Mysteries of the Alphabet: The Origins of Writing

Rating:
Summary: Archaeography??
Review: Is it just me who thinks this whole concept of 'archaeography' in the last chapter is utterly ridiculous?! Surely the way a word is spelt alphabetically has nothing to do with its meaning and etymology?!

As for the rest of the book, it's a nice overall intro into the origins of the alphabet -not too technical and yet combines a lot of research.

Rating:
Summary: Learning and extreme ignorance.
Review: The book explains the evolution of standard 26-letter Latin alphabet focussing mostly on the early evolution of the letters from proto-Sinaitic through Phoenician, Greek, Etruscan and Latin and also looking very closely at the Aramaic stream which produced modern Hebrew characters.

It is lavishly and beautifully printed in black and red on very heavy (almost carboard) stock with the various letter shapes appearing in the text in red. There are a large number of clear hand drawings and a few very clear photographs of important early inscriptions. To some Ouaknin may seem too concerned that every shape that every letter ever took should be shown and explained. But far better a reference book that contains too much rather than not enough.

If you want to learn to read some of these early scripts and became familiar with ancient letter form this book provides lots of genuine material to practice on, especially if you know Hebrew or Greek and can read many of these inscriptions. If you can't they will mostly just be pretty pictures.

But there are some serious downsides to this book if you want to use it for anything but epigraphical reference.

Ouaknin pushes hard a dubious and undemonstrable hypothesis that the alphabet was invented by Israelites in Egypt but provides no evidence whatsover, just quotations from another writer Gérard Pommier. Ouaknin associates the original pictograph for G with the meaning "camel" rather than "throw stick" for no other reason than he wishes to believe despite archaelogical evidence that camels were associated with Hebrews in the patriarchal period. Maybe they were and the evidence just hasn't yet been found. But that's a bad reason to favor one interpretation over another when neither says anything about the independant issue of when domestication of the camel first occurred.

Israelites are as likely a candidate for inventing the alphabetas any other Semites. But they are no more so. It is special pleading to argue that the reason later forms of the writing system lost the original pictorial quality was because they passed through the hands of a people opposed to graven images! We have other scripts that began as pictorial images which also later became abstract shapes where no such reason could involved. The explanation is redundant.

Such special pleading is disturbing.

Ouaknin mangles the pronunciations of the characters. What kind of professor and teacher specializing in Hebrew and Jewish studies doesn't know that the sounds of modern Hebrew and modern Greek were not always the same as the sounds of their ancient counterparts (and in the case of Hebrew not the same as the Hebrew used by Jews who have continued to dwell in Arabic countries for centuries).

Every time a character's modern pronunciation differs from an older pronunciation Ouaknin gets it wrong.

One example of many: in his discussion on F Ouknin explains that the letter vav is pronounced as v. In fact in ancient texts it was pronounced w and the letter should probably be called waw in those contexts.

Then Ouaknin compounds his error by claiming the diagamma character which came from waw in Greek was also pronounced v. It wasn't.

Yet two paragraphs later (correctly but in contradiction) Ouaknin mentions that there was no "v" sound in ancient Greek. (Does he not read what he himself writes? Is he just copying material he doesn't understand?)

Also in an aside here Ouaknin mentions the introduction of the new Greek letter phi which he claims was pronounced like "f". In fact in Classical Greek the letter phi was pronounced like p followed by h.

Not only are many of the pronunciations wrong but also the diacritics on some of the tables, especially the table for Ugaritic.

On page 106 the five addtional Greek letters are given instead as four and identified as "Y, then F, X, and finally W". Seemingly F here means Phi, Psi has been forgotten altogether, and W is an error of Omega. Is the writer of this passage who apparently doesn't know the Greek alphabet the same who covers Greek epigraphy elsewhere in the book?

On page 267 though the letter O is being discussed the inscriptions have instead the letter theta rendered in red.

The book feels as though it might have been expanded from a draft originally intended to treat mainly the Hebrew alphabet. Ouaknin carefully and consistantly matches up Hebrew letters to Latin letters as much as he can and for Latin letters which contain no match Ouaknin refers the reader to a Latin letter which he considers to be the main match.

Y is listed three times in the book. The last reference which is the place where a reader would naturally look for it wrongly refers the reader to the section on K. Y is actually officially mentioned under I where it wrongly said to derive from Hebrew Yod rather than Wav/Waw. But Y also appears under F under the name "Greek I" presumably a translation error from the original French as the French word for Y is I-Grec 'Greek I'.

I will stop pointing out such confusions now. But there are others.

Ouaknin also includes discussion of meanings of the letters, based on their original forms and on their names and on who knows what. Sometimes he mentions the Kabalah but not often. For the letter resh (R) he obtains further derived meanings by replace aleph in the three letter root Resh-aleph-shin and yet further meanings by replacing aleph instead by yod, presumably because these substitutions make no difference in modern Hebrew pronunciation.

It's as bad as equating English _trough_ with _threw_. This is just crank linguistics.

And that leads to the final short section in the book pretentiously explaining the new concept of archaeography which is what Ouaknin is really interested in, mystical divination based on the meanings he ascribes to words in languages spelled with the proto-Sinaitic forms of the alphabet according to his equations of forms.

Yet another New Age mystical system!

Rating:
Summary: Where Do Our Letters Come From
Review: The mysteries of the alphabet suggested by the author in the title of this refer to where the letters of the alphabet came from. To answer this question the author divides his book into parts. In the first part the author briefly surveys the history of writing from around the world. In this part of the book the author offers the theory that the alphabet was invented by, not only Semites, but Hebrews, on the Sinai Peninsula during the time of the Exodus. Ouaknin writes that the reason for this was the Commandment not to make any graven image or likeness of one. "This prohibition on the image forced the Semites (i.e. Hebrews), who still wrote in a pictographic writing, to rid themselves of images" (p.46).

The second part of the book shows how each letter of the modern Latin alphabet "has a clear line of descent back to the script known as Proto-Sinaitic (p.115) and so to images of things known in Antiquity. For example, the letter A comes from the image for an ox. This part of the book takes up 236 pages of the 369 pages of text. It is this part of the book that makes it worth keeping.

In part three, Ouaknin brings up what he calls the "archeographic revolution." This means tracing the origin of scripts no longer in use and how they evolved. Ouaknin reiterates his belief that L Benveniste was correct in asserting that "writing was born on Sinai." For Ouaknin the "abstract form of the letters of the alphabet have a superior status to the pictorial form..."

Unfortunately Ouaknin races through this more philosophic part of his book in only 20 pages. Broad statements are not explored more thoroughly. So the reviewer is left conceding that Ouaknin's connection of the letters of the modern Western alphabet is interesting reading. On the other hand, Ouaknin depends so much upon the idea that the alphabet was *invented* on the Sinai. In _Early History the Alphabet_ Joseph Naveh writes that the Sinai inscriptions are preceded by a century or more by those from Shechem, Gezer, and Lachish. Naveh is one of those scholars that Ouaknin would cite as a reference; I will be glad to accept Naveh's opinion over Ouaknin's.

Rating:
Summary: Archaeography??
Review: This book could probably be shortened to 100 pages max.

There are TOO many pictures/tables in the book that have nothing to do with the text and the pictures/tables aren't even explained.

This book lacks organization.

Was not what I expected. Only a handful of sentences helped me understand how we arrived at the modern alphabet from pictograms (pictures that represent words)

If you want a book that explains the evolution of written language from pre-history, this is NOT the book for you!

Rating:
Summary: Simplistic, Cutesy, Questionable Conclusions
Review: This book looked fun and since I enjoy reading about languages and writing how could I go wrong? It is not a really bad book. There are errors in all books but as one reviewer notes, these should not be about your subject matter.

Here it is - we have a brief, illustrated history and the assumption (unproven) that the ancient Israelites were the developer of the alphabet which evolved and transformed as it spread around the world. I do not know for sure that this is not the case but what I do know is that the author presents scant evidence for his contention. The "ABC" portion of the book was helpful only if one were looking at Hebrew or Greek since the order followed the Hebrew alphabet. The book is not worth the money.

Rating:
Summary: Simplistic, Cutesy, Questionable Conclusions
Review: This book looked fun and since I enjoy reading about languages and writing how could I go wrong? It is not a really bad book. There are errors in all books but as one reviewer notes, these should not be about your subject matter.

Here it is - we have a brief, illustrated history and the assumption (unproven) that the ancient Israelites were the developer of the alphabet which evolved and transformed as it spread around the world. I do not know for sure that this is not the case but what I do know is that the author presents scant evidence for his contention. The "ABC" portion of the book was helpful only if one were looking at Hebrew or Greek since the order followed the Hebrew alphabet. The book is not worth the money.