acrophony
Sign in to saveAcrophony (; + 'sound') is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic: the names of the letters α, β, γ, δ, are spelled with the respective letters: (), (), (), ().
Described at
Acrophony: How Letter Names Derive From Words
How did the Egyptian word for 'owl' help create the letter m? Acrophony reveals how ancient alphabets named their letters after the very words that inspired them.
worldwidewords.org →From such pictographic symbols, Egyptian scribes derived the world's first alphabet by the principle of acrophony, in which a hieroglyph for a word came to represent the first consonant of that word. So, for example, the Egyptian word for “owl” began with an [m] sound, so the glyph for “owl” became the letter m . The best-known cases are Classical Greek and Hebrew, both derived from ancient Phoenician. In Hebrew, for example, the first four letters of the alphabet are aleph (the Hebrew word for ox), beth (house), gimel (camel) and daleth (door). It’s as though our children’s alphabet had been transformed into the actual names for the letters, so that a wouldn’t be called or said ay , but apple . Acrophony combines the Greek prefix acro– meaning uppermost or head, with –phony , sound, hence “the sound of the initial letter”. Over the past 30 years, World Wide Words has chronicled the shifting English wordscape — new coinages, word histories, books on language, curious idioms, and the oddities of native English speech. More than 3,000 articles are archived here for you to enjoy. There are no advertisements to interrupt your reading pleasure. I rely on your generosity to cover running costs. Donations made via PayPal are secure.
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Acrophony (; + 'sound') is the naming of letters of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic: the names of the letters α, β, γ, δ, are spelled with the respective letters: (), (), (), ().
The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Proto-Sinaitic script and the succeeding Phoenician alphabet, in which the letter A, representing the sound , is thought to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an ox, and is called 'ox', , which starts with the glottal stop sound the letter represents. 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 ālep-bēt came 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.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “acrophony” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.