The Power of ABCs

Few inventions are as beyond reproach as the alphabet, the beautifully economical series of symbols crafted in Egypt four millenniums ago that has allowed ordinary people to convey the complex nature of ideas and things with fewer than 30 letters.

Prior to the invention of the alphabet, written communication was limited to royal scholars who could afford the time to memorize thousands of unwieldy characters, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics, that represented single words or concepts.

The alphabet, for the first time, allowed people to represent sounds of spoken language on the basis of a handful of easily learned and written symbols. The sound of letters built words that any peasant could learn with time. The alphabet helped bridge the gap not only between oral and written cultures but between the humble many and the wealthy few.

Archeologists were recently reminded of the alphabet’s power when they came upon limestone inscriptions along an ancient desert road west of the Nile River. The characters appear to be the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing and have been dated to at least 1800 BC, two centuries earlier than previously recognized uses of an alphabet. They appear to have been etched by Semitic soldiers, couriers and traders traveling to and from the royal Egyptian city of Thebes.

The alphabet, it’s becoming increasingly clear, was an invention by workaday people that simplified writing, freeing it from the exclusivity of elite scribes. By bridging the classes, it democratized them.

The once-unassailable value of the alphabet, however, has recently come under attack by academics trained in the 1960s to question sacred cows. For instance, “The Axemaker’s Gift,” a 1995 book by James Burke and Robert Ornstein, and “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess,” a 1998 book by Leonard Shlain, point out that the alphabet’s power should not be exaggerated. Cultures where wisdom is conveyed through oral storytelling, as well as Asian cultures with languages much more difficult to render into written words than Western speech, have lived quite well without the alphabet and certainly are just as “civilized” as the Western world.

What we term the alphabet is found only in languages like English, Russian and Arabic, which use symbols to translate sounds into words. It’s a dynamic, living thing. The alphabet makes innovation easy since it allows people to spell out words based simply on how they sound. Phonetics, if you will.

Today, the alphabet’s ease of use is still allowing ordinary people to innovate in their use of language. Teenagers, for example, are using new symbols and phrases to “talk” rapidly to each other on e-mail.

What an alphabet does to a civilization over the long term is anyone’s guess. But over the short, four-millennium-long history of the modern world--as Semitic soldiers and e-mailers have shown--the alphabet has been a democratizing force, characters on glowing screen or paper or stone that allow the reader to speak and understand.