Programming the mind
G’s that look like I’s, F’s that sound like “Waw,” and Q’s that look like monkeys — man, was our alphabet a mess.
That’s because many of our letters began as Egyptian hieroglyph symbols 4,000 years ago, with a hodgepodge of Semitic, Phoenician, Greek and Roman influences thrown in.
It would take centuries, and the dropping of more than a few letters along the way, before our alphabet was born. By year 1011, the order that we know today was largely in place — excluding “J,” “U,” “W” — but there were 29 letters, including the ampersand.
The alphabet we know today takes its modern 26-letter shape in the 16th century.
Author Michael Rosen devotes 400-plus pages to topsy-turvy history of our letters in his entertaining “Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells A Story” (Counterpoint), dedicating a chapter to each of the 26 letters. Here’s a brief look.
Turn the “A” upside down and you’ll have a good sense of its original shape and meaning when it was introduced around 1800 BC. Resembling an animal’s head with antlers or horns, the original meaning of the letter in ancient Semitic was “ox.”
Around 800 BC, Phoenicians began to use a “dalet” — or a rough triangle facing left — which translated to door. The Greeks adopted it and renamed it “delta.” The Romans later added serifs and varied the thickness of the lines, softening one side into a semicircle.
The “F” of Phoenician times resembled a “Y” and sounded like “waw.” The ancient Greeks changed it to “digamma” and tipped the “Y” over to look like a drunk version of our “F.” The Romans regulated the writing of the letter centuries later, drawing the cross lines at firm geometric right angles, also giving it the “fff” sound.
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https://nypost.com/2015/02/08/the-stories-behind-the-letters-of-our-alphabet/