T h e H i s to r y o f

Le s

Allan Haley

tt er fo rm

I n t ro d uc tio n

OF

achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things: indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention. When and to whom in the dim past the idea came that mans speech could be better represented by fewer symbols [to denote certain unvarying sounds] selected from the confused mass of picture ideographs, phonograms, and their like, which constituted the first methods of representing human speech, we have no certain means of knowing. But whatever the source, the development did come; and we must deal with it. To present briefly the early history of the alphabet requires that much collateral matter must be disregarded and a great deal that is omitted here must necessarily be taken for granted; the writer desires, however, to present what seems to him to be a logical and probable story of the alphabets beginnings.

ALL

THE

Although it has not yet been proved conclusively, it is quite possible, and altogether probable, that the traders of Phoenicia and the Aegean adopted both the use of papyrus and Egyptian hieratic writing, from which developed the Phoenician alphabet. Whether all the earliest writing systems of different countries sprang from one common stock of picture writing, we shall, perhaps, never surely know; we do know that the picture writing of Egypt exercised a very great influence, and it seems quite safe for us to assume that crude attempts by those ancient Nile-dwellers to express thought visibly or to record facts by a series of pictures - or by diagrams sufficiently pictorial, at least, to connect them with well-known objects [disregarding the earlier mnemonic stage or use of memory aids like the quipu or knotted cord, of which the rosary is a modern example - constitute the origin of the abstract and arbitrary signs or symbols which we call letters.

T h e L e tte r Q

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FOR AS LONG

as there have been Qs, designers have been having fun with the letters tail. This opportunity for typographic playfulness may even date back to the Phoenicians: the original ancestor of our Q was called ooph, the Phoenician word for monkey. The ooph represented an emphatic guttural sound not found in English, or in any Indo-European language.

Most historians believe that the ooph, which also went by the name gogh, originated in the Phoenician language, with no lineage to previous written forms. Historians also believe that the characters shape depicted the back view of a persons head, with the tail representing the neck or throat. Its possible, but if you consider that the letters name meant monkey, then perhaps the round part of the symbol represents another kind of backside, and the tail of what became our Q may have started out as, well, a tail. The Greeks adopted the ooph, but found it difficult to pronounce, and changed it slightly to koppa. The Greeks also modified the design by stopping the vertical stroke, or tail, at the outside of the circle. The koppa, however, represented virtually the same sound as kappa, another Greek letter. One of them had to go, and koppa was ultimately the loser, perhaps because it had begun to look much like another Greek letter, the P. Unlike the Greeks, the Etruscans could live with the somewhat redundant nature of the koppa, and continued to use the letter. In fact, they had two other k-sound letters to contend with. The Romans elected to use all three signs when they adopted much of the Etruscan alphabet. The first Roman Q had the Etruscan vertical tail, but over time it evolved into the graceful curved shape that cradles the U which usually follows it.

Th e Le tte r X

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IS X REALLY NECESSARY?
Fewer words in the English language start with X than with any other letter. Its sounds are easily rendered by the z or ks combination. The Phoenicians had no use for the x sound, and many scholars contend that the Greeks did not use the letter to represent a phonetic sound. Even the Romans were not exactly sure where to use the letter, and stuck it at the end of their alphabet.

such letter. The Phoenician samekh became the Greek xi, which had different sound values in the Eastern and Western Greek alphabets. Inconsistencies in the Greek pronunciation and usage of some letterforms were a direct result of geographical and political disunity. There were many Greek dialects and variations in letterform shapes and sound values, but the two main alphabet subgroups were the Ionic and Chalcidian. By 400 B.C., the Ionic alphabet, which had been officially sanctioned at Athens, became what we now know as the classical Greek alphabet. The Chalcidian, which was the alphabet of some Greek colonies that migrated to southern Italy, influenced several Italian writing styles, including Umbrian, Oscan and Etruscan. The Romans appropriated the x sound from the Chalcidian alphabet and represented it with the chi of the Ionic alphabet, which consisted of two diagonally crossed strokes. This letter became the prototype for both the capital and lowercase X we use today.

The Phoenician ancestor to our X was a letter called samekh, which meant fish. Although some historians argue that the character represented a post or support, with only a small stretch of the imagination the drawn character can be seen as the vertical skeleton of a fish. When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet they left some of the Phoenician sibilant letters behind, taking only those that represented sounds the Greeks required. The ancestor to our X, which represented a sharp s sound, was one

Th e Le tte r Z

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Around 1000 B.C. the Phoenician zayin became the Greek zeta. The Greek character looked more like a dagger than the zayin did, but it didnt bear much resemblance to the Z we currently use. In fact, it looked a lot like our present capital I (especially as set in ITC Lubalin Graph, or another slab serif typeface). The Romans adopted the zeta into their alphabet, but since the sound was not used in the Latin language the letter was eventually dropped, and the position of the seventh letter was given to the G. In fact, the Z might never have made it into our present-day alphabet, if not for a few stray Greek words that were incorporated into the Roman language after the Romans conquered the Greeks. In order to write these words a Z was required, and so, several centuries after it was first banished from the Roman alphabet, the Z was allowed to return. However, because the letter was not a part of the traditional Roman language, the Z was relegated to the last spot in the alphabetical hierarchy.

T H E T W E N T YSIXTH LETTER
of our alphabet was the seventh letter in the Semitic alphabet. They called the letter za (pronounced zag) and drew it as a stylized dagger. The Phoenicians used roughly the same graphic sign, which they called zayin and which also meant a dagger or weapon. A similar symbol turns up in various other cultures, all having the same meaning.

The Romans used the capital I form of the letter in their monumental inscriptions, but there are none to be found in the famous Trajan Column (since there are no Greek words inscribed there). It was only when the letter was written by scribes and calligraphers that the top and bottom strokes were offset from each other and connected by what became a diagonal, rather than vertical, stroke. The reason for this design change? Probably because it was quicker and easier to write. The lowercase z is simply a smaller version of the capital, no doubt for the same reason.