John Mullan reviews David Sacks, The Alphabet, for the Guardian. Excerpts:
His book sets out to show how our so-called Roman alphabet (though the Romans had no J, V or W) evolved from others. It is not the first such history of the alphabet for the general reader, but it is an especially engaging one. Sacks's clever, simple idea is to follow the individual letters, one by one. He takes us back in time to find how each came to us and how it gained its special properties. In the process, the eccentricities of English spelling and pronunciation become intelligible, even weirdly ingenious.
It is extraordinary how far and how clearly we can see back to the origins of our letters. English took its alphabet from Latin (as did many a language that the Romans never heard spoken, from Polish to Zulu to Indonesian). Latin itself was written with letters copied from the utterly dissimilar Etruscan language, a tongue still largely unintelligible to us. A few centuries before this happened, the Etruscans had appropriated the Greek alphabet, even though, again, the languages had little in common. And the Greeks had taken their letters, with minor adaptations, from the Phoenicians, though the two peoples' languages were "as different as Arabic and English".
Shared alphabetical signs do not imply that languages are closely related. When languages have passed from illiteracy to literacy, they have simply needed to find letters, and have taken them from some nearby source or impressively clever group of foreigners. Sets of letters are always purloined from somewhere else. At each stage, as an older alphabet is fitted to a newer tongue, there are changes. New sounds are affixed to old letters.
[...]
The Phoenician system is the ancestor of most of the world's alphabets: not just our own, but others such as Hebrew, Arabic and the Devanagari and Bengali scripts of India. Perhaps 19 of our letters have Phoenician counterparts. The shapes of some of these are extraordinarily intact. So the 12th letter in the Phoenician alphabet stood for an "l" sound. Called lamed (pronounced "lah-med") it meant "ox goad" and imitated the shape of a stick with a crook handle for poking livestock. There, in the very same place in our alphabet, is L, the same ox-herder's stick. There is something as miraculous in these forms as in the most beautiful relics of ancient civilisation.
The American edition of the book has a different title: Language Visible : Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z.