[.ca] Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World (ISBN 047141574X)

From Amazon.com:
In the tradition of small books that try to explain a lot (think How the Irish Saved Civilization), John Man's Alpha Beta is an excellent survey on the history of letters. They may have played a more dramatic role in the advancement of Western culture than most people realize: "The Greeks, so this argument runs, would not have been so influential but for the invention that fixed their writings, the invention that they named after its first two signs, alpha and beta--the alphabet." This opinion will no doubt ruffle a few feathers in the classics departments at universities, which have instructed students on the intellectual and literary achievements of the Greeks for generations. Man seems to challenge the idea that the Greeks offered something inherently worthwhile. "Possibly nothing of their oral genius would have been preserved but for a piece of astonishing good fortune. They just happened to live near one of the cultures that had stumbled on the alphabet, and they just happened to be at a crucial state in social evolution that made them open to its adoption." This is a fascinating argument, and Man makes it a compelling one, although it's also possible to believe the Greeks had the additional good fortune of producing a storyteller as good as Homer. Most of the book is a well-told tale that runs a course from the first symbols pressed into clay tablets to the advent of the Internet--the Greeks are just a piece of it. The book covers the ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Etruscans, and several other cultures in some detail. One of the most interesting sections discusses the Koreans, creators of "an alphabet that is about as far along the road towards perfection as any alphabet is likely to get." Man is a colloquial writer; reading Alpha Beta is like listening to a popular college professor lecture on his favorite topic. The complex and controversial scholarship on the alphabet becomes instantly accessible to nonexpert readers on these pages. Anyone interested in the power of words and the history of civilization will find Alpha Beta irresistible. --John Miller

Uninformed:
This is a book written by an author who seems to be very much out of his element. He begins with a lengthy discussion of Chinese characters, which is logical enough, except that he really doesn't have even a basic understanding of them. Much of what he says about Chinese characters is fundamentally misinformed. He argues that Chinese characters persisted because of the "conservative" nature of Chinese culture, when in fact this form of writing persisted because it is very well suited to the nature of the Chinese language. This undermines some of the succeeding points he tries to make about writing, where he argues that hieroglyphic writing persisted because of the "conservative" nature of Egyptian culture. He includes a brief and pointless chapter about memes, in which he fails to make clear why he is even discussing it. It strikes me as filler. He does include a fair amount of Mediterranean history, which is reasonable, but he scatters it among the information he is presenting about the alphabet. The result is that it is hard to follow the relationship between historical events and the development of the alphabet. This material comes across as insufficiently considered. There certainly is a fascinating story buried here, but Man fails to dig it up, dust it off, and show it to us. Finally, I would say that Man fails to deliver on the title. The focus of the book is the development of the alphabet, rather than how the alphabet changed the world.

Those Most Important Symbols:
On a visceral level, most educated people understand how important reading and writing are, though it often seems that both are out of vogue as anything more than functional tools these days. Still, no matter how the literary may mourn (and I count myself as one of these), there is something to be said for the simple functionality of these twenty-six shapes that define the "Roman" alphabet. As John Man reminds us, it is this concept of alphabet as a subset of writing--since writing can exist without an alphabet--that allowed civilization to develop in the way that it has. As a teacher of math and science I have often given more thought to the development of number than I have to the development of the alphabet; and yet, both subjects are equally intriguing and important. Both have contributed to the rise of our modern culture in different and important ways. I am fascinated by many of the things that Man has to say about the development of these important symbols. For example, it is interesting to think about how the leap was made from "symbol as word" to "symbol as sound" which is at the heart of the leap to the alphabet. Then there is the paradigm-shift that has to take place as younger cultures appropriate the concept and develop it. It is an incredible story. And, for the most part, Man tells it well. It seems a little brief at times but it is a good overview of a complex subject that is still advancing day by day. Anyone interested in writing and language would be foolish not to take a look at this most readable book.

Parson's Egg:
I found this book quite informative and intriguing in parts but it also included some very dodgy logic and a style of English which makes USA Today read like Shakespeare. I found Man's central hypothesis that the Roman alphabet is the most efficient way of transferring the spoken word to written format hardly credible. His analysis of Chinese and the merits of Chinese characters versus the alphabet is facile and the Japanese language is not given a mention. However, neither are Arabic nor any of the Indian languages, so I suppose speakers of those languages should not feel discriminated against. More irritatingly, the extermination of the Mayan written heritage by the Spanish might suggest to some (but not to John Man) that efforts to diffuse the Roman alphabet in Central/South America were not totally meritorious. Man certainly has collected some interesting snippets of knowledge about how the Roman alphabet developed but too often the ideas are not fully developed, or the train of thought sputters out midway. The whole book would have been better in the hands of a Simon Singh or Simon Winchester, where the intellectual rigour could have been maintained without the silly anecdotes about the author's childhood experiences.

Disappointed:
The development of alphabets, and specifically of the western alphabet, is not straightforward. But John Mann makes it even more confusing than the subject is all on its own. Rather than try to make steps and pieces link up in an understandable manner, the author jumps around, adds lots of tangential anecdotes that could be intereting but aren't relevant, and drags things out. I have the sense that what might have made a good magazine article or two have been padded, a lot, to make it book length. The book would benefit greatly from some illustrations and diagrams. There are two appendices, but they aren't referenced in the text and the reader won't even discover them unless you look to see how much farther you have to read. The author, for some reason, has decided that the western alphabet owes its beginnings to the epics of Homer, and proceeds to reassert that throughout the book, although the justification for that assertion never does become clear or strong. Nor does the distinciton between cuneiform and other forms of writing. There are a lot of interesting bits of information in the book, just not put together as well as they should be.

An Unconventional and Stimulating Look at Expressing Ideas:
If you are like me, this book will surprise you. I expected something like 26 chapters with each saying something about each letter of the alphabet and its origin. Instead, the book tries to find the earliest precursors of the modern alphabet, and connect the dots from there to the use of modern languages on the World Wide Web. In doing so, the book relies on a combination of interesting conjecture, reviews of well-established but little-known scholarship, and cutting-edge, in-process research that will be new to most readers who are not in linguistics. In reading Alpha Beta, the insights you get will be different from what you expected. An alphabet works well because it fits a lot of languages equally poorly. As such, it is a form of "fuzzy logic" that mathematicians love. Korea has developed the alphabet that is most closely connected to its base language. Most alphabets succeed because of the military and commercial strength of the culture that favors them, rather than how good they are. The mixtures of ancient alphabets, languages, and religions are much more complex than you probably ever imagined. The process of taking an oral tradition, and making it into a written one is also powerfully explained (as happened with both the Bible and Homer's masterpieces). I graded the book down because it tended to tell me more than I wanted to know about how each of the cultures evolved, and less than I wanted to know about the details of how an alphabet's creation solved specific language problems. After you finish this book, think about what the potential benefits could be of reforming the alphabet to eliminate more of the confusions inherent in expressing English. What would make it easier to be precise in this language, while making the language easier to learn? Make your point clearly!