Letter Perfect Quotes

“The alphabet was an invention below stairs.”
― David Sacks, Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z

“Alternatively, the name may refer to the prized textile dye, ranging in hue from red to dark purple, which was Phoenicia’s prime luxury product. Extracted from sea mollusks’ dead bodies through a secret process, this uniquely beautiful and expensive purple, exported in woven clothing and furnishings, became an international status symbol in antiquity, its use confined to the very rich, chiefly royalty. Down through the early 20th century A.D., the color purple was associated in Europe with kings and emperors.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“vowel” coming via medieval French from the Latin adjective vocalis, “using the voice.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Modern experts now believe the alphabet was invented sometime around 2000 B.C. by Semites who dwelled as foreigners in pharaoh’s Egypt;”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Less rigorous was the second Egyptian writing system, hieratic. (The name, which is misleading, means “priestly,” but other social classes used it.) Hieratic was a simplified hieroglyphic script, designed for ink and brush on papyrus or textile: Pictures were converted to stylized outlines or strokes, with a far reduced vocabulary. Hieratic writing in its most basic form was accessible to most of the Egyptian upper and middle classes: landowners, certain merchants, and military officers.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean “boat” or “to sail”—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant “there,” not “an owl and a reed.” Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the Egyptian word for “there.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Any picture could be employed either as (1) a pictograph or logogram or (2) a phonetic symbol. A sailboat image might mean “boat” or “to sail”—or it might simply contribute certain consonant sounds to help spell a different word. In hieroglyphics, an owl and a reed together meant “there,” not “an owl and a reed.” Read phonetically, the two pictures approximated the sound of the”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Writing in Egypt began around 3000 B.C. The official system was hieroglyphics (“sacred carvings”), revered as the gift of the scribe god Toth.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“The Gezer Calendar is a limestone inscription from the mid- or late 900s B.C., thought to be the earliest survival of written Hebrew. Discovered in A.D. 1908 at the site of the ancient city of Gezer in what is now southern Israel, the “calendar” briefly lists the months of the year by farming duties.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Our word “Phoenician” comes from ancient Greek. Phoinikes, “red people,” was what the Greeks called them, probably in reference to their copper skin color.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“The Phoenicians were Semites, akin in ethnic group and language to the ancient Jews. Phoenician speech would have sounded much like ancient Hebrew. Israel—the Jewish kingdom of David and Solomon—”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“The Phoenicians were a dynamic Iron Age people, based in what is now Lebanon. Today they are remembered as the best seafarers of the ancient world. In the 700s B.C. they spanned the length of the Mediterranean with a seaborne trade network, exchanging luxury goods from the East for raw materials from the West: Babylonian textiles, Egyptian metalwork, and Phoenician carved ivory were traded for elephant tusks from North Africa and bars of silver and tin from Spain.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“The Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B.C. would become the great-grandmother of our own. About 19 of our letters can be traced back directly—in their shapes, their alphabetical sequence, and, for most, their sounds—to Phoenician counterparts. Ours is not the only descendant. As shown in the “Family Tree of the World’s Alphabets” (this page), the Phoenician alphabet has been the source for nearly every subsequent alphabet, past and present.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z

“Likewise, India’s Hindi and Pakistan’s Urdu are fundamentally the same tongue, only using Devanagari script in India, Arabic letters in Pakistan. And Yiddish, while not exactly German, is closely akin to it. Yet Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, and German in Roman ones.”
― David Sacks, Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z