Alphabetical Read Online Free Page A

history of storing meanings is not always a pretty one.
    The Phoenicians used abstract versions of objects to indicate letters: a bifurcated (horned?) sign was an ‘ox’ (in their language‘aleph’), and on down through the words for ‘house’, ‘stick’, ‘door’ and ‘shout’ up to ‘tooth’ and ‘mark’. You don’t have to be all that fanciful to see that in many of the cases, the sign had evolved from the object and that the corresponding letter came to signify the first sound of the name of that object.
    One other point: Phoenicians had no letters for vowels. These days, such an alphabet tends not to be called an alphabet, or even a ‘consonantal alphabet’; it’s called an ‘abjad’ – which is a transliteration of the Arabic word corresponding to ‘alphabet’. The idea of trying to use an alphabet that has no vowels may seem to some surprising or difficult. If you can read written Arabic this is neither surprising nor difficult as it has no vowels either. Ancient Hebrew, another descendant from Semitic writing, didn’t have vowels either, though reforms have added them.
    A quick digression (the first of many in this book) on Hebrew vowels: my family were not religious, so I didn’t attend Hebrew classes. However, one day I was ‘spotted’ by a boy at my school who ‘claimed me’.
    â€˜You are, aren’t you?’ he said.
    â€˜What?’ I said.
    â€˜Jewish,’ he said.
    â€˜I think so,’ I said, though I wasn’t 100 per cent sure. So I went home and asked my parents if I was Jewish.
    â€˜Why do you ask?’ said my father.
    (Remember here, in the kind of Jewish life I was part of, every comment gives rise to a question.)
    â€˜Because Peter Kelner says that I am,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh yes,’ said my father. ‘And because he said so, you should believe him?’
    â€˜He says I should go to Hebrew classes with his mother,’ I said.
    â€˜Did he? Why’s that?’
    I don’t remember how or why my secular parents, who had spent some time separating themselves off from the religious traditions, enabled me and encouraged me to go to Hebrew classes with Mrs Kelner.
    To be honest, I don’t remember much of what was taught. Yet, I can distinctly remember Mrs Kelner teaching us some Hebrew vowel sounds.
    â€˜Look at that one,’ she said, and she pointed at a letter that looked a bit like a 7 with a dot over the top.
    â€˜Now look at that one,’ she said, and she pointed at another 7 with a dot halfway down the downstroke of the seven.
    â€˜How do you tell the difference between those two? I’ll tell you. If a football lands on your head, you say, “Oh!” If it lands in your kishkes [your ‘guts’] you say, “Ooo”.’
    â€˜Oh’ and ‘Ooo’. That’s just about the extent of my Hebrew alphabet, and given that one of the things that people know about ancient Hebrew is that it has no vowels, it’s ironic that it’s vowels I remember.
    End of digression.
    The Phoenicians didn’t have the advantage of Mrs Kelner and her vowel sounds though it is thought that they were just as creative in their teaching of the alphabet. That’s why they retained ‘ox’, ‘house’, ‘wheel’ and the rest – as popular memory devices or mnemonics. Though people with my education may well have ended up thinking of the Phoenicians as a people in Latin exercise books, waiting patiently for the Romans to obliterate them and their library, we can look at the Phoenicians’ letters and see the objects they derive from; or we can then look at our own letters and trace them back to these objects. Here is the Phoenician alphabet, its name, its sound and the modern letter in the alphabet it corresponds to.

    A, ‘aleph’, ‘ox’; sound : a stop in the