From Pictographs to Symbols: A Brief History of the Alphabet (2024)

Every literate person in this country and in most of other countries around the world grew up reciting the Roman alphabet before going to school. The ABCD song is definitely one of the very first songs that we learned when we were still toddlers. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. Those 26 letters turned out to be the components of the most influential writing system in history. We use it primarily in communication through each other, expression of ideas, emotions, and information, and can even dictate the course of history and civilization. Without these tiny symbols, you wouldn’t even be able to read this article in the first place. But it is also a fascinating idea to ask where exactly these lovely letters came from. What does the alphabet look like back then? It turns out that we can trace its very roots way, way back from Ancient Egypt around 5000 years ago.

But what exactly is an alphabet anyway? Basically, it is a set of basic symbols or graphemes (also known as letters) to represent a single unit of sound (known as phonemes), which consists of vowels and consonants. The word itself came from the two first letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. The most famous example of this system is the Latin Alphabet that is still used today by the majority of the nations of the world, particularly the West. However, there are also other kinds of alphabet out there still currently in use, like the Modern Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, and Korean Hangul.

Keep in mind that not all writing systems in the world are alphabet. An abjad, for example, is almost similar to alphabet, but doesn’t have any symbols for vowels, only for consonants, and usually written from right to left, in contrast of alphabets which is written left to right. They just write the consonant symbols, and then the vowel sounds are up to the reader. Examples that are still in use now are Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Tifinagh.

A syllabary, meanwhile, is a writing system that uses graphemes to represent syllables (ka, li, mo) instead of just single sounds (k, l, m), like the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana scripts.

To contrast, an abugida also represents syllables but usually using the same symbols for particular default syllables (like ba, ka, da, or ga) then usually putting some diacritics on them to change the vowel sounds of them, called a virama. Examples are the scripts of Indian subcontinent like Devanagari, Gujarati, Tamil, and Tibetan, and Southeast Asia like Khmer, Thai, Burmese, Javanese, and Baybayin.

Finally, a logograph is a writing system where a single symbol can represent a full word, like the Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji, Egyptian and Mayan Hieroglyphs, and Cuneiforms of ancient Mesopotamia.

But keep in mind that this is not about an explanation of the history of all the writing systems in the world, but focused on the alphabet instead, specifically the development of the Latin Alphabet. Although the evolution of other scripts, like Baybayin, can also be a next topic to be tackled someday. Take a look at the pictures of the writing systems below, you might ask “Why are those letters colorful? Are they just for aesthetics?” Well, no. They are to help to illustrate how those individual letters were developed into the modern letters that we know today. They are color guides. So without further ado, let’s move on.

The story begins with the flourishment of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs around 3200 BCE. It is still debatable whether it was the oldest writing system in history since some evidences confirm that the title is probably more deserving to the Sumerian Cuneiform (which was created in the civilization of Sumer in Mesopotamia around 4th millennium BCE). Some scholars also say that the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Sumerian Cuneiform may have been invented independent from each other at the same time (1). Long after the fall of Ancient Egypt, the Hieroglyphs was basically a forgotten script, not until it was deciphered by French linguist Jean-François Champollion through the Rosetta Stone in 1820s (2). Just like the Cuneiform, it started as a pictograph system, drawing images of a thing to describe them nonverbally, but it soon developed into a series of drawings representing sounds and words. Even though Egyptian Hieroglyphs consist of a thousand logographic symbols for multiple syllables and even uses determinatives, just like Cuneiform and Mayan script, they also have symbols for single phonemes or sounds. The selected logographs from the scripts are what the linguists and philologists believed to be the inspiration behind the Proto-Sinaitic script or Proto-Canaanite script.

It was around 19th century BCE when workers and slaves in the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt devised an innovative way to reduce the symbols of Hieroglyphs from several thousands to just 20–30, by getting its basic fundamental sounds. The writing system of Ancient Egypt has ridiculously complicated rules, and there was too much symbols to remember, not to mention that they were written by the elite scribes. So that would be a waste of time for the common folk to study all of them. What did they do? They just picked the most essential sounds in the Hieroglyphs and used them according to what sounds their ancient Semitic language needed. For example, the second symbol that is shaped like a house was used to represent the sound /b/, while the fish-looking symbol represented the sound /d/. Their innovation turned out to be more efficient, since it reduced a lot of time from memorizing all the symbols. It is now widely regarded by most linguists as the oldest form of abjad, and the ancestor of other ancient Semitic scripts like Paleo-Hebrew, Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician, and may more. However, it is still debatable about when exactly the Pro-Sinaitic script emerged. According to Simons (2011) (3):

“The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BCE, and a late date, around 1550 BCE. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, and by extension locates the invention of the alphabet in Egypt or Canaan respectively.”

Later on, around 1050 BCE, the use of Proto-Sinaitic script became widely influential and was adopted by the inhabitants of the Levant, particularly by the Phoenicians and ancient Canaanites, hence the flourishment of the Phoenician Alphabet, the first developed alphabet (although technically, it is really an abjad because like other Semitic scripts, they were written in a right-to-left direction) (4). It only has 22 consonant letters and vowel sound were implied. This is like the grand daddy of almost all Indo-European scripts that we know today. This script became the direct ancestor of the later developed abjads like Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Mongolian, Uyghur, and the Brahmic, which itself later also became the ancestor of the abugidas of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. However, aside from influencing the Semitic and Indo-Malayo civilizations, the ship-sailing Phoenicians also spread their alphabet to the Mediterranean Sea, particularly to the ancient Greeks.

Back then, the Minoans from the island of Crete used the Linear A script, which is still undecipherable today, while the Mycenaeans of southern Greek peninsula utilized the Linear B script. Both of them are now extinct writing systems. But it was only during their trades with Phoenicia during the Bronze Age when they borrowed their writing system and used it on their own language (5), forming the different variations of Archaic Greek Alphabet as early as around 800 BCE (6). However, it is important to point out that there was never a single set of alphabets in ancient Greece, since there exists a group of different set of alphabets in other areas in Greece with some slight variations. For example, the alphabet of Euboea was slightly different from Attica, and also from Laconia, and from Crete. Therefore, the script above is just a mere combined representation of all of their alphabets. The archaic Greek alphabet became the direct ancestor of the Modern Greek Alphabet that is still used today, as well as the Cyrillic script of the Slavs and Balkans.

The greatest innovation that the ancient Greeks made from the alphabet of Phoenicians was their invention of vowels (7). Since abjads are just letters for consonants, they struggled to use the script since they have a lot of vowel and diphthong sounds. They, instead, used some of the Phoenician letters that had little to no use and repurposed them as vowels. For example, the first Phoenician letter ʾālep (𐤀) and the 16th letter ʿayin (𐤏) were just intended as glottal stops, but the Greeks used them as alpha (Α) and omicron (Ο) and later on, omega (Ω). The letter hʾē (𐤄) was repurposed into the letter epsilon (Ε), while jōd (𐤉) became iota (I). Aside from that, they also added new letters to sustain their phonemes that didn’t exist in the tongues of Phoenicians, like phi (Φ), chi (Χ), and psi (Ψ). It is also noticeable that some of the letters from archaic Greek were no longer used today in Modern Greek, like the letters waw or digamma (Ϝ), san (Ϻ), qoppa (Ϙ), and sampi (Ϡ). Years were passed when the ancient Greeks, particularly the Euboeans, also passed their alphabet across the Italian peninsula.

The Euboean Greek alphabet became the instrument of the Etruscans for their languages, thus forming the Archaic Etruscan Alphabet (8). The oldest record of this alphabet came from the Marsiliana Tablet which dated back to circa 700 BCE, back when the city of Rome was still in its infancy. During the rule of Etruscan kings in Rome, the ancient Romans also adopted their script and formed the Archaic Latin Alphabet, dating around 600 BCE. But around 400 BCE, Etruscan made some changes in their alphabet by removing and adding some letters, giving rise to the Neo-Etruscan Alphabet. Notice that the Etruscans and Romans removed a lot of letters from Greek like the theta (Θ), xi (Ξ), and phi (Φ), simply because ancient Greeks had sounds that they did not have. Now, what the hell is that number 8 figure there? Where did it came from? Neo-Etruscans adopted that letter from Italic scripts like Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene, which looked like a number eight (𐌚), and it was meant to represent the sound /f/ (9). Another peculiarity that is worth pointing out is that some letters in Old Italic and Archaic Greek scripts had flipped letters. It is because the ancient Greeks and Romans had the habit to write sentences both left to right and right to left in alternate lines, which is called boustrophēdón (βουστροφηδόν). However, Romans would later favor writing left to right since majority of the literate citizens of Rome were right-handed.

Speaking of the Romans, they did a lot of reforms into the alphabets of Etruscans, and they formulated the Roman Square Capitals or Capitalis Momentalis as early as around 300 BCE, but its peak was reached during the rule of the first emperor Augustus on the newly formed Roman Empire. That was the time when the first forms of Latin Alphabet that we all know today were finally developed. But the thing is, only the majuscule letters (aka capital letters) existed back then. There were still no minuscule letters (aka lowercase letters) at that time. This is because the Romans and Greeks didn’t have any way to distinguish the capital from small letters. It’s not as if the ancient Greeks and Romans were always angry when they were writing. They also just had 23 letters, instead of 26 letters as we know today, missing the letters J, U, and W. It is because the Romans didn’t have the /dz/ sound, and the sounds /u/ and /w/ were both represented by the letter V. This is the reason why Gaius Julius Caesar’s name was originally written in Roman Square Capitals as GAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR, and was pronounced as “GA-yus YUL-yus KAY-sar”. Aside from that, using spaces as word separator was not a thing to them back then, which made reading inscriptions difficult nowadays.

The Classical Roman Alphabet’s first three letters became A, B, C, unlike the Greeks which began with alpha (Α), beta (Β), and gamma (Γ); while Phoenicians started with ʾālep (𐤀), bēt (𐤁), and gīml (𐤂). How did this happen? This is because the third letter of the alphabet used to have double job on representing both the sounds /k/ and /g/. But thanks to this man, Spurius Carvilius Ruga, because he basically invented the letter G by putting an extra stroke in letter C to form a definitive distinction between the two letters (10). Ruga’s invention is understandable since his name in Classical Latin SPVRIVS CARVILIVS RUCA produced confusion. So, the Romans separated the letters and put the letter G into the seventh place, replacing the letter Z (zeta) and putting it in the very last, since that was their least used letter. This was the reason why the letter Z is the last letter of the alphabet. However, they also still kept the letter X, which was the only originally Greek letter that survived in the Latin alphabet, to represent the sound /ks/. The letter waw or digamma (Ϝ) from the Archaic Greek also changed its sound in Latin, since from the sound /w/, it represented the sound /f/. They also used the letter Y, which was derived from the Greek letter upsilon (Y), and represented the sound /i/, while the letter U (V) was also derived from the same letter. In fact, the Romans used to call the letter Y as i Graeca, which means “Greek I”. Even nowadays, the letter Y in German is called as ypsilon, while it is pronounced as i grec in French. More on that pronunciation stuff later.

Moving on, the Rustic Capitals or Capitalis Rustica was developed around 1 CE, which was used and designed by talented Roman writers. The word rustica means “rural” in Latin, since the elitist inhabitants of Rome contrasted this script from the Roman squares which are more “civilized”. The letters were basically the same with capitalis momentalis, but only different from style. It is because the handwriting font was designed for writing in parchments and papyri, unlike the Roman square that was usually carved in rock and marble inscriptions. Rustic writers also made the use of punctus (dots) as word separator a norm, in order for easier readability (11).

But since literacy rate in the Roman Empire increased, and the ability to read and write was not only available for the patrician elites, some of the Roman plebeian (commoners) who can write but not talented enough to write calligraphy, developed their own corrupt and sloppy versions of Roman squares, ushering in the birth of the Old Roman Cursive, which also flourished around 1 CE alongside the Rustic Capitals. The word “cursive” came from Medieval Latin “cursivos” which means “running,” and Classical Latin “currere” which means “to run.” It is because the letters looked like they were written in a hurry. This is because it was usually used for informal setting, and sometimes for impromptu decrees from the Roman emperor. Some of the surviving records of the Old Roman Cursive was found both in the destroyed cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were wiped out by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. But during the late Roman period around 300 CE, which was the time when Christianity gradually began to spread throughout the empire, the New Roman Cursive was born, and became the blueprint for the later developments of minuscule (lowercase) letters that will complete our modern alphabet today.

Around 300 CE, the Uncial Script was developed by early Christian monks inspired from Rustic Capitals and Koine Greek Uncial in order to reproduce early handwritten copies of the Bible. Even though the Uncial font was composed of majuscule (capital) letters, the usage of minuscule letters became popular during the Early Middle Ages, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire into the hands of Germanic tribes on 476 CE. This is especially evident with the birth of the Half-Uncial Script alongside the majuscule Uncial. The Half-Uncial became the blueprint for the development of Medieval minuscule letters that became popular throughout Europe. One example of Half-Uncial’s direct descendant was the Visigothic Script, that was used by the Germanic tribe of Visigoth from the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) around 600 CE. Another descendant of the Uncial and Half-Uncial scripts were the ones that was developed by Christian monks in Ireland also around 600 CE, that would be called as the Insular Alphabet, which replaced the native Ogham script, and is still in use by modern-day Irish Gaelic speakers. This script was later on utilized by the Anglo-Saxons in England. Aside from the usual Latin letters, the Insular Alphabet also introduced the medieval letters thorn (þ), which represented the sound /th/; and wynn (ƿ), which represented the sound /w/. They were originally from the Runic alphabets of Vikings and Nordic tribes of Scandinavia and Northern Germany. English people during the Middle Ages eventually dropped those letters as they fell out of fashion, especially after the invention of the printing press.

Another child of the Half-Uncial script was the Merovingian script, which flourished in Northern France under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian dynasty around 700 CE. The script had four variations around France: the Luxeuil, Laon, Corbie, and Chelles, but this particular variant only shows the Luxeuil font. It is worthy to take note that during the Middle Ages in Europe, almost only the Christian monks are the ones that can read and write. And since Johannes Gutenberg didn’t exist yet back then to invent the modern printing press, the monks are assigned to write all of the copies of the Bible in Latin Vulgate by hand, and matching an extremely ornate calligraphy. This is why coming up with new fonts were extra-challenging for them. #thestruggleisreal. On the other hand, another Half-Uncial child was born at the same era in southern Italy by Benedictine monks in Monte Cassino and Bari monastiries, called as the Beneventan script, or Langobarda script.

Meanwhile around 800 CE, with the fusion of Uncial script, and some Nordic Runes, the Anglo-Saxons also developed their own version of alphabet called Anglo-Saxon Latin, aka the Old English Alphabet. This was their alphabet before they began using the Insular script of the Irish up until 12th century CE. They also utilized the letters from Anglo-Saxon runes like the thorn (þ) and wynn (ƿ), but they also modified Roman letters like ash (æ), which came from the Latin diphthong /ae/; and eth (ð), which sound is almost the same as thorn. All of these weird letters, except wynn, are still used in Icelandic alphabet to this day. In writing Old English alphabet, since writing the letter thorn and letter Y can sometimes look like the same letter, medieval writers produced a habit of putting a dot called “tittle” above the letter Y to avoid confusion. Eventually, using tittles became a thing on writing the minuscule letters “i” and “j”. But going back to France, the Carolingian court of Emperor Charlemagne, together with his assistant English monk Alcuin of York, developed a more standardized writing system throughout the Holy Roman Empire starting around 800 CE in order to promote the Latin Vulgate Bible to the literate class. That script was called as Carolingian Minuscule (12), and it became the standard writing system of the European Medieval Period around 1000 CE, since it was way easier to both read and write. And around 12th century, the Anglo-Saxon England also began using this French system after the Norman conquest of William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy by seizing the English throne and killing the last Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson during the Battle of Hastings on 1066. After that, England was completely Romanized through its language, writing systems, and cultures. However, have you ever noticed that the letter S from these scripts suddenly looked like a small f? That letter variation is called long S (ſ), and sometimes it was distinguished from the actual letter S. It was actually still used as late as the 18th to 19th century, until we finally dropped it in favor of the letter S that we know today.

Since the printing press was still not invented yet, medieval writers still searched for other ways to write copies of the Bible easier, until monks from Germany developed the Gothic Blackletter around 1150 from the Carolingian Minuscule after it fell out of fashion (13). It became the dominant style of writing in Europe up until Gutenberg invented the modern printing press, and made more varying fonts from it. An example variation of the blackletter font was also developed during the Renaissance period, known as the Fraktur, around 1500s when the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I demanded a new typeface design from German typographer Hieronymus Andreae for his commission of Albrecht Dürer’s Triumphal Arch, and later on used in printing by Johann Schönsperger to publish some of the prayer books of the emperor (14). It was during the Renaissance Period when the letters J emerged and the letters U, V, and W became distinct letters on their own right. Back then, the letter J was just a fancier version of letter I, since they both represent the sound /i/ and /y/. It was only later on when letter J developed the sound /dz/ that made it a separate letter from letter I. That’s why it was only around 600 years ago when Europeans started writing the name Jesus instead of his Latin name Iesus. And during the Middle Ages, the letters U and V were used interchangeably, like, for example, the words “grave” and “upon” were sometimes written as “graue” and “vpon”. But it was only on a Gothic script in 1386 when the two letters became distinct to each other, having different sounds over time (15). Another child of the Renaissance was the Humanist Minuscule, a combination of Carolingian Minuscule and Roman Square Capitals. It was formed because of the efforts of the Renaissance humanists to revive the classical Greek and Roman art, literature, history, language, and writing system (16).

And at last, from the early Modern Period up until now, we finally got the Modern Latin Alphabet in both uppercase (based from Roman Square Capitals) and lowercase (based from Humanist Minuscule) forms. We’ve come a long way, and who knows what will happen in our alphabet in the future? Only time will tell.

Observe how you would pronounce every letter of the alphabet. Chances are you were trained by your parents to pronounce them on English (and Filipino, but that’s another story). In Spanish, French, Latin, Italian, German, and even Tagalog, the letter A is pronounced as /ah/, but why is it called /eɪ/ in English? Most Western European languages call the letter I as /i/, but why English call it /aɪ/? Well, that’s because of the Great Vowel Shift of 14th to 17th century (17). Basically what happened is that English people dramatically changed the way they pronounced their vowels and diphthongs over time. Linguists are still debating what exactly caused the phenomenon, but what we are sure about is that it just happened. Even some pronunciations of consonants were changed, which explains why plenty of English words don’t match up how they are spelled versus how they are pronounced. For example, the word “knight” was used to be voiced as /knɪxt/ in Middle English, said as how it was spelt, but in Modern English, it became /naɪt/. Whut?

But let’s just ignore some of the letters here, and focus on some more interesting ones. Look at the letter H. Americans say it as /eɪtch/, some Brits call it /heɪtch/, Spaniards call it /ache/, the Frech pronounce it as /ash/, the ancient Romans say it as /ha/, Italians call it /akka/ and the Germans, /hah/. What about the letter J? English: /dzeɪ/, Spanish: /hota/, French: /zhi/, and Germans: /yot/. That letter is not a thing in both Latin and Italian, but back then, the letter J doesn’t exist in any kinds of Roman Alphabet in Europe during the late Classical and early Medieval period. As said earlier, it was derived from the letter I, which in turn derived from the Greek letter iota (I) /yota/. I will not attempt to go down the rabbit hole to explain why they are all pronounced differently, because that would be a separate topic for the other day, and besides, I am not a linguist to be more diverse on the issue.

Now this is the fun part. It is previously explained how the letters U and V a separate letter representing different sounds, but how about W? Why do we, English speakers, call it as “double-u” if it looks like two V’s combined? Why not call it “double-v” instead? Because the letters U and V were just the same during the Middle Ages, and used interchangeably. Both of them functioned to be used for the sounds of vowel /u/ and consonant /w/. How would they indicate the consonant /w/ sound using these letters? They either write it as “uu” or “vv”, up until it was frequently used that it became a separate letter unto itself. And aside from that, it is already called as “double-v” in other languages. It is called “uve doble” in Spanish and “doble vé” in French. While in German, every single Ws are pronounced as /v/, and Vs as /f/, so we (W) is called /ve/ while vau (V) is called /fau/.

Let’s now look at the letter Y. Pretty much all the other languages above called it as the “Greek I”, the letter upsilon (Y), which the Greeks used to pronounced as something close to /ipsilon/. But why English called it /waɪ/? Again, the Great Vowel Shift is to blame. The Anglo-Saxons borrowed the letter Y from the Romans to replace the Old English sound /y/ from the previously used Runic letter ᚣ. During the Medieval England, the pronunciation became /wi/, up until the pronunciation shift happened and it became /waɪ/. You might ask why there is a lot of mess when it comes to the origins of letters F, U, V, W, and Y? If you have been paying attention along the way, these letters all ultimately derived from the archaic Greek letters waw/digamma (F) and upsilon (Y), which in turn derived from the single Phoenician letter wāw (𐤅).

It is always been enlightening and fascinating to look back on the history of something that we frequently use all the time. Studying the past increases our appreciation for something that we always take for granted. So, the next time you write some words or sentences on a paper, or even type messages on your cellphone, remember sometimes the millennia-long journey that these tiny letters that you’re writing or typing took, before they even got into our culture, embedded into our collective consciousness until the end of time.

(1) Wolff, D. R., et al. (2011). The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600. Oxford University Press.

(2) Houston, S., Baines, J., Cooper, J. (2003). Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 45 (3).

(3) Simons, F. (2011). Proto-Sinaitic — Progenitor of the Alphabet. Rosetta 9: 16–40. Retrieved from http://www.rosetta.bham.ac.uk/Issue_09/articles/simons_alphabet.pdf

(4) Cross, F. M. (1980). Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The American Schools of Oriental Research. 238 (238 (Spring, 1980)): 1–20.

(5) Cross, A. (2009). The Development of the Greek Alphabet within the Chronology of the ANE. University of Cagalry. Retrieved from http://www.arcalog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Near-Eastern-Chronology-and-the-development-of-the-Greek-Alphabet.pdf

(6) Swiggers, P. (1996). Transmission of the Phoenician Script to the West. In Daniels; Bright (eds.). The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford: University Press. pp. 261–270.

(7) Coulmas, F. (1996). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

(8) Benelli, E. (2017). Alphabets and language. In Naso, Alessandro (ed.). Etruscology. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter. pp. 245–253.

(9) McDonald, K. (2015). Oscan in Southern Italy and Sicily. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 65–82.

(10) Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. John Wiley & Sons.

(11) Brown, M. P. (1990). A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press. p. 18.

(12) Colish, M. L. (1999). Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400. The Yale Intellectual History of the West. Yale University Press. p. 67.

(13) Dowding, G. (1962). An introduction to the history of printing types; an illustrated summary of main stages in the development of type design from 1440 up to the present day: an aid to type face identification. Clerkenwell [London]: Wace. p. 5.

(14) Fritz Funke (2012). Buchkunde: Ein Überblick über die Geschichte des Buches (in German). Walter de Gruyter & Co KG. p. 223.

(15) Pflughaupt, L. (2008). Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany. trans. Gregory Bruhn. Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 123–124.

(16) Eisenstein, E. (2006). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. p. 134.

(17) Stockwell, R. (2002). How Much Shifting Actually Occurred in the Historical English Vowel Shift? (PDF). In Minkova, Donka; Stockwell, Robert (eds.). Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective. Mouton de Gruyter.

Published on May 20, 2021