The Invention of the Alphabet with Johanna Drucker

In the Weeds

“Letters have power,” Johanna Drucker tells me. But what is the nature of this power and how did it all begin? Unlike writing, the alphabet was only invented once. Somewhere in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, about 4,000 years ago, speakers of a Semitic language adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the basic phonetic building blocks of their language. All modern alphabets can be traced back to this origin.

Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and author of numerous books, including her most recent, Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), talks to me about this fascinating history, from what archeology has uncovered to the alphabet’s central role in information technology. We also discuss a theory put forth by David Abram, in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, that the alphabet opens “a new distance […] between human culture and the rest of nature,” as it turns our powers of perception inward and focuses our attention on human-made sounds and words.
Links to some of the things we discuss: Two key archeological sites where inscriptions of the first alphabet have been found: Serabit el-Khadim and Wadi el-Hol. Sandstone sphinx at the British Museum with Proto-Sinaitic letters. The Acrophonic principle. The Ahiram sarcophogus and shards found in Israel. Unicode. See also in-the-weeds.net.