The missing letters

“The standard Greek alphabet had twenty-four letters; the standard late Roman alphabet had twenty-three; ours has twenty-six.
From the standard Greek alphabet the Romans took A, B, E, Z, H, I, K, M, N, O, T, X and Y with hardly any change at all. . . . Remodeling and finishing other Greek letters, the Romans produced C (and G), L, S, P, R, D and V. F and Q were taken from two old characters abandoned by the Greeks themselves. And that makes twenty-three. . . .
The missing letters, J, U and W, were not used by the Romans at all. U and W developed from V about a thousand years ago, and J developed from the letter I about five hundred years ago.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

all consonants, no vowels

“The Phoenicians, we believe, supplied the Greeks with nineteen characters—all consonants, no vowels. They wrote entirely with consonants. . . . It was a sort of ‘abbreviation’ writing. We sometimes do almost the same thing as, for instance, yr for ‘your’ and bldg for ‘building.’”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

the Moabite stone

“One of the finest specimens of Phoenician writing, and also the oldest known one that can be dated, is an inscription in the alphabet of Tyre written in the reign of Mesha, king of Moab, early in the ninth century B.C. This inscription on a stone tablet with a rounded top known as the Moabite stone, was discovered in 1868 in the vicinity of the Dead Sea and is now in the museum of the Louvre in Paris.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

Kyoorius Designyatra

the first Hindu characters

“In India, when the Hindu god Brahma decided to write down his teachings, there were no letters for him to use so he invented some. His patterns came mainly from the seams in the human skull. Brahma, they say, traced the first Hindu characters with his finger on leaves of gold.”

—Oscar Ogg, The 26 Letters, 1961.

of divine origin

“Many peoples believe their language or system of writing to be of divine origin. The name of the Sanskrit alphabet is Devanagari, which means “pertaining to the city of the gods.” Hieroglyphic, used by the ancient Egyptians for their formal documents, carved in stone, means “sacred stone writing.” . . . The Assyrians had a legend to the effect that the cuneiform characters were given to man by the god Nebo, who held sway over human destiny. . . . The Mayas attributed writing to their most important deity, Itzamna. The lost prehistoric writing of Japan was styled kami no moji or “divine characters.” As late as the Christian Middle Ages, Constantine the Philosopher (another name for Cyril, apostle to the Slavs) is described as having had Slavic writing revealed to him by God.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

a true phonetic alphabet

“The Egyptian symbol for ‘sun’ was a picture of the sun. The spoken Egyptian word for ‘sun’ was re. The sun picture is often found in hieroglyphic inscriptions standing not for “sun” but for the spoken syllable re occuring in a longer word.
It remained for the Phoenicians and Hebrews finally to use their symbols with the exclusively phonetic value of single syllables or consonants, dropping the ideographic connotation altogether. At this point, we have the beginning of a true phonetic alphabet.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

the Roman

“The Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician, gave rise to the Etruscan, which in turn gave rise to the Roman, in use among western nations today.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

the Cyrillic

“[A] version of the Greek alphabet was devised by two bishops from Constantinople, Cyril and Methodius, for the Slavs to whom they brought Christianity in the ninth century. Faced with Slavic sounds which did not exist in Greek, they stretched the Greek alphabet as far as it would go, then drafted one or two Hebrew characters and invented others. The result was the Cyrillic alphabet used today by those nations which followed the Eatern Church—Russians, Ukranians, Serbs, and Bulgars.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.

Black Letter

“[T]he German Gothic or Black Letter alphabet, first developed around the twelfth century from the earlier Carolingian script used by scribes at the court of Charlemagne and his successors. Black Letter was used in English till the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the plainer Roman.”

—Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1965.