Published by John Murray, 2013, 431 pages.

Can you imagine a world without alphabets? They are such an essential part of our lives; the letters help us form words to express ourselves and communicate with others.

Take, for example, the “English” alphabet—which is what Michael Rosen’s book is about. It feels like it has been there forever—the 26 letters from A to Z—which, if you think about it, is a fairly random arrangement. However, the order feels right, because it’s always been that way. But has it, and have the letters always been the way we know them today?

Rosen takes us on a journey of discovery: all the letters came from somewhere, and several of them started life with different shapes and sounds to the ones we now know. Each letter is given a short chapter on its origins and uses, followed by one that looks deeper into language.

Let’s take A, for example. It started upside down, representing an ox’s head, and in the ancient Semitic languages stood for aleph or ox. The Phoenicians then turned it on its side, and eventually the Greeks rotated it to the upright position we are familiar with today.

The chapter that follows the origins of D is called “D is for Disappeared Letters”. There is, for example, Thorn, written like a lowercase “p” with the loop halfway down the stem. Thorn stood for the sound we make at the beginning of the word thorn or them. The old-style gothic printers made Thorn look almost the same as Y. So when we see signs such as Ye Olde Shoppe, the Ye doesn’t stand for “you”, but “the”.

Rosen’s book is full of interesting information: why and how alphabets are created, how we teach the alphabet to children, and the evolution of printing. He weaves history as well as popular culture into his story—his chapter on “K is for Korean”, about how Koreans created an entire alphabet from scratch, begins with a reference to the Korean singer Psy’s song, Gagnam Style, which went viral in 2012.

Rosen often refers to ancient Rome—after all, many of our present-day letters received their final form from the Romans. One of the interesting stories in the book is about tablets found from that period that seem to be written in some kind of shorthand which is thought to have been used by servants and slaves. It grew out of a need to take dictation from their masters, but since their masters were not able to decipher it, they would also sneak in some subversive postscripts—“Send some more plonk”.

Some of the book had me laughing out loud. For example, there is a Jamaican singer called Eek-A-Mouse. (I looked him up—he does exist, he’s a reggae musician known for his original style of scatting.)

Rosen writes about the way language is used now and the two-pronged use of technology. On one hand, we can communicate with each other instantly over large distances, and on the other, we put so much information about ourselves on the web, all for Big Brother to access. But then, he reminds us that “there were times when the alphabet wasn’t used for much more than inscriptions and sacred texts, legible to a tiny minority and written by even fewer”.

To paraphrase the famous Virginia Slims ad, we’ve come a long way, baby.

Note: You might also be interested in Shady Characters by Keith Houston, about punctuation marks.