I received this book from someone who didn't finish it, on the chance that I would.
I won't.

Me, reading:
Oh, this chapter is quickly interrupted by an inset. A seven page inset? Well let's find the rest of my paragraph and finish it. Right, now back to the inset. Hang on, this inset is interrupted mid-paragraph by a 2 page nested inset! Alright, let's finish that paragraph and the rest of the inset, then the nested inset... now, where was I? Right, page three of the actual chapter.

I assume these special boxes and graphics are to break up the text and keep the reader going, as in a textbook. After all, who would want to read a whole long chapter on lexicography? But the answer is: me. I'm an adult and no one is forcing me to read; I chose to be here, you don't have to trick me into staying.

The problems with these sidebars are many. Much of the history is here, but broken up and spread throughout the chapters, so that often it seems to have at best a tangential relationship to the chapter topic (here I am in the chapter on 'B', reading about the Etruscan lack of the vowel 'O'). Also, the smaller / more nested the box, the more the font changes. It's awful hard to read lightly shaded 8 point italic when we're talking about individual letters. Is that a lowercase k? a b? Wait is it a Hebrew character? For fun I showed someone the (tiny) map of Phoenician territories and asked them to read a place name for me - any place shown. They couldn't. Maybe that information isn't important - but then why include the map at all? Finally, each separate narrative - chapter text, inset, nested graphic - seems to assume that I won't read the others, and is thus increasingly repetitive. Unfortunately the most interesting details have been in the sidebars, and without them the chapters are only maybe 8 pages long, so I'd have to keep reading them.

My biggest grievance is in the tone. Too often it's assumed that avoiding technical terms is the way to make a book 'accessible.' Let's say you introduce the concept of a glottal stop. You explain the sound, and when it's used, and that we don't have it consistently our language or in our orthography, but others do, etc... thereafter, you can refer to it as a glottal stop. Refusing to, or calling it some weird unidentifiable other sound thingy or whatever, does not make your text accessible or lively, it just makes me think you think I'm stupid. And maybe I expect more scholarly speech from linguistic books, but I don't think that's the problem. Yes, there's an extra annoyance when I already know the terms, but I've run into this in various other books on topics in which I'm hardly an expert, and it bothers me every time.

All that being said, I do applaud the interest and research. This might be a decent book for a very casual reader or someone hunting for cocktail tidbits. And I might look up one or two topics that I'd like to read more about - I just won't read them here. ( )

Really fascinating book on how the individual characters of our current alphabet came to be. Many go clear back before the Phoenicians and then developed through the Greek and Roman alphabets. They used to all have meanings too. The "A" is an upside down "ox head" for instance. ( )

A wealth of information on the origin and evolution of the western alphabet(s). Tends to get a bit heavy and laboured, as it goes letter by letter, rather than in broad historical sweeps. Mostly deals with western scripts based on Roman and Greek forebears. Very useful tabulation of the pre-Roman alphabet systems like ancient Phoenician, Judaic, etc. ( )

Interesting, but repetitive and thus annoying. ( )

I would not recommend reading the book from cover to cover in one sitting, since the design that allows you to jump from one letter to another out-of-order means that there is some repetition that could become tedious. However, it's an accessible book filled with interesting details about the evolution of our Roman alphabet over the millennia. At least check out the chapters on F, G, T, U, Y, and maybe Z. Plus some more. ( )