I have often wondered why gamma was the third letter in the ancient Greek alphabet. What happened to C? Why didn’t Victor Hugo ever use the letter W? And Ye (as in Ye Olde Pub) – what’s that about? Happily these and other admittedly trivial questions are answered in Language Visible, David Sacks’ unearthing of the roots of the language tree. The origins of the alphabet are traced from graffiti in ancient Egypt to its development by the Phoenicians and its later adaptation by the Greeks and the Romans.

Relearning the ABCs is a fascinating journey. The alphabet was a significant improvement over earlier forms of writing since it used fewer symbols. Egyptian hieroglyphics combined pictographs (pictures of the object), logograms (symbols), and phonetic signs (like our alphabet). Babylonian cuneiform used 600 symbols to represent syllables.

The alphabet provided a remarkably adaptable set of building blocks. The Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician alphabet. The Etruscans fiddled some more: they didn’t need the hard G so they changed gamma to “kay” (which looked like our C). The Romans kept C and reintroduced the letter G.

As Sacks explains, the alphabet’s 26 letters are only recent. Some letters have been added, others have dropped out. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) listed only 24 letters. Webster’s American Dictionary (1828) rejected British spellings and promoted J and V to separate-entry status. French only settled on 26 letters in the late 19th century (and still isn’t fond of W).

Other letters, such as the Old English thorn (the “th” sound), gradually fell out of favour. In 15th-century typesetting, the thorn was represented by the letter Y – so Ye was actually pronounced as The. Sacks does an excellent job tracing each letter’s history. The book is compiled from his 26-part series that originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, and so there is some repetition. But Language Visible is a well-researched and very readable exploration of the history of A to Z.