Bill Hill’s Blog

(FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) “e” somewhere, copy it into your clipboard, and paste it in with Ctrl-V instead of typing it. But try doing that for even a short email, and see how wearing it gets.

We take the alphabet so much for granted. It has been described as the biggest breakthrough humans have ever made.

The alphabet marks the major divergence between two sets of languages – alphabetic and pictographic.

With an alphabet, making up new words is easy. You just pick from the library of 26 or 28 letters, there are standard prefixes and suffixes, and – hey presto! – a new word. Because it’s made up of standard components, it’s fairly easy for anyone to figure out what it means.

To a certain extent the same is true in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. There are re-usable components. But it gets very complicated, and you end up with, say 20,000 or more Kanji characters and it’s about impossible for anyone to learn them all.

The Latin-based languages used to be pictographic, too. The letter A, for instance, started life the other way up – as a picture of an ox. When it travelled from the Middle East to Greece in the writing of the Phoenicians, it was rotated 90 degrees to become the letter alpha, eventually making the full 180-degree rotation into the A as we know it today.

For a fascinating book on this subject – which is also great for getting children interested – read Oscar’s Ogg's The 26 Letters. I see there’s actually a copy for sale on

Amazon for the princely sum of 92 cents.

Another interesting fact about an alphabet is that it gives words a directionality. You can read the word “ate” just fine, but can you make sense of “eta”?

One of the early forms of Greek writing (~700BC) used left-to right and right-to-left writing on alternate lines. This form of writing was called boustrephon, which means "as the ox plows the field". In other words, writing was an unbroken trail of meaning.

However, as alphabets became widely used this form of writing no longer worked, once words had a fixed “direction”.

So instead we adopted a convention of reading from left-to-right only (for Latin languages), and making a rapid right-to-left eye movement to the beginning of the next line. This innovation worked, and that’s how we read today.

_______________________________

I love the flexibility of blogging.

Back when I was a 19-year-old trainee page editor on a newspaper in Glasgow, Scotland (in the days when men were men, and dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I used to be in charge of a busy news page, which I had to re-do completely five times during the course of my 12-hour shift, since the different editions went to different localities and that page was aimed at giving it a local flavor.

We went to a lot of effort to try to get the text right. The raw copy was typed up in a few cases by a professional typist from a story phoned in by a correspondent, but most of it was typed up by reporters like me – terrible typists whose copy was always full of erasures and corrections.

_______________________________

MORE BLOG ENTRIES

• Scotland Flowering Again?
• The Future of the Book
• Proof-Reading in the 21st Century
• Step Away from the Keyboard!