Letter (alphabet)

“ Please to understand, then, ignorant Reader, that this curious alphabet reduces all the complex machinery of Cadmus and the rest of the writing-masters to characters as simple as can be made by a dot, a space, and a line, variously combined. Thus, the marks .— designate the letter A. The marks —... designate the letter B. All the other letters are designated in as simple a manner.
Now I am stripping myself of one of the private comforts of my life, (but what will one not do for mankind?) when I explain that this simple alphabet need not be confined to electrical signals. ”

“ An alphabet is formed upon the palm of the left hand and the inner side of the fingers, as shown by the accompanying cut, which, to those becoming familiar with it, requires but a touch upon a certain point of the hand to indicate a certain letter of the alphabet.
A rapid succession of touches upon various points of the hand is all that is necessary in spelling a sentence. The left hand is the one upon which the imaginary alphabet is formed, merely to leave the right hand free to operate without change of position when two persons only are conversing face to face. ”

“ The following sentence of only 48 letters, contains every letter of the alphabet:—John P. Brady, give me a black walnut box of quite a small size.
The stanza subjoined is a specimen of both lipogrammatic and pangrammatic ingenuity, containing every letter of the alphabet except e. Those who remember that e is the most indispensable letter, being much more frequently used than any other, [1] will perceive the difficulty of such composition. ”

“ One single letter gave it to me.”
“How was that?”
“If you will look at the telegram,” said Ben, spreading it out before me, “you will notice that in one instance only is a single letter seen standing by itself. That is the letter ‘b,’ which I concluded must stand for the article ‘a,’ for I know of no other, unless it is ‘I.’ Now, the letter ‘b’ is the second one in the alphabet, and stands next in order to ‘a.’ If this system is followed throughout the cipher, we have only to take, instead of the letters as written, the next in order as they occur in the alphabet. ”

“ In fact the collocation of capital letters and other logograms, without space, is a beautiful feature of the art. We will explain:
"All the consonants of the English alphabet, when written as CAPITALS, are logograms or word-signs that require no space before or after. Four letters, G, J, Q, X, (being of less frequent use) , are also used for affixes besides being word-signs. The capital letter B invariably stands for be, by, but; C stands for say, sea, see. It can never mean anything else. D is used to express day, die, do; F is the word-sign for of, if. off; G stands for God, go, age. ”

“ Every one who writes a letter, owes his alphabet to the Romans and Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learnt it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect alphabet as all the students of phonetics will tell you ”

“ As a whole, the new alphabet was so systematized that the sound of any letter, vowel or consonant was always the same, wherever it occurred, or whatever its alphabetical collocation. Nor did the new alphabet contain any silent letters, or fail to provide a letter for every distinct sound in the language. The difference between short and long vowels was compassed by a single vowel where short, and a double one, where long. ”

“ It is much to be lamented, that the alphabet, which has produced and preserved almost all the improvements in other arts and sciences, should have itself received no improvement in modern times; which have added so much elucidation to almost every branch of knowledge, that can meliorate the condition of humanity. Thus in our present alphabets many letters are redundant, others are wanted; some simple articulate sounds have two letters to suggest them; and in other instances two articulate sounds are suggested by one letter. ”

“ Though now very compressed in sound, it gains in clearness by that compression. By a single letter, according to its position, they contrive to express all that with civilised nations in our upper world it takes the waste, sometimes of syllables, sometimes of sentences, to express. Let me here cite one or two instances: An (which I will translate man) , Ana (men) ; the letter ‘s’ is with them a letter implying multitude, according to where it is placed; Sana means mankind; Ansa, a multitude of men. The prefix of certain letters in their alphabet invariably denotes compound significations. ”

“ PART I. ORTHOGRAPHY. ORTHOGRAPHY treats of letters, syllables, separate words, and spelling.
CHAPTER I.—OF LETTERS. A Letter is an alphabetic character, which commonly represents some elementary sound of the human voice, some element of speech.
An elementary sound of the human voice, or an element of speech, is one of the simple sounds which compose a spoken language. The sound of a letter is commonly called its power: when any letter of a word is not sounded, it is said to be silent or mute. The letters in the English alphabet, are twenty-six ”

“ The Roman alphabet, although the one most in use, is unfortunately the most difficult to compose into words artistically, as the spacing between the letters plays a great share in the result. The effect of even color over a whole panel is obtained by keeping as nearly as possible the same area of white between each letter and its neighbor ”

“ O may be regarded as the Key letter of an alphabet. Given an O and an I of any alphabet, we can make a very good guess at the forms of the other letters.
In fine Inscriptions the external line of O is commonly an almost perfect circle (see Plate II.) —i.e. its height and width are equal. This may be regarded as the ideal shape, though a slight widening or narrowing of the letter (fig. 157) is quite permissible.65
Fig. ”

“ In type-making, when a font of type is designed, not only is each letter considered separately, but in combination with every other letter of the alphabet, that when the letters are assembled into words space may be evenly distributed. ”

“ The extensions above the shorter letters are quite insignificant, and are only used to save the letter from resembling some other letter of the alphabet. They never conflict, and how legible they are. ”

“ So a great quarrel sprang up between the different countries as to which Alphabet should be used, the Roman or the Gothic. In Italy a man called Manutius tried to settle the quarrel by making a letter which all the printers would use and he called his style of lettering the Italic. The printers who used the Gothic and Roman letters also used these Italic letters, but were not willing to give up their own style and use the Italic entirely.
We are so used to seeing and using the Alphabet today that we never ask ourselves how the letters came to look the way they do now. ”

“ Vowels.
What letter in the alphabet is necessary to make a shoe? The last.
What word of six letters admits of five successive elisions, leaving at each abbreviation a well-known word? Brandy—brand—bran—ran—an—a.
Name two English words, one of which, being of one syllable only, shall contain more letters than the other of five syllables? Strength—Ideality.
Why is a glass-blower the most likely person to set the alphabet off at a gallop? Because he can make a D-canter. ”

“ After the writing is completed, attention should be paid to the initial and the decoration. A good method for the beginner is to fix a sheet of tracing-paper over the page; as the lettering shows plainly through, there is plenty of opportunity for experimenting with decoration.
Some good types of letters suitable for initials are shown in Fig. 26. The first alphabet is based largely on a type of letter used in the eleventh century, while the110 second one is a free rendering of thirteenth-century letters. These letters are all built up. They may be made with either pen or brush. ”

“ Before that there never was a letter X in the alphabet. It was then the king said, "We shall put the crossed arms in the alphabet; we shall have a new letter called X, so everybody will understand a funeral is beautiful if there are young singing playmates." ”

“ That the Bengal letter is very difficult to be imitated in steel will readily be allowed by every person who shall examine the intricacies of the strokes, the unequal length and size of the characters, and the variety of their positions and combinations. It was no easy task to procure a writer accurate enough to prepare an alphabet of a similar and proportionate body throughout, with that symmetrical exactness which is necessary to the regularity and neatness of a fount. ”

“ On the basis of these colors I would make the following classification of the alphabet, placing in each category the most positively colored letters first:
In some cases, as in O, C, G, U, I, J, this supposed coloration is plainly derived from the forms of the letters themselves, the O inclosing most empty space, the I none at all. In some other cases, as E, F, or R, B, W, M, the resemblances of form in the pairs in question may have led to their taking place in the same category, the duller letter taking its place beside the brighter one which it resembles. ”

“ As you are aware, E is the most common letter in the English alphabet, and it predominates to so marked an extent that even in a short sentence one would expect to find it most often. ”

“ These letters are formed with quite simple strokes of the pen. In this MS. the f-shaped minuscule s is used. In the alphabet given here this has been substituted by one more in keeping with the modern type of letter, and several letters have been added to make the81 alphabet complete. The student is strongly advised to study the lettering in this MS. for himself. It makes a very effective script if written fairly small with a crisply-cut pen. ”

“ Like the original, this specimen was printed and then zinc-etched
Use of the pen and brush in lettering and the tendency to letter rapidly finally gave us the lower-case type of today. The evolution is pictured in Example 465. “A” shows the Roman capital alphabet as made with the pen (compare with the chiseled letters of Example 464-A) . In “B” we have the result (known as uncials) of hurried writing of the Roman capitals, and one can see how the lower-case letters were forming. ”

“ We know that the ; immediately ensuing is the commencement of a word, and, of the six characters succeeding this 'the,' we are cognizant of no less than five. Let us set these characters down, thus, by the letters we know them to represent, leaving a space for the unknown—
t eeth.
"Here we are enabled, at once, to discard the 'th,' as forming no portion of the word commencing with the first t; since, by experiment of the entire alphabet for a letter adapted to the vacancy, we perceive that no word can be formed of which this th can be a part. ”

“ It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. ”

“ Because they have been introduced into the Alphabet since the Science of Arithmetical Notation was invented.
33. What effect does it have on the value of a letter to draw a line above it?
In most cases it increases its value a thousand times.
34. Is a line ever drawn beneath a letter for the same purpose?
In some instances it is.
35. What effect does it have on a letter as a numeral to repeat it?
Repeats its value as often as it is repeated.
[pg 35]
CAPITALS AND ITALICS.
1. ”

“ Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale. ”

“ He couldn’t finish the name. The final letter swelled in his throat, to the size of the whole alphabet. ”

“ Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as he ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals. ”

“ Truly has it been said that “The history of our alphabet is the golden thread which entwines itself with the long story of man’s civilization;” that “It is the greatest triumph of the human mind;” and again, as “The most wonderful of intellectual achievements.” For we are coming to know that letters are an invention, not spontaneous productions or miracles of language, and that evolution, as in other directions of human inquiry, has much to say upon their origin and history. ”

“ One thing strikes me at once, and that is that in this paragraph all the letters of the alphabet are not used. That is very strange. If we take up a book and open it by chance it will be very seldom that we shall hit upon two hundred and seventy-six letters without all the signs of the alphabet figuring among them. ”

“ That is to suit the Alphabet to the Utterances of the Language.’ He announces that ‘care is taken to give every character one power of its own, in which no other character is allowed to interfere.’ He pointed out the defects and inconsistencies of our ordinary orthography, and sought by means of a simpler alphabet and a new vowel scale to place the spelling of the language on a strictly phonetic basis. ”