Sunday, August 6, 2017

First Lithograph ever and the origin of the Alphabet

Looking back this is kind of a weird image.  The letter in the middle is supposed to be the Hebrew letter aleph.  The aleph is sort of a midpoint in the evolution between the cuneiform logogram for ox and our letter A.  In Sumerian the logogram was pronounced "gu", and in Akkadian "alpum".  The cuneiform is still very evident in our capital A.  It just needs to be flipped upside down and the triangle is the head of the ox and it's feet are the horns.  The term alphabet does actually come from Akkadian.  Alpum, ox, and bitum which means house.  The letter B corresponds to the logogram for bitum.  So our alphabet starts with the two most important things in Akkadian life.                                                                           In Judaism the aleph is a special letter because it doesn't have it's own sound.  It adopts the sound of the vowel marking underneath, usually an ah sound.  I think maybe this is sort of carry over from the Akkadian.  Because it was a sign that represented a word not a syllabic sound.  The tradition though is that the aleph could only be pronounced by G-d.  That is why when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down people went insane.  They could hear G-d pronouncing the aleph, and human ears and brains were not equipped to handle it.

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