauty is that
these 26 gems have helped to support, sustain and make supreme the English
language though:-
1.
It may
not be as sweet sounding as French
[a language in which I can read, write, understand and speak] or Telugu [8] [ in which language I sing and listen to
thousands of excellent Carnatic classical songs];
2.
Or it may
not have the multiple and multi layered meanings and marvelous merging of words to
form new words as well as entertain us with the enjoyment of dissecting long
words to decipher the several meanings within a single long word like Sanskrit or German [both these
languages I enjoy reading and writing]; [9]
3.
Or it may
not help you recognize the meaning of a work simply by looking at the
orthography because of its symbolic logograms like the Chinese Hanzi or the Japanese Kanji involving more logical
pictograms which are mere pictorial representations of the objects they denote
which are standardized and simplified and made easy to write and recognize as Ezra Pound used to say if you mark a
danger symbol everyone in the world understands irrespective of whatever language he speaks;
4.
Or it may
not have a highly resourceful etymology which manifests the esoteric meanings
and multiple connotations and many possible interpretations like Sanskrit or Tamil;
5.
Or it may
not include the words to express the many unique socio cultural aspects of even
European cultures; or it may not have independent verb to denote the act of
‘birth’ and may need the crutches of an auxiliary; or it may not have an exact
opposite for the word Sin referred to as Punya in Sanskrit, Hindi and many Indian languages.
6.
It has
not a single word expression to counter many social and psychological aspects
of life, which many other languages, even very insignificant ones have, as has
been wonderfully brought out be Howard
Rheingold in the book titled “They have a word for it”. Here are a few of
them; Tjotjog (Japanese) –
harmonious congruence in human affairs; Mokita
(Kirinina-New Guinea) –Truth everybody knows but nobody speaks; Yufen (Japanese)- an awareness of the
universe that triggers feelings too deep and mysterious for words; Fucha (Polish)-using company time and
money and other resources for your own ends;
7.
It does
not have the grammatical subtleties of such insignificant languages as Chichewa, a language spoken by the
unlettered tribes of East Africa which as per the studies of Benjamin Lee Whorf, has an
extraordinary perspective on time through its two past tenses, one for the real
or objective past and another for the subjective or mental past. The primitive
tongues of Algonquin languages have
four persons in their pronouns;
8.
The
metaphysically marvelous language of Hopi
Indians of Arizona which reflects their excellent view of creation; instead
of a noun for ‘wave’ they have only the participle ‘walalata(Waving).
9.
English
language does not have a one word for what I have done in most part of the
beginning of this write as the Russians would say it Pochemuchka [Someone who asks a lot of questions,
probably too many questions] or a single word to describe the many answers that
the journey of this write up has thrown
up as in Tibetan language Gadrii
Nombor Shulen Jongu - meaning Giving an answer that is unrelated to the
question.
But despite all the above aspects why
we all love them [the 26 gems of English alphabet]? How is it that it they have
remained powerful?
It was because as a global
language it has bothered to nurture the pride of ancestry, has been in popular
use at present, and possess worthy credentials to survive in the future and
through these it has become qualified to become a global language. But mere
number of users cannot be a sufficient or justifiable parameter to classify a
language as significant , because if that were the case we may have in that
list such unheard of languages as Wu in
China , Xhosa in South Africa , Pashto in Afghanistan , Quencha in Peru .
These 26 gems have given the English language certain very
unique qualities more visible among them are their ability to make the language
adjust, accept, allow, assimilate without acting as a linguistic luddites and besides and because of its uncontrollably vast
geographical spread it has also very often accepted transliteration
phonetically from many languages and gradually made them her own. These gems are so open minded and so large hearted and therefore have
managed to penetrate even in territories of high linguistic chauvinism and
gradually got accepted as welcome guests or worthy friends.
On a more justifiable classification in addition to the number of users of a language, it has its tentacles geographically spread far and wide with a wide range of and variegated vocabulary that are plundered, borrowed and pleasantly assimilated logically through etymological derivations from various language roots and accommodated and also retained various foreign words which were imbued with different cultural flavors as it is in their original form and made them as if her own in a very loving association like guru, renaissance, connoisseur etc to communicate and express as many ideas or events as possible in as many fields of human activity. It has the syntactic plasticity, flamboyant flexibility suited to both simple and complex modes of expression, and an enormously evolved derivational morphology.
You may wonder why have I wandered from the discussion on 26 gems [alphabets]
into language because they are so interrelated, inter connected and
complimentary like some divine couples that no one can avoid discussing the greatness
of one without praising the position or contribution or power of the other.
It is no wonder that Robert K.
Logan
begins with “The alphabet was the most
significant boons conferred upon mankind by Phoenicia. It is generaly
considered the greatest invention ever made by man” (Hitti 1961,p.102)
“Letters—these
seemingly commonplace little signs, taken for granted by so many, belong to the
most momentous products of creative power. These forms, which we take in with
our eyes a million times each day, embody the highest skill within their small
compass. They are abstract refinements of the creative imagination, full of
clarity, movement and subtlety”- Gustav
Barthel
“The making of
letters in every form is for me the purest and the greatest pleasure, and at
many stages of my life it was to me what a song is to the singer, a picture to
the painter, a shout to the elated, ore a sign to the oppressed. It was and is
for me the most happy and perfect expression of my life”-Rudolf Koch
“When one considers
the immense power of man’s spirit, it is amazing to think that it could not
have developed without the alphabet. How clearly we are heirs to this process .
. . the links in a chain”.-Friedrich
Neugebauer
“More powerful than
all poetry, more pervasive than all science, more profound than all philosophy
are the letters of the alphabet, twenty-six pillars of strength upon which our
culture rests”.-Anonymous
“From his beach bag
the man took an old penknife with a red handle and began to etch the signs of
the letters onto nice flat pebbles. At the same time, he spoke to Mondo about
everything there was in the letters, about everything you could see in them
when you looked and when you listened. He spoke about A, which is like a big fly
with its wings pulled back; about B, which is funny, with its two
tummies; or C and D,
which are like the moon, a crescent moon or a half-full moon; and then there
was O, which was the
full moon in the black sky. H is high, a ladder to climb up trees or
to reach the roofs of houses; E and F look like a rake and a shovel; and G is like a fat man sitting in an
armchair. I dances on tiptoes, with a little head
popping up each time it bounces, whereas J likes to swing. K is broken like an old man, R takes big strides like a
soldier, and Y stands tall, its arms up in
the air, and it shouts: help! L is a tree on the river's
edge, M is a mountain, N is for names, and people
waving their hands,P is
asleep on one paw, and Q is sitting on its tail; S is always a snake, Z is always a bolt of
lightning, T is beautiful, like the mast
on a ship, U is like a vase, V and Ware birds, birds in flight;
and X is a cross to help you
remember.” ― J.M.G. Le Clézio, Mondo et autres
histoires
What the Alphabet stands for:
ABC = Always Be Careful.
DEF = Don't Ever Forget me.
JKLM = Just Keep Loving Me.
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ = No Other Person Quite Reasonable Shall Treat U Very Well Xcept
me, You'll Zee !
- Unknown
All love is reciprocal and that’s why real love is eternally
enjoyable. As much as I have loved them [ The English alphabets] they [The English
alphabets] too have always inspired me
and improved my thought process and that is one of the reason why I am in love
with them and I have written many alphabetical chain link verses , even
arranged some of my longer essays on alphabetical order, written a Calendar of
Attitude made of acronyms and also written a REVERSE DICTIONARY
OF ADJECTIVES.
Besides I use them as mnemonics to recollect the things I tend to forget. Here
are links to some such verses and essays [10]
[1]
Greatness of number 8 you can find in this link http://dhilipkumarek.wordpress.com/article/the-fascinating-number-8-6x7q12qyypma-3/, http://www.endless-loving.com/number-8.html,
http://spiritualsoul.net/profiles/blogs/significance-of-number-8-in-hinduism,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_(number)
2a] Euphonics: a Poet's Dictionary of Sounds (Paperback) John Michell
I am giving below samples for two letters ‘B’
and ‘M’ in Euphonic from this book
Alphabet
‘B’
‘B’ the shape of B can be described as double or
binary. It is an oval squashed into two bulges, like the bi-focal spectacles
and the ‘b’’ sound is predominant in the names both proper and vulgar, given to
the bipartite bulges of the body: bust, bosom, breasts, boobs, bubs, bums, buttocks,
butt, base, beam, bottom backside.
A bull has balls or bollocks, and beer-bobber grows
big belly like a tub, barrel or bloated bladder.
An image evoked by the B sound is of balloons blown
up near to bursting. They are broad, bluff, burly, obese, bulging, bulbous, burgeoning,
billowing, blooming, blubbery blimps. These bouncing orbs attract adjectives
bounty: blessed, benevolent, benign, abundant, bland, buttery.
But bulbous bubbles also have the sound of bumptious
bullies, who are :bold, brash, brazen, bothersome, beefy, brawny, bellicose, brutal
bigots or bossy blunders, given to brawling, blustering blundering, squabbling,
slobbering, blubbering, biffing, bashing, brow-beating, butting, bumping and
boring. Bucolic and flabby, they boom, bawl, bray, bleat and belly-act and are
bombastic, boastful, braggarts, babbling bullshit blah-blah and balderdash.
The brutal bluster of a blundering buffoon is the
type of energy expressed by B big bill was a broad as a barrel of beer. At
bruising and boozing he hadn’t a peer. A burly club bouncer he drubbed one and
all until clobbered and bashed in a brutal pub brawl
Alphabet
‘M’
‘M’ the double-arched shape of the letter ‘m’ in the
its mother’s eye brows and breasts is the first pattern to be experienced by an
infant, and its first sound is likely to be murmured, muttered M, which seems a
natural symbol of mammals and maternity. Mother is mild, merciful, mollifying
and mollycoddling. Her home is humble but warm and comfortable as the womb.
Sometimes it is moderately merry and mirthful, yet home can become monotonous, hum-drum
and gloomy. Making one morose, miserable mean, melancholy, mournful, moody, mosey,
dim, grim and glum,
The association between the cycles of women and the
moon that measures the month has caused these words in many languages to be
dominated by the ‘M’ sound. Under the moon occur mysteries, romances, marvels, miracles,
magic and the mantic arts, stimulating imagination or madness and monomania.
The ‘M’ sound evokes images of the dark, mysterious
aspect of the female spirit, such as the mystic moon-maiden, the Madonna and
the gloomy chasm
[8]
http://contentwriteups.blogspot.in/2012/11/telugu.html
[9]
"I would like to quote a wonderful and
worthy observation from a wonderful blog maintained by my friend Mike
Magee http://www.shivashakti.com/ [don’t miss to see his pagehttp://www.shivashakti.com/datta.htm] about some aspect of Sanskrit language
“One of the unique but mysterious features of the Sanskrit language is how many
words can be used at three separate and distinct levels of thought. Even whole
verses have this remarkable feature. It is one of the factors which have made
translation into other languages so difficult. The difference presupposes three
groups of people. First there is the literal meaning intended for the
householder or worldly man, and a guide to better thought and action. The
second is the meaning on a higher level intended for the mumukshi or hungry
seeker for God. Here the same words take the reader from the mundane level to
the higher level, and the implications. The third is the meaning intended for
the soul who has attained or is nearly ready to attain liberation”. You will
find this in my blog post link given below which incidentally has also been
trending excellently in speaking tree. http://contentwriteups.blogspot.in/2011/05/dear-all-i-was-asked-write-about-guru.html
10]
Free verses in alphabetical chain link form or just alphabetical form
ATTITUDE CALENDAR
made of acronyms
Essays
inspired by alphabetical thinking mode
REVERSE DICTIONARY OF ADJECTIVES
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