Word: alphabetic
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Ever since Plato, scholars have been baffled by a seemingly closed mystery: Where did the alphabet come from? The Greeks thought that the Phoenicians had learned it in Egypt and that "because they navigated the sea, brought it to Greece." Nineteenth-century scholars, in pensive afterthought, decided that the Semites developed the alphabet from certain cursive characters that the Egyptians had evolved from their own hieroglyphs. Later, other scholars began to discover certain signs that predated hieroglyphs -a series of trademarks, potters' signs, pawnbrokers' labels, and masons' marks that may have spread from trader to trader...
...press of more urgent business-he was an official of the Y.M.C.A. in China, director of prisoner relief in Siberia during World War I, pastor at Cornell University until 1942-Dr. Moran found time to dig deeper into the historical ABCs. eventually evolved a basic theory. The alphabet, says he* could have had its origin only in some great "organizing principle" common to the ancient world as 'far back as 1400 B.C. The only principle possible: religion...
...would seem, therefore, to be of some significance . . . that the first letter of the alphabet is Alpha, the Hebrew Aleph, 'a Bull' . . . Scanning down through the other letters of the Hebrew alphabet which have names with recognized meanings in the Hebrew, we find that they also deal with ideas current in astrology-a house, a hand, an eye, a fish, a serpent . . . while, strangely enough, the last of all in the Hebrew is Taw, a 'mark,' a 'sacred symbol,' the Aramaic Tor, 'oryx' or 'ox,' the Arabic Thaw, the Greek...
Language Game. Ling-Whist, a card game that will teach players 300 words of either French or Spanish, has been put on the market by Manhattan's Games of the Month, Inc. Each card in the 120-card deck contains a letter of the alphabet, its phonetic pronounciation and point value. Object: build the cards into one of the 100 sentences or expressions shown in an instruction book. Price...
...collecting material for a dictionary. In 1944 he finally settled down to work in earnest. He pored over every English and Spanish dictionary available; he read novels, newspapers and magazines, wrote to businessmen, lawyers, laborers and scholars for the latest words and expressions. When he had gone through the alphabet once, he started from A to Z all over again. The result: the most comprehensive dictionary of its kind...