Excerpt of Letter Perfect by David Sacks (Page 1 of 3) Printer
Friendly Excerpt This book attempts a voyage of discovery among
the letters of the alphabet. Like islands of an archipelago, the
26 letters will be visited and explored, one at a time. Each
island's geography and local lore will be examined briefly, also
its relationship to other islands in the navigational stream.
Some islands may prove more lush or lofty than others. But any
one will yield substantial mental nourishment to visitors, along
with glorious vistas onto language, literature, and history of
the past 4,000 years. Where do our letters come from? How did
they get their shapes, their assigned sounds, their sequence,
immortalized in our "Alphabet Song"? Why do we use "Roman"
letters for Englishalso for Spanish, Czech, Turkish, Swahili,
Vietnamese, and many otherswhile some languages (Russian, Greek,
Arabic, Hindi, etc.) use different types of letters? What is a
letter, exactly? What's an alphabet? These are among questions
to be answered wi