Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An easy to read but complete history of the alphabet, 11 Mar 2004
This book by David Sacks is excellent. It gives the full history of the alphabet from the first known alphabetic inscriptions up to modern-day uses. There's plenty of information mixed with stories about the letters, examples of their use in advertising and diagrams of their evolution.One problem with the book is that it originated as 26 separate articles in a newspaper, one for each letter. These have been tied together, making one chapter for each letter and an introductory section, but there is still a fair amount of repetition, because the story of the Phoenician alphabet ends up being repeated in just about every chapter. Extra sections on subjects like the evolution of printing are thrown into the middle of chapters as "insets", but these can take four or five pages, so the flow of reading is constantly being interrupted. Even within these, pictures can have long titles stretching to half a page, the reading of which interrupts the flow of the inset. So it's not an easy book to read. Another possible problem is that the book accepts as incontrovertible the origin of Semitic writing in Egypt in 2000 BC, and cites as evidence the two inscriptions found in Wadi El Hol. These are not as convincing as the author seems to think and are not as far as I can tell universally accepted. All in all, though, an excellent book.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing book on a fascinating subject, 24 Sep 2005
This book can't quite decide whether it's a serious investigation of the history of orthography or a collection of fun trivia snippets. I did learn a lot about the first Semitic alphabet, from which most others are descended, and its descent to us through the Phoenicians, Greeks, Etruscans, Romans and French. But I was disappointed not to learn more about other alphabets than ours.Also the fact that the book is essentially an assemblage of 26 newspaper columns, one for each letter, meant that several topics came up again and again without ever being fully explored. One topic that I already know a bit about, but where I'd hoped to learn more, was the Great Vowel Shift. One topic that I know almost nothing about and where I found the information provided infuriatingly minimal and repetitive was the evolution of minuscule letters, and indeed why we have upper and lower case now - Georgian doesn't, for instance, and Arabic takes a whole different approach to letter shapes. I particularly hated the practice of inserting explanatory boxes for sub-topics within the main text. Apart from the fact that it makes the main argument (such as it is) difficult to follow, I found (ironically) the fonts used for some of the boxes difficult to read. And the structure became confusing rather than ordered. The only person who has really done these vignettes well is Norman Davies in his Europe: A History, and others shouldn't try to copy him unless they really know what they are doing. So, in summary, an unsatisfying book on a fascinating subject.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating and well told, but dodgy pronunciation, 29 Dec 2007
I have the hardback version of this, and it's a fascinating story. Sacks does a very good job of describing how the letters migrated from one alphabet to the next, especially when the journeys are quite complicated. Most enlightening for me was the story of the different handwriting styles that developed during the middle ages, which led to different lower case scripts (uncial, semi-uncial and carolingian minuscule, in particular). Also interesting was the changes in pronunication of the letters throughout the Roman period and into the proto-Romance languages: it's funny to imagine Julius Caesar saying, "wenee, weedee, weekee".
I have a couple of minor gripes: sometimes, with his descriptions of pronunciation, Sacks uses out-of-date terminology, which can be confusing. For example, many of the sounds he describes as "long", eg the "long 'i' of 'mile'" "long 'a' of 'same'" are actually better described as dipthongs as they are clearly composites of more than one phoneme, as would be clear if they wer transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
In other places, the pronunciation descriptions of other letters are rather suspect to English ears, although perhaps Sacks's descriptions may work better for north-American readers. It is certainly not the case, for example, that in my southern English accent the 'h' in words like 'when' has ANY audibility at all; nor do we pronounce the 'i' in 'fir' as a schwa, but rather with the same long vowel sound as in 'third' (and a silent 'r').
That said, I think that virtually anyone reading this book will find something that interests them and will be left wanting to find out more.
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