David Sacks

I received this book from someone who didn't finish it, on the chance that I would.
I won't.

Me, reading:
Oh, this chapter is quickly interrupted by an inset. A seven page inset? Well let's find the rest of my paragraph and finish it. Right, now back to the inset. Hang on, this inset is interrupted mid-paragraph by a 2 page nested inset! Alright, let's finish that paragraph and the rest of the inset, then the nested inset... now, where was I? Right, page three of the actual chapter.

I assume show more these special boxes and graphics are to break up the text and keep the reader going, as in a textbook. After all, who would want to read a whole long chapter on lexicography? But the answer is: me. I'm an adult and no one is forcing me to read; I chose to be here, you don't have to trick me into staying.

The problems with these sidebars are many. Much of the history is here, but broken up and spread throughout the chapters, so that often it seems to have at best a tangential relationship to the chapter topic (here I am in the chapter on 'B', reading about the Etruscan lack of the vowel 'O'). Also, the smaller / more nested the box, the more the font changes. It's awful hard to read lightly shaded 8 point italic when we're talking about individual letters. Is that a lowercase k? a b? Wait is it a Hebrew character? For fun I showed someone the (tiny) map of Phoenician territories and asked them to read a place name for me - any place shown. They couldn't. Maybe that information isn't important - but then why include the map at all? Finally, each separate narrative - chapter text, inset, nested graphic - seems to assume that I won't read the others, and is thus increasingly repetitive. Unfortunately the most interesting details have been in the sidebars, and without them the chapters are only maybe 8 pages long, so I'd have to keep reading them.

My biggest grievance is in the tone. Too often it's assumed that avoiding technical terms is the way to make a book 'accessible.' Let's say you introduce the concept of a glottal stop. You explain the sound, and when it's used, and that we don't have it consistently our language or in our orthography, but others do, etc... thereafter, you can refer to it as a glottal stop. Refusing to, or calling it some weird unidentifiable other sound thingy or whatever, does not make your text accessible or lively, it just makes me think you think I'm stupid. And maybe I expect more scholarly speech from linguistic books, but I don't think that's the problem. Yes, there's an extra annoyance when I already know the terms, but I've run into this in various other books on topics in which I'm hardly an expert, and it bothers me every time.

All that being said, I do applaud the interest and research. This might be a decent book for a very casual reader or someone hunting for cocktail tidbits. And I might look up one or two topics that I'd like to read more about - I just won't read them here. show less

An entertaining and informative, if somewhat methodical, trip through the alphabet that traces the historical development of the twenty-six letters that we all know and love. Sacks is good at helping helping readers consider language from a molecular perspective, encouraging us to reexamine the relationship between sound and symbol in ways that most of us probably haven't done since we learned the letters for the first time. I must admit, it'd been a while since I considered how many sounds show more the letter "e" accounts for, or the close relationship between the "f" and the "v." Reading "The Alphabet" reminded me that proper pronunciation depends on dozens of subtle movements of the mouth and throat that have long since become automatic for most of us. Similarly, most Westerners are so used to the alphabet that it seems unimaginable that literate humans once lived without it. Sacks's book reminds us that the alphabet is not a natural feature of our planet but a tool, one of the most consequential, adaptable, and flat-out marvelous tools ever produced by the human mind. In showing how our twenty-six letters evolved, and how different languages evolved slightly different alphabets to suit their particular needs, Sacks makes us aware of exactly how much we owe the ancient Semites who first came up with the idea of an easily reproducible and endlessly mutable alphabet.

The author seems to sense that he faces a challenge in keeping his reader's attention through twenty-six letters, most of which developed in tandem and consequently have fairly similar histories. While this book is also geared towards readers who wish to investigate the development of just one or two letters, Sacks also works, usually successfully, to vary his telling of the alphabet's development. His tone is often simultaneously learned and humorous, a welcome mix that counteracts his material's tendency to seem too familiar over the course of an entire book. "The Alphabet's" repetition might even be said to have some advantages. It impresses upon the reader the winding path through various cultures that the alphabet has taken to reach us, from the Semitic to the Greek, Roman, and the Medieval to the present day. Sacks is also insightful about the cultural history and artistic potential of each letter and knows enough fascinating trivia about each to, well, fill an entire book. Inevitably, "The Alphabet" becomes a bit of a slog as you reach the end, but this book is recommended both to the curious and to those who seek a more complete understanding of the letters that so many of us take for granted. show less

Language visible : unraveling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z (2003) by David Sacks is a lively history of each letter in our modern alphabet (called the "Roman alphabet" which is explained in the book). For each letter Sacks traces the history of its shape from the ancient Semitic carvings in the Egyptian desert to Phoenician and Hebrew letters to Greek, Etruscan, and Roman alphabets to Old English and medieval Romance languages to minuscule characters of monastic scriptoriums and show more the first printed letters and finally our alphabet today. Some changes in the alphabet are surprisingly recent. J, V, and W are all relatively young letters. Noah Webster had an inordinate influence in setting apart American letters from European.

For each letter, Sacks also traces the changes in the sound the letter represents. If there's one thing you learn from this book it's that while many languages share the same alphabet there's absolutely no consistency in what sounds the letters stand for and sometimes they're somewhat arbitrarily assigned. Sacks also writes about the social and cultural significance of each letter which is the most fun aspect of the book. For example, he relates one of my favorite stories about how George Bernard Shaw suggested spelling the word "fish" as ghoti, that is the "gh" of rough, the "o" of women, and the "ti" of station. Ghoti would make a great band name by the way and you wouldn't even be able to be sued for copyright infringement by a Vermont jam band. Sacks also explains how the Anglo-Saxon letter thorn for the "th" sound was represented by the letter Y. This is why someone 200-years ago would write "Ye Olde Tavern" and pronounce "ye" as "the."

This is a good read - both fun and educational. show less

I must admit I didn't finish this (a rare occurrence for me) and I had no desire to keep it for later so I Mooched it on. That has to give you an insight into the standard. I'm very interested in language and linguistics and there are some great books out there ... this isn't one of them, I'm afraid. The premise is an interesting one - the history of the alphabet, both from the perspective of modern usage and of the ancient history of the formation of the actual alphabet. It is dealt with, show more letter by letter, in individual chapters. The chapters are made up of the modern history of the usage of and implied meaning behind each letter. Its ancient history is covered in boxes contained in the chapter. So far, so good ... or not, as the case may be! It suffers from being an incredibly dull treatment of what is an incredibly interesting subject. It is poorly written, there's no flair (just because it's non-fiction, doesn't mean it shouldn't have flair!). Keeping the ancient and the modern separate just doesn't work and you get no sense of the cohesive history of the alphabet, it doesn't flow. The sections dealing with the modern examples of usage are shallow and more of a finger-dip into pop-culture than any serious treatment of the theme. What's worse is that, as each letter is afforded its own chapter, you just know that after 'A', there are another 25 tortuous experiences to go. I tried to finish it, I really did (it even resided on the shelf in the bathroom for a couple of years because each chapter was the right size to cater for one bath's worth of reading - and let's face it, I really didn't care if I dropped it in) but I still failed to get past C.

Whatever level of interest you have in reading about language, there is someone out there who does it better than Sacks. Try David Crystal if you want general interest pitched at a non-expert level, for cultural anecdotes try Bill Bryson, for deeper, more heavily linguistic treatments try Steven Pinker but for heaven's sake don't buy this! show less