Everything about Acrophonic totally explained
Acrophony refers to naming
letters in an
alphabetic writing system using words whose initial sounds (Greek:
acro uppermost, head +
phonos sound) are represented by the respective letters. For instance, were the English alphabet named acrophonically, the letter "A" might be named "axe" or "aardvark" or any other word beginning with A.
The
canonical acrophony is an
ideographic or
pictographic writing system, where the letter's name and
glyph both represent the same thing or concept - if for example the letter
A in English, named "axe", were in the form of an
axe.
The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Late
Bronze Age Proto-Canaanite alphabet in which the letter A, representing the sound /a/, is a
pictogram representing an
ox, and is called "ox" -
ʾalp. The
Latin alphabet is descended from the Proto-Canaanite, and the stylized head of an ox can still be seen if the letter A is turned upside-down: ∀. The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet is
bet (which means "house" and looks a bit like a shelter) representing the sound /b/, and from āleph-bēth we've the word "alphabet" - another case where the beginning of a thing gives the name to the whole, which was in fact common practice in the ancient Near East.
The
Glagolitic and
early Cyrillic alphabets, although not consisting of ideograms, also have letters named acrophonically. The letters representing /a, b, v, g, d, e/ are named
Az, Buki, Vedi, Glagol, Dobro, Est. Naming the letters in order, one recites a poem, a mnemonic which helps students and scholars learn the alphabet: Az' buki vedi, glagol' dobro est' means "I know letters, [the] word is good" in
Old Church Slavonic.
In
Irish and
Ogham, letters were formerly named after
trees, for example A was
ailm (
white fir), B was
beith (
birch) and C was
coll (
hazel). The
rune alphabets used by the Germanic peoples were also named acrophonically; for example, the first three letters, which represented the sounds /f, u, þ/, were named
fé, ur, þurs in Norse (wealth, slag/rain, giant) and
feoh, ur, þorn in Old English (wealth, ox, thorn). Both sets of names probably stemmed from Proto-Germanic
*fehu, *uruz, *thurisaz.
Rudyard Kipling gives a fictional description of the process in one of his
Just So Stories, "How the Alphabet was Made."
Modern
radiotelephony and aviation uses
spelling alphabets (the best-known of which is the
NATO Phonetic Alphabet, which begins with
Alpha,
Bravo,
Charlie,
Delta...) in which the letters of the English alphabet are arbitrarily assigned words and names in an acrophonic manner to avoid misunderstanding.
Most notes of the
solfege scale (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti) derive their names from the first
syllable of the lines of
Ut queant laxis, a
Latin hymn.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Acrophonic'.
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