“How Nature Inspired the Alphabet”

Okay, I admit it: I’m a language geek. Proof? I love stories like this:

32,000 years ago, ancient humans gathered in a cave in Lascaux, France, where, by firelight, they created the first hand-drawn forms — scenes depicting man’s relationship with the natural world. The favorite subject in those first drawings was the ancient ox, so impressive in stature and strength, that it was deified by our earliest ancestors. This reverence for nature remained as civilizations formed, and with it, written language. It is no wonder then that subtly hidden within our alphabet today lie the remnants of these ancient forms — many of which reflect the earliest relationships between man and nature. To find them, you just have to look a little closer.

The precursor to many of the characters in our modern script are found in the pictogram hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. The symbol for the letter ‘A’, in its earliest representation, depicted the image of the deified ox — which came to represent ‘the great one’ or ‘the creator’ in subsequent cultures. So it remained, as the symbol became adopted by the Greeks and Romans in a more rudimentary form, called ‘Alpha’ — still signifying a supreme position today.

Letter ‘A’ from an ox:

Letter ‘D’ from a fish:

Letter ‘M’ from waves:

Look, writers are sometimes called wordsmiths. So it figures that we should love learning about the language we use, right?

Or maybe that’s just my excuse for being a geek about stuff like this.

Any other language geeks out there?

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