laurence de looze

The alphabet makes an interesting topic. Its scope can be far greater than you might imagine. It can encompass cryptography, spelling, social rules, conspiracy theories, and how a society sees itself. It lends itself to art and philosophy. The Letter and the Cosmos touches on all of them.

It goes back in history, following the firming up of alphabets from the Phoenicians and Mesopotamians to the Greeks and Romans. It explores decoration and fonts. But it is more of a survey than anything transforming. It is a collection of facts and anecdotes that does not build. That’s unfortunate, because the book begins with a story de Looze experienced with a Japanese student, who didn’t recognize a possible letter D in a photo of a water wheel – because she was Japanese. Her worldview was different. I was hoping there would be all kinds of insight into how different societies’ views are shaped by their alphabets. How they are different from us, because of their alphabets. De Looze cites Levi-Strauss a lot, but apparently was not inspired by him.

As we get to the 20th century, the book turns to linguistics and the arguments over the significance of sounds and phonemes. Sounds are represented in the same alphabet differently of course, and it has long been controversial if not pointless to draw world-shaking conclusions from spelling. There is a lot on rationalizing French spelling, and a lot on Oulipo, a largely French artistic movement that tortured words for fun and art. Examples are paragraphs that do not contain the letter e, or paragraphs whose only vowel is e. Letter suppression turns out to be a game about as old as alphabets.

Sadly, there is no followup to the introduction, where the Japanese student didn’t automatically recognize the D. Occasionally there is a glimpse of such disconnects, as when the Aztecs were astounded that scratchings on paper allowed the Spanish Conquistadors to communicate over vast distances. Those disconnects are the potential The Letter and the Cosmos does not explore. The cosmos of the title is an ancient Greek word for basic unit, as in letter, not the whole universe.

This could have been a much different book if de Looze had performed macroanalysis, in which cultural differences might have shown up, as well as different styles, values and trends by language, region and time. Instead, he provides tons of encyclopedic research and quotes a lot of passages. It’s not as good.

David Wineberg… (meer)