Alpha Beta

A narrow goal - trace how the alphabet came into being - becomes a meandering story, complex and multifaceted, yet is drawn together pretty well. I know John Man from his history of well known figures (Atilla, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, Marco Polo); groups (Ninja and Samurai) and Chinese landmarks (the great wall, the terracotta army, the Gobi Desert). I have read five of his previous books and own a few more. I enjoy the wide sweep that he gives his topic, picking at the seams and circling back on his arguments. They usually incorporate aspects of travelogue with history in short readable chapters, not too heavy.

He does a pretty good job on this one, as complex and challenging as the task is. There are parts where he goes a bit speculative, creating ‘possible' situations to explain finds or events, also some speculative reasoning behind the inconsistencies of the ‘facts' of the bible. The author tracks the development of various written forms of language - and is careful not to get drawn into the separate spiral of oral language development, which would probably be even more complex.

There is a strong focus on what is borrowed from earlier scripts, what is changed and what develops, where the written language is used and what for. There are discussions on whether written language changes are driven top down or not (change requires control and motivation; alternately writing is the charge of scribes and artisans, not kings); and we are told about numerous alphabets - Egyptian hieroglyphics, proto-Sinaitic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, Etruscan before the Roman alphabet reaches parity with our modern alphabet. On the way she examines the Slavic alphabet (which becomes Cyrillic - which incidentally I learned how to say, when I discovered it was named after Brother Cyril) and the clever Korean alphabet - the letters of which reflect the position of the tongue in pronouncing the sound of the letter!

There are some interesting historic insights along the way, and the reading is easy and straight forward, however for me the learning doesn't hang about long, so this could be more of a reference book than a once-read narrative. The speculative stories went on a bit long for me, which dropped a star, whereas other places the detail felt clipped, or too far from the point of the narrative, which dropped me back another star.

3 stars.