Case Alphabet

Alphabet Art and History

The English alphabet is a varied and interesting collection of history.  Decorative photo letters are one way to celebrate both the history and beauty that is inherent to our alphabet.  Consider for a moment how many times a day you see letters.  Even if you live in a remote area it is quite likely you see the alphabet many times in books and other printed material, to signs, pictures, etc.  "Beautiful things get more looks.  More touches.  More responses."  Using photo letters to decorate your home is a way to bring the beauty of art and the alphabet together.  Here is some of the history behind the English alphabet.

"A" is the first letter of both the English and Roman alphabets, descended from the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet and was neither vowel nor consonant.  This letter represented the ox, which scholars have speculated was both a pictorial sign without any specific sound, and as a homage to the position of the sun at vernal equinox in the constellation Taurus.

"B" originated from the Greek letter beta and the Phoenician "beth."  Interestingly, the ancient Semitic letter "beth" had multiple meanings, among which were house, temple, daughter, woman, and place.

"C" started out as G.  Early Christians interpreted this as a symbol of Christ as a corner stone.

"D" comes from the Phoenician daleth and the Greek delta. In ancient Herbew-Phoenician D, then called daleth, meant door.

"E" is the most frequently used letter in the English, French and other languages.

"F", The Etruscans borrowed their F from the Greeks and altered it into a symbol similar to our 8. The 8 appears in early Latin as the digraph F8 and was later simplified to F.

"G" acquired its tale from C when the Roman had no letters to differentiate between G and K sounds. The new letter was placed seventh in the alphabet, replacing Z. Middle English also saw a correspondence between G and Z, though through the sounds of g and dz.

"H" is from the Phoenician. Both its sound and letter shape are suspected to have come from Egyptian hieroglyphs, originally connoting a bundle or twisted string.

"I" is from the Greek iota. It first appeared looking more like a Z in the Semitic and Greek alphabets, with the Greek form gradually straightening until the Romans flattened it out.

"J" is the last addition to our modern alphabet. Scholars kept it from dictionaries until the late 19th century.

"K" is linked to C, but has been a member of the alphabet since ancient times. When the Romans borrowed their alphabet from the Greeks, they found themselves with three letters representing a K sound: C, K, and Q. They dropped all but K.

"L" is classified as a liquid. Lowercase L is the narrowest letter of the modern English alphabet, and has also been proved to be the least identifiable in tests of reading legibility (compared capitol I to lower-case L).

"M" is a variation of the Greek letter mu and the Semetic mem, which is also the Phoenician word for water. Originally M's legs were uneven, perhaps resembling waves, which many scholars believe was a pictograph of water.

"N" is derived from the Greek nu and the Semetic nun. In ancient Phoenician "nun" was the word for fish.

"O" and capitol I make up the two basic forms of all letters in our modern alphabet. O is unique also in that its forms are basically the same between upper and lower-case letters. The letter descended from the the Semitic "ayin" which meant the word "eye" in Phoenician.

"P" is derived from the Greek pi.  Many English words beginning with ph are descended from the Greek letter phi. Like Greek, the runic alphabet had two signs for P.

"Q" is descended from the Greek koppa and the Semetic koph. The Phoenician alphabet had a word koph, which the eastern Greeks adopted as a letter with a K sound. They dropped the letter soon after, preferring their older kappa for the K sound. Western Greeks, however, kept their K, and when the Romans adopted it they used it only before a U. English has kept to the practice, and now all Qs are followed by U's.

"R" and P look like they share a history but they don't. R began as something of a reversed P.

"S" is phonetically known as a voiceless sibilant.  The late Roman and early medieval alphabets created a second form of S, one similar to a modern lowercase f. This use can be seen up until early American documents, including the Declaration of Independence.

"T" is phonetically classified as a point-breath-stop-consonant.  Old English had two symbols — the thorn and thok.  The thorn was still used up until the spread of printing, but because printers did not have a symbol for thorn they used a lowercase y, causing the use of phrases like "ye olde farm".  The miniscule form of T was finally created in the early Renaissance as the ascender rose over the cross bar.

"U" was carved by the Romans as V, and is still represented this way on modern buildings. The Romans actually used their V as both a vowel and a consonant, a practice which kept on until the Renaissance.  In modern English, U has at least six different sounds.

"V" is closely related to U. The two uppercase forms were used interchangably until the 1700's.

"W" is a latecomer to the alphabet, first descended from the Semitic letter vau, which was also the origin of the letters F, U, V and Y. The W form did not appear at all in antiquity.

"X" originated as the Phoenician letter samech, which has been translated as prop, support, post or a fish. X was related to the Greek xei, which sounded like "ks".

"Y", Most scholars date Ys creation to 1st century AD when Z was also added. Y has long been considered a philosophical letter — a symbol of moral decision — because of its forked top.

"Z" started up as the Greek letter zeta and the Phoenician letter zayin, both of which were placed at the beginning of the alphabet.

 

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For more information about decorative alphabet letters please visit http://www.sterlingfoxcustomgifts.com/

how can I type the letter a of the alphabet in the traditional way that is taught in kindergarten in mi-word?

i mean, there are 3 different types of a for children to learn: capital a, lower case a and the a one gets from the computer. I need the traditional a ( the circle with a stick on the right side) in order to create a puzzle for kindergarteners.
Please help!

Thanks,

Monica

Unicode contains all three forms of A: A, a, and ɑ.

The ɑ symbol is used in phonetic transcriptions and is one of the characters in the International Phonetic alphabet, used for the “a” in “father” ([ʹfɑðəɹ] in standard US pronunciation). (See http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ .) It is also used in some other phonetic alphabets.

The ɑ symbol is Unicode symbol U+0251 and is included in a large number of fonts supplied with computers. See http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0251/index.htm and click on “Fonts that support U+0251”. The entire IPA set is included in a number of fonts that ship with Windows Vista and Windows 7.

If for some reason you don’t find this symbol in a suitable font which you already have, you can download and install the free Deja Vu fonts from http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/index.php?title=Download .

You may find this better than using Comic or another font where the normal lowercase a symbol appears as ɑ.

3D origami alphabet diagram~upper case

Tags: alphabet, case alphabet killer, case alphabet murders, case alphabetical order, case alphabets, games, kindergarten, letters, lower case alphabet, reading

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