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A review by nwhyte
A is for Ox: A Short History of the Alphabet by Lyn Davies
3.0
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1697767.html
A decent little book on the origins of the alphabet, the first half being about the global question of how the Latin script developed from hieroglyphics via cuneiform, Phoenician, Greek and etruscan, and the second half taking each letter individually. I've read several books on this topic so not much was new to me; the information is very much presented for the non-specialist, and readers may well wonder what the sounds were precisely that were represented by the Semitic letters aleph and ayin (
A decent little book on the origins of the alphabet, the first half being about the global question of how the Latin script developed from hieroglyphics via cuneiform, Phoenician, Greek and etruscan, and the second half taking each letter individually. I've read several books on this topic so not much was new to me; the information is very much presented for the non-specialist, and readers may well wonder what the sounds were precisely that were represented by the Semitic letters aleph and ayin (