the Sumerian writing system

“The first system of writing, devised by the Sumerians, consisted of stylized representations of objects, known as pictograms.

The symbols, crude at first, were used primarily to record agricultural transactions and astronomical observations. Consequently, the first written words of which there is evidence were for nouns—particularly for stars and animals. Over the next hundred years Sumerian scribes combined noun pictograms with qualifying adjectives to arrive at symbols for such words as “small bison,” “big reindeer,” and “bright star.” Clearly enamored of their new invention, scholars continued to modify their writing system, and by about 3200 B.C. it contained symbols for verbs; “to sleep” for example, was represented by a recumbent man. These richer characters are called ideograms.

Greater refinement was needed, however, because the range of human communications by this time already encompassed abstract ideas.

These entered the Sumerian writing system about 3100 B.C. through the straightforward use of homonyms. For instance, to use and English example, a scribe might combine the noun symbols for “bee” and “leaf” to arrive at the abstract concept of ‘belief.’ But this enrichment of writing made for slower execution, and adherence to the use of pictures limited the number of ideas that could be expressed. These disadvantages the Sumerians overcame by simplifying their written symbols and teaching combined characters to the next generation as single words in their own right, known as phonograms.

A further attempt to facilitate the speed of writing, and to streamline it, eventually gave rise to the use of abstract symbols, each of which represented a unit of sound within a word, or syllable. This writing, known as cuneiform . . . was drawn by the scribe with a wedge-shaped stylus on a wet clay tablet. . . .

By the end of the third millennium B.C. the Sumerian writing system had become sufficiently rich and flexible to record the most complex historical events and literary creations. Inscribed on tablets in twelve columns, these literary compositions range from short hymns and longer myths to children’s fables and scholarly essays to epic-length poems, some running a thousand lines.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.

The Phoenicians’ system of writing

“The Phoenicians were probably the greatest seafarers of the ancient world and inhabited regions that are now Syria, Israel, and Lebanon. Their principal cities were all ports . . . and one of their famous ports, Byblos, is known today as the point of origin where the Phoenician alphabet entered, and profoundly affected, the Greek world.

The Phoenicians’ system of writing was unique. . . . [T]he Phoenicians, somewhere around 2000 B.C., severed the relationship between pictures and words for all time in all Occidental cultures. By creating symbols with phonetic values for single syllables and consonants, they thus devised the first almost-pure phonetic alphabet. (It still did not recognize vowels.)

The closest system of writing had been Sumerian cuneiform. It is unknown whether the Phoenicians arrived at their largely phonetic alphabet by simplifying Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics. . . .

Byblos was also the port from which papyrus traveled to Egypt and Greece, and the city’s name has been immortalized in many Greek and Western words: biblion, Greek for “rolled paper” or “scroll”; and our words “Bible,” “bibliography,” and “bibliophile.””

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.

the present English alphabet

“The Greeks adopted the Phoenecian alphabet (also known as the North Semitic alphabet) of twenty-two to thirty letters and called them by such words as alpha, beta, and gamma, which are phonetic imitations of important Semitic words, names in most cases: aleph (ox), beth (house), and gimel (camel). To these they added two letters supposedly signifying female and male genitalia—delta and phi.

In a stroke of genius, the Greeks decided to replace some of the Phoenician syllable letters with vowel sounds, thus producing the first purely phonetic, and true, alphabet, composed entirely of vowels and consonants. The Greek alphabet spread throughout the European world, undergoing minor changes, and gave birth to the Etruscan alphabet and then to the Roman.

In giving the letters Latin names, the Romans introduced the alphabet that is in use among Western nations today. The Latin alphabet had only twenty letters, the present English alphabet minus j, k, v, w, y, and z. The Romans added k for use in abbreviations and y and z to transcribe Greek words, producing a twenty-three letter alphabet.

After being adopted by English-speaking peoples, the alphabet gained its final three letters: w arose from a doubling, or formation of a ligature, of u, and j and v as consonant variants of the vowels i and u.”

—Charles Panati, The Browser’s Book of Beginnings, 1984.

the Colosseum by moonlight

“‘Well, I have seen the Colosseum by moonlight—that’s one thing I can rave about!’”

—Henry James, Daisy Miller, 1879.

sonorous, crystalline

“The stars shone through the leafless jasmine branches. Behind them they heard the river flowing, and now and again on the bank the rustling of the dry reeds. Masses of shadow here and there loomed out in the darkness, and sometimes, vibrating with one movement, they rose up and swayed like immense black waves pressing forward to engulf them. The cold of the night made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations.”

—Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1856; translated from the French by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, 2003.

my favorite colophons

I’ve been working on the book. (Imagine that!) And, not that it matters to anyone but me, I’m not going to worry about the colophon. A colophon implies a certain persnicketyness or even perfectionism, and I don’t want any would-be publishers to think I’ll be difficult to work with.

And besides, my favorite colophons are WAY TOO LONG, like one my mother sent to me with a note (“Your father thinks this is a bit much”). Some colophons not only identify of the typefaces used, but describe them, summarize their general uses, and of course reveal briefly their history. (If Nabakov were still around he could probably work a whole novel into a colophon, the way he did with footnotes in Pale Fire.)

So . . . in the interest of actually finishing the book, I’m dropping the damn colophon.

@

a quote book!

I’ve been working on my book, Color Quotes. I am working with InDesign, which I recommend to anyone who happens to be designing a book, and yesterday I put all 22 chapters together as one. The count is . . . drumroll, please, 425 pages!!!

All that’s left to create is a title page, a table of contents, some acknowledgements, and of course a colophon. (That’s the identification of the typefaces and some notes about the design and production of the book. It’s usually on a left-hand page at the bottom of the last page of the book, but I’ve seen them on a left-hand page near the beginning of the book too. I love colophons. My book’s got to have one.)

I haven’t even begun to think of a cover. In the industry, books and book covers are designed by competely different people, and now I know why. Each are completely different monumental design challenges. One is about reading, and one is about selling. I will not mind leaving the cover to someone else, but the idea here is to, basically, self-publish, as in print and bind, maybe with a hard cover and a bookmark ribbon, just a few copies of the book. When these fall on the desks of the publishers they will look so real that they won’t be able to resist. There’ll probably be a bidding war! Movie rights, for a quote book!

I Just Want To Be A Tugboat Captain

winged genies

“[In the ninth century BC] appear winged genies . . . with human heads or sometimes the heads of birds of prey, whose task was to attract positive forces. Indeed, they hold in one hand a situla and in the other an object like a pinecone, with which they seem to sprinkle anyone who comes near them. . . . [A]s on the panels behind Ashurnasirpal II’s throne at Nimrud, these figures also appear in composite scenes: twice behind the king, who is also depicted twice, once on each side of the Tree of Life, which itself is surmounted by a winged disc representing the great god Assur or the sun god Shamash.”

—The Art and Architecture of Mesopotamia, by Giovanni Curatol, Jean-Daniel Forest, Nathalie Gallois, Carlo Lippolis, and Roberta Venco Ricciardi, 2007.