Alphabets

The word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. When the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script, they assigned a sign to each vowel as well as each consonant. That is the first true alphabet, and it is the oldest alphabetic script still in use. It gave rise to the Latin, Gothic, Cyrillic, Coptic, and Glagolitic alphabets. Latin and Cyrillic are the two offshoots that now write most of the world's languages. Greek letters also stayed in mathematics, physics, and astrology.

The letter-by-letter account of Greek is on the Greek alphabet page. What follows are signs in which a letter is also a symbol, not only a sound.

Phi

The golden number, the divine ratio 1.618, is written with the Greek letter phi. One account of the name takes it as a nod to Phidias, the fifth-century Greek sculptor and mathematician who made sculpture for Olympia and the Parthenon. The same ratio is traced through shells, plants, and spirals on the golden spiral page.

Tau

The Greek letter tau comes from the Phoenician letter taw, and it in turn produced the Roman T and the Cyrillic Te. Older readers set tau opposite theta: tau for life or resurrection, theta for death. The tau symbol page follows that sign into later religious use.

Runes

Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and other Germanic alphabets used runes. The runic row is traditionally called the futhark, after its first letters, f, u, th, a, r, and k. The strokes are mostly straight, because they were cut with a knife. Runic writing was used for more than a thousand years and faded before the sixteenth century. It did not disappear. People still draw runes for insight and for divination. The runes page is the fuller guide. Three characters are worth naming here because each one stands for a condition of life, not only a sound.

Dagaz, sometimes written Dagas, is the rune for D. It means day or dawn, an awakening or a breakthrough. In a reading it is taken as the moment to make a plan or to start a piece of work.

Othala is the rune for O. It stands for ancestral property, the house or home that is really one's own, a place of value and shelter.

Jera may be read as J or Y. It is the harvest of earlier work: hope, happiness, and prosperity that arrive because the labor was already done.