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The Story of the Alphabet

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About This Book

The work traces the alphabet's evolution from pictorial signs to a compact phonetic system, showing how early pictures representing familiar objects were simplified into sound‑bearing characters and adopted by successive cultures. It outlines paleographic efforts to read ancient scripts, describes how Greek and Roman adaptations reorganized letter shapes, and explains the influence of tools and writing media on the emergence of diverse styles. The narrative connects specific letters to their pictorial origins and follows how graphic economy, balance, and the need for speed produced the forms and additions that underpin the modern alphabet.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of the Alphabet

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Title: The Story of the Alphabet

Author: Otto F. Ege

Release date: June 12, 2020 [eBook #62374]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and Sue Clark from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

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The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Story of the Alphabet, by Otto F. Ege

 

 

Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/storyofalphabet00egeorich

 


 

 

 

 

The
STORY OF
the
ALPHABET
By OTTO F. EGE
The Cleveland School of Art
“Many thanks to old Cadmus,
Who made us his debtors
By inventing, one day, those
CAPITAL LETTERS.”
—Saxe
PUBLISHED BY
NORMAN T. A. MUNDER & CO.
Printers
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND