#judith flanders

Sambourne House  

Unlike speaking in prose, however, alphabetical order took a while to catch on. This is partly because, even before we get to a standardized order of letters, the very idea of an alphabetical writing system is surprisingly unintuitive. In the logographic writing systems that preceded the alphabet and survive in some languages today, each character bears some inherent meaning, representing a word or smaller semantic unit. The letters of the alphabet, on the other hand, represent sounds without meanings of their own. Flanders compares this innovation to the invention of money in the sixth century BC. Coins and characters alike became detached, fungible signifiers. There is a kind of pure, mathematical beauty to this abstraction. With just twenty or so symbols, alphabetical writing achieves a range of expression stretching as far as language itself. But this simplicity belies a leap in underlying conceptual complexity. The idea of writing itself was already hard enough for humanity to get its head around – writing is thought to have been independently invented just three times in human history. But alphabetical writing is so novel, so abstracted, that it was apparently invented only once: “in the Western Desert of Upper Egypt, somewhere between the cities of Thebes and Abydos”, in around 2050 BC. To our knowledge, “every alphabetic script derives from this single source”, attested in rock inscriptions left by traders and mercenaries. Alphabetical sequencing, on the other hand, “looked like resistance, even rebellion, against the order of divine creation”. The gradual acceptance of alphabetical order was, Flanders reckons, evidence of a broader historical shift towards conceptual abstraction. As alphabetical writing detached letters from meaning, and alphabetical order detached books from the world they described, so it was with double-entry bookkeeping, accurate clocks and searchable library catalogues: debit and credit became abstracted from specific transactions, time from the sun and seasons, and books from particular rooms or shelves. At times, this narrative is presented slightly too teleologically, as a largely medieval shift. In fact, the question of whether language is innate or arbitrary, for example, has been perennial among philosophers since at least Plato’s Socratic dialogue on the “correctness of names”, written in the fifth century BC.

There are supposed to be endorphins or whatever that make you feel great when you exercise. I don't think I have any because I only feel great when I'm lying on the sofa reading a book, possibly while simultaneously eating biscuits.

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