alphaBravo
Jasper Johns, Colored Alphabet, 1959
Alpha Bravo
The advent of airplane warfare in the first half of the 20th century ushered in the widespread use of radio communication in navigation. Between static on the radio and the sounds of battle, the garbled “b” versus “d” sound in a message containing “Proceed to coordinate BD68” could literally spell life or death if misunderstood. Airmen began using ad-hoc versions of an acrophonic alphabet: the naming of letters in an alphabet such that the letter’s name begins with the letter itself. These codes became standardized into a spelling alphabet recognized by the International Civil Aviation Organization: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, etc. The message “Proceed to coordinate Bravo Delta Six Ait” in ICAO-speak is unambiguous.
Strictly speaking, our alphabet is not acrophonic (say the name for “W” if you disagree), but it descends from scripts that were. The Latin alphabet we use is a variation on the Greek, which uses acrophony (alpha, beta, gamma), and Greek in turn descended from the acrophonic script used by the Phoenician maritime traders who adapted the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet for trade. The Phoenician merchants of the Bronze Age were so successful, almost every alphabet in use worldwide has an origin in the Proto-Sinaitic.
In this alphabet, the equivalent to our letter A is a pictogram illustrating the head of an ox, the Phoenician word for ox being alp. If you turn our letter upside-down you can still see the pictogram: ∀.
Evolution of the alphabet
Linguist Robert Fradkin has animated the evolution of alphabets at his website (link is archived at the Wayback Machine). It’s worth checking out all his animations! The evolution of the Latin alphabet from his website is below:
Our alphabet, a code or system of signs, has origins in drawing, a theme we explored in 2D Digital Art. Jasper Johns, seen above, returns the alphabet to its drawing roots. Johns enjoys defamiliarizing this commonplace system of 26 signs through painting and composition. This will also be your task. But in this project, you’ll be “painting” with software and and “composing” with a blog. You’ll create an alphabet out of objects from the environment or your imagination. It will recall, through form or acrophony or a combination of the two, the common letterforms of the Latin alphabet.
Alphabet Soup
If Jasper Johns isn’t your cup of tea, for a different kind of inspiration go to the Flickr One Letter group. Here you can see what photographic isolation of environmental lettering can offer.
Next, see what letters form in Sigrid Jones’ word and image blog.
Before the death of Flash, you could manipulate letterforms into a Johnsian state of defamiliarization using Concrete Poetry by Jonny Norridge. The adjacent video captures the essence of the experience. If you install the Ruffle extension for your browser, you may be able to experience some of the behavior of Norridge’s site. As of this writing, it’s not quite fully restored. Only about 70% of the site’s ActionScript3 is functioning, but Ruffle’s developers say keep checking back!
View the famous American Alphabet by Heidi Cody. She made her alphabet up entirely of letters from corporate graphics (guessing them was an internet game for a while).
And in a similar vein, letter-as-logo becomes a Flickr set for In the Picture Design.
Lastly, many alphabets similar to such as you’ll be doing can be found on Reuben Miller’s blog. It’s archived at the Wayback Machine.