The ABCs of a communication revolution

What would you say was the most influential invention in human history? The wheel? The light bulb?

How about the alphabet?

We tend to take it for granted, but the alphabet was a human invention. Without it, we wouldn’t read books and newspapers or write shopping lists and e-mails. We would have to rely on recitations and recordings to transmit language. But as vital and visible as the letters of the alphabet are, they usually go unappreciated.

David Sacks changes that in his fascinating overview of the alphabet’s history. The book has been released in paperback with a new title, “Letter Perfect” (Broadway, $14.95). The hardcover was called “Language Visible.”

The invention of the alphabet, a system that used symbols to represent individual sounds rather than things or ideas, revolutionized human language. Before the alphabet was invented, only scholars could write, as hieroglyphics used hundreds of symbols for words and syllables that took years of training to master.

Today, our 26 letters do all the work of representing the approximately 45 phonemes (individual sounds) and 500,000 words of English.

“With the alphabet’s invention, the farmer, shopkeeper, the laborer have been able to read and write,” Sacks writes.

The roots of the alphabet reach to about 2000 B.C. in ancient Egypt. But the great-grandmother of modern alphabets, according to Sacks, was the 22-letter Phoenician alphabet of about 1000 B.C.

Based in what is now Lebanon, the Phoenicians distributed their alphabet to the many nations they traded with, including ancient Greece. The alphabet was adapted for Greek, then for Latin and eventually for English.

Letters began as pictures.

“A” was a picture of an ox’s head; it was written sideways, with its point as the head and two horns sticking out. “A” signified the first sound of the Phoenician word “aleph” for “ox.” “K” stood for “kaph,” the word for “hand,” and K’s extremities still look like fingers today. “M” was for “mem,” meaning “water,” its bumps resembling the waves of the sea. “O” was for “ayin,” the word for “eye.”

“The system meant that once a Phoenician child had memorized a list of 22 common nouns, he or she had a handle on each letter’s sound (the same as the name’s opening sound) and on each letter’s shape (typically a rough sketch of the object named),” Sacks explains.

Sacks’ history goes through the alphabet letter by letter. The letter F originally looked like Y and sounded like W before the Romans changed it, for example.

We like our letters so much, we make them words and names unto themselves: a, I, oh, Dubya. We wear T-shirts, make U-turns, and watch “The X-Files.”

Centuries after hieroglyphics died out, the alphabet’s triumph is clear. “The alphabet,” Sacks writes, “was an invention to change the world.”

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This article originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune.