The “ship of the desert,” the camel, gave its name to the third letter.
Our name for this animal is traceable back to the Phoenician “gimel”
(gheˊmel) or “gamel” (gahˊmel). The long neck and the peculiar angle of
the neck in relation to the head could easily be represented. The Greeks
made changes similar to those in other letters—they improved the shape
and changed the name to “gamma.” The Romans did not forget the curve and
gave it both the hard and soft sounds (kay and gay). Later on, about the
third century A. D., to distinguish the “g” sound from the “k” sound
they added a little bar below the opening. Thus we get both C and G from
the picture of the camel.
Stevenson said that when he was a child the capital G always impressed
him as a genii swooping down to drink out of a handsome cup. Kipling’s
story of the invention of the alphabet is filled with similar delightful
stories of the picture origin of letter forms.
D
The next letter D, came from a representation of a door—“daleth”
(dahleth). It probably pictures the door of a tent. A custom that
prevails among the Arabs and in a number of countries gave particular
importance to the door of a tent—a stranger, or even an enemy, if he
entered through the door of a tent must receive food, drink and shelter.
“Daleth” became “delta” with the Greeks and D (day) with the Romans,
who, of course, rounded the angle.
E
The house picture gave us B, the door, D, and the window, E. “He” (hay)
meant to look, to see, or window, and one writer asserts our familiar
street cry “hey, there” can be traced to these ancient times. One side
bar of the window was lost early.
The Greeks at first used this sound for the long “e” (epsilon) but
afterwards employed the character H or “eta” for the long sound. The
Romans at first made no change except to call it “eh.”
This is the letter that occurs so frequently in English words, and many
no doubt recall the interesting use that Poe makes of this fact in his
story “The Gold Bug.”
F
Our letter order does not agree with that of the Phoenicians or the
early Greeks. Our sixth letter, F, is missing in classical Greek, but it
is found in earlier writings. It comes from a Phoenician representation
of a hook or nail (?) “vau.” The Hebrew form resembles the latter
object. The nail was important in shipbuilding, a common industry of the
early traders. When the Greeks used this letter they called it “digamma”
(double gamma) and its form represented one “gamma” (Greek c)
superimposed over the other. The Romans called it F (ef) and during the
reign of Emperor Claudius the consonant V was represented by the F
inverted. This was done because the Latin alphabet had but one character
to represent U and V and OCTAVIA became OCTAℲIA.
H
Two fence posts and three horizontal boards gave us our eighth letter,
H. The fence was called “cheth” (haith). The Greeks omitted the upper
and lower boards thus making it like our H, and called it “eta” (ata).
The Romans gave it a soft sound H (hah) just as we do today.