A is for Ox: A Short History of the Alphabet

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It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. The text on this statuette, running from upper left to lower right, seems to read 'mt l bʿlt,' meaning 'gift for the lady. The solution, as inferred by Sanders (and I agree) begins in the household: the mother, father, and child. Musk Ox, our rambunctious anti-hero, literally chews through the cover of this anarchic alphabet book. In A Is for Ox, Barry Sanders brilliantly shows how the answer to this question takes us to the heart of the twin crises of youth violence and illiteracy.

From those ancient beginnings came our own alphabet, whose formation would take it on a journey that took in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Semitic slaves, the Greeks and on to the Etruscans and Romans.The author considers the self as the mediator, the voice, for the articulation between the inner life and the outer swirl of events. The National Library of Australia acknowledges Australia’s First Nations Peoples – the First Australians – as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of this land and gives respect to the Elders – past and present – and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Sanders goes on to say that, ‘The idea of a critical, self-directed human being we take for granted as the working foundation of our humanness develops only in the crucible of reading and writing. Over 3,500 years ago, a few of them seem to have had the idea to adapt the writing system to their own language, and the way they repurposed hieroglyphs was inspired. This book gives a brief history of the alphabet's development, tracing the path of change in simple, direct prose, illustrated with numerous examples of symbols, engravings and script.

Over time, what had started out as drawings of animals, objects, and tiny people was simplified into abstract lines that could be jotted down easily. Yazarın günümüz dünyasıyla ilgili düşüncelerini de okuma fırsatım olsaydı karşılaştırma adına çok güzel olabilirdi.The electronic medium violates the cardinal rule of conversation: the listener must be able to interrupt. I never really gave the matter much thought, of course, or I would have realized that it could not possibly have happened that way, but it wasn't until I read this book that I learned how they came about. You might not have learned it in elementary school, but the earliest history of the alphabet that forms the basis of written English and French has its origins in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.