This book offers a whole new perspective on the history of the birth of the Greek alphabet. It also aims to give a clear account of how ancient Greek alphabetic writing could naturally evolve into the world’s first segmental writing system, in which vowel and consonant letters are used to represent vowels and consonants respectively. This book should be of great interest to linguists and phoneticians, especially those taking an interest in the world’s writing systems. General readers who are curious about the genesis of the Greek alphabet are also likely to find the subject of the book interesting.

A challenging and fascinating enquiry into the genesis of alphabetic writing.

“One of the most satisfying accounts of a great passion that I have ever read.” —Vivian Gornick, New York Times Book Review Mary Norris, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen and best-selling author of Between You & Me, has had a lifelong love affair with words. In Greek to Me, she delivers a delightful paean to the art of self-expression through accounts of her solo adventures in the land of olive trees and ouzo. Along the way, Norris explains how the alphabet originated in Greece, makes the case for Athena as a feminist icon, and reveals the surprising ways in which Greek helped form English. Greek to Me is filled with Norris’s memorable encounters with Greek words, Greek gods, Greek wine—and more than a few Greek men.

The idea behind the alphabet - that language with all its wealth of meaning can be recorded with a few meaningless signs - is an extraordinary one. So extraordinary, in fact, that it has occurred only once in human history: in Egypt about 4000 years ago. Alpha Beta follows the emergence of the western alphabet as it evolved into its present form, contributing vital elements to our sense of identity along the way. The Israelites used it to define their God, the Greeks to capture their myths, the Romans to display their power. And today, it seems on the verge of yet another expansion through the internet. Tracking the alphabet as it leaps from culture to culture, John Man weaves discoveries, mysteries and controversies into a story of fundamental historical significance.

Most scholarship on early Greek alphabetic writing has focused on the questions around the origin of 'the Greek alphabet', instead of acknowledging the diversity of alphabetic systems that emerged in Geometric and Archaic Greece. The research concerning the so-called epichoric scripts was introduced by Kirchhoff in the 19th century and saw its highest point in the 1960s with the works of Jeffery and Guarducci. Nevertheless, recent epigraphical finds and new possibilities offered by digital tools call for a revised, comprehensive study of these alphabets. Unlike previous research, which was mostly concerned with palaeography, this book presents a linguistic analysis of the epichoric alphabets that follows the latest trends in grapholinguistics and the methodology of comparative graphematics. The latter is a branch of writing systems research focused on the relationship between graphemes and the values that they represent and compares them across writing systems. This study compares the different Greek alphabets in their earliest stages, i.e. 8th and 7th centuries BC, also taking into account other contemporaneous alphabets, like those for Phrygian, Eteocretan and the Italic languages. Through the analysis of the data provided by the epigraphic texts dated within the chronological framework of this thesis, it is possible to identify the different notation systems that Greek-speakers devised to represent their dialects in writing. This brings new insights on the innovations created by these communities and the different alphabetic traditions present in Greece and across the Mediterranean. The conclusion of the book emphasizes the need to study these regional alphabets independently, rather than considering them as part of a unified entity - 'the Greek alphabet' - which did not exist at the time, and creates a new line for future research that intends to frame them individually within the ecology of ancient Mediterranean alphabets.

Western civilization has long sought its cultural roots in the classical civilizations of the Aegean. During the twentieth century, however, it has been made increasingly clear that it owes a great debt to the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. In the thick of the debate as to how much classical civilizations were influenced by the Levant has been the question of the date of the transmission of the alphabet. In this monograph, Bernal takes up the question anew and marshals persuasive arguments that the date of transmission of the alphabet should be moved considerably earlier than generally has been thought, to the middle of the second millennium B.C. Growing out of his work on Black Athena, the intricate matters of alphabetic history and transmission are dealt with, both in terms of the history of the investigation of the topic and also with regard to the specific working out of his own new proposal.