The Letter and the Cosmos: How the Alphabet Has Shaped the Western View of the World

285 Pages·2016·5.63 MB·English

by  Laurence de Looze

THE LETTER AND THE COSMOS
How the Alphabet Has Shaped the
Western View of the World
•
From our first ABCs to the Book of Revelation’s statement that Jesus is
“the Alpha and Omega,” we see the world through our letters. More
than just a way of writing, the alphabet is a powerful concept that has
shaped Western civilization and our daily lives. In The Letter and the
Cosmos, Laurence de Looze probes that influence, showing how the
alphabet has served as a lens through which we conceptualize the world
and how the world, and sometimes the whole cosmos, has been per-
ceived as a kind of alphabet itself. Beginning with the ancient Greeks,
he traces the use of alphabetic letters and their significance from Plato
to postmodernism, offering a fascinating tour through Western history.
A sharp and entertaining examination of how languages, letterforms,
orthography, and writing tools have reflected our hidden obsession
with the alphabet, The Letter and the Cosmos is illustrated with copi-
ous examples of the visual and linguistic phenomena which de Looze
describes. Read it, and you’ll never look at the alphabet the same way
again.
laurence de looze is a professor in the Department of Modern Lan-
guages and Literatures at the University of Western Ontario.
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LAURENCE DE LOOZE
The Letter and the Cosmos
How the Alphabet Has Shaped the
Western View of the World
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2016
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4426-5060-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-4426-2853-3 (paper)
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper
with vegetable-based inks.
________________________________________________________________
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
De Looze, Laurence, author
The letter and the cosmos : how the alphabet has shaped
the Western view of the world / Laurence de Looze.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-5060-2 (cloth).–ISBN 978-1-4426-2853-3 (paper)
1. Alphabet – History. 2. Civilization, Western. I. Title.
P211.D44 2016 411 C2015-908590-X
________________________________________________________________
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

an Ontario government agency
un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario
Funded by the Financé par le
Government gouvernement
of Canada du Canada
For Aara
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Contents
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Preface ix
Abbreviations xv
Illustrations xvii
1 Introduction 3
2 Ancient Greek Letters 19
3 Latin Letters and the Enduring Influence of Roman Scripts 32
4 Christian Letters: The Middle Ages 49
5 The Letters of Humanism 67
6 Baroque Variations and the Search for a Universal Language 83
7 Logical Letters: The Alphabet in the Age of Reason 102
8 The Alphabets of the Industrialized World 118
9 From Modern Experiments to Post-Modern Experiences 135
10 Into the New Millennium 165
Notes 179
Works Cited 195
Illustration Credits 209
Index 211
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Preface
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Writing exists only in a civilization and a civilization cannot exist without writing.
I.J. Gelb, A Study of Writing
Il parlait de A qui est comme une grande mouche avec ses ailes repliées en
arrière; de B qui est drôle, avec ses deux ventres, de C et D qui sont comme la
lune, en croissant et en moitié pleine, et O qui est la lune entière dans le ciel noir.
Le H est haut, c’est une échelle pour monter aux arbres et sur le toit des mai-
sons; E et F, qui ressemblaient à un râteau et à une pelle, et G, un gros homme
assis dans un fauteuil; I danse sur la pointe de ses pieds, avec sa petite tête qui
se détache à chaque bond, pendant que J se balance; mais K est cassé comme
un vieillard, R marche à grandes enjambées comme un soldat, et Y est debout,
les bras en l’air et crie: au secours! L est un arbre au bord de la rivière, M est
une montagne; N est pour les noms, et les gens saluent de la main, P dort sur
une patte et Q est assis sur sa queue; S, c’est toujours un serpent, Z toujours un
éclair; T est beau, c’est comme le mât d’un bateau, U est comme un vase. V, W
ce sont des oiseaux, des vols d’oiseaux; X est une croix pour se souvenir.
J.M.G. Le Clézio, Mondo et autres histoires
When I began work on this book, freshly armed with a generous
SSHRC grant from the Canadian government, I envisioned a book on
Renaissance attitudes regarding the alphabet and how they influenced
the reception of the New World. The topic fascinated me, especially
because I found in Europe’s difficulty to reconcile the magnificence
of Meso-American culture with its lack of alphabetic writing, a water-
shed moment in the Early Modern period (the Spanish, beginning