Reviews for The Alphabet

The average rating for The Alphabet based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-06-29 00:00:00 Elizabeth Aiken As the title says, this is a look through the story of the Roman alphabet. But the title notwithstanding, Sacks illuminates not just "our" alphabet, but the journey its ancestors, from the Phoenician to Etruscan to the Greek to the Roman to Old English, took to get there. Scratched into rock, carved into Roman marble, inked by medieval monks and formed into uncials, then printed, the alphabet's history spans four thousand years, and Sacks traces the journey of each of our 26 letters across those millennia. The narrative of the initial chapters gets a bit convoluted at times, when one digression is followed or even split by another digression and the main text continues several pages later. This is an odd and distracting editorial choice, and even made me hesitate to continue; why not just make these lengthy pieces their own chapters or sub-chapter so the text isn't interrupted? However, once the letter chapters start, the book finds a good flow, and it is an absolute treasure trove of fascinating facts. There's information on the evolution of letter shapes, the evolution of letter names and pronunciation, how regional accents affect spelling, frequency of letter use in various languages, the letters' cultural meanings today — Sacks has read and studied everything, it appears. His book is deeply researched and thorough, dripping with erudition, every page packed with information. Yet Sacks conveys this information in a light, readable prose style, with amusing asides and pithy quotes by medieval grammarians.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-22 00:00:00 New Guest I cannot rate this highly enough. Full of so many bizarre facts about things you never considered - why letters are called as they are, what words came from French vs German and why, how alphabets were made etc etc. Will read it again at some point so I can try to remember more of what I read!