Chapter grammar — every biography follows the same skeleton
- The Picture
- The Sound
- The Journey
- The Forks
- The Descendant
Each letter starts as a pictograph named for a thing (acrophony), is reassigned to a sound, travels Phoenician → Greek → Latin, forks into cousins along the way, and arrives as the glyph on your keyboard.
01 𐤀 A — the ox that lay downʾālep, an ox's head → Greek alpha → Latin A. How a consonant's support became the first written vowel. Forthcoming
02 𐤁 B — the housebēt ‘house’ → beta → B; and how Greek read the same sign as a different sound. Forthcoming
03 𐤂 C & G — the splitgīml → gamma; Etruscan blurs g and k, Rome splits them, and a new letter G is invented c. 230 BCE. Forthcoming
04 𐤃 D — the doordālet → delta → D, and the rounding of a triangle into a curve. Forthcoming
05 𐤄 E — the shouthē, a calling figure → epsilon → E; a consonant handed to a vowel by the Greeks. Forthcoming
06 𐤅 F, U, V, W, Y — the waw familyone Phoenician hook, wāw, fathers five modern letters — the alphabet's most crowded branch. Forthcoming
07 𐤇 H — the fenceḥēt → eta → H; a letter that changed from consonant to vowel to consonant across languages. Forthcoming
08 𐤉 I & J — the armyōd, the smallest letter → iota → I; and J, a medieval flourish that split off only centuries ago. Forthcoming
09–26 · …K through Zthe remaining letters, each traced from its Phoenician ancestor to the modern cap — twenty-six biographies in all. Forthcoming
Toward the book
This series is declared complete at twenty-six chapters — one alphabet, one book. On completion it moves to Naisu Press as a volume in the institute's imprint — same chapter grammar, same specimens, print-first typesetting via the Paged.js pipeline. Chapters published here remain open access; the book is the collected, revised edition.