Rules, Constraints, and Phonological Phenomena Book

Like a lot of books with high-concept titles, this one isn't really true to its billing. It is not a biography or even a history of the alphabet as we English-speakers know it. It's a survey of all the alphabets that have battled it out over the history of humankind -- a broader editorial scope that is challenging to sum up pithily. Certainly there's an emphasis on all things A to Z, but with a lot of time spent on Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and so forth. (The Korean material is especially interesting.) It's a fascinating, relatively quick read.

One side note: there's a fascinating side bit in here about Thomas A. Sebeok, a retired professor from Bloomington, Illinois, who developed a plan for how to mark for thousands of years that a given spot is poisoned by nuclear waste.

Showing that no symbols could do the job, he determines that the best plan, if any, would be to create an "atomic priesthood" whose sole role would be to maintain the continuity of this important information, generation after generation.

Even though I've followed the Long Now organization for many years, I only now have connected Sebeok's plan with the group's projections, and with Neal Stephenson's novel, Anathem, which features a priesthood quite similar to the one described here.

According to this post from the Long Now, Sebeok was not on the minds of the group's founders, even though there are striking parallels in their perspectives: