Wim Borsboom
Author | Victoria, British Columbia, Canada |
Website
Back in Holland, when I was a kindergarten kid, I loved to play with a set of alphabet letters. They were like the ones that nowadays pretty well every family with kids has stuck on their fridge. But mine were not made from colourful plastic - it was the late nineteen-forties - no, they were well-used grimy little cardboard cut-outs which I kept.... more
Back in Holland, when I was a kindergarten kid, I loved to play with a set of alphabet letters. They were like the ones that nowadays pretty well every family with kids has stuck on their fridge. But mine were not made from colourful plastic - it was the late nineteen-forties - no, they were well-used grimy little cardboard cut-outs which I kept in a box and which I would empty out on the floor. I would then mix the letters up ‘real good’ and try put them in the right order while singing the alphabet song. I was good at it.
When I was six years old and in first grade, I posed a - for my grade one teacher - disturbing question,
“Miss, why is it that the ABC letters are in that order?”
Obviously she did not get the depth of my question when she answered,
“Well, they are in alphabetic order of course! Now get on with it and recite the alphabet!”
That question though kept turning up in my mind but remained unanswered until I eventually became a school teacher myself and decided to look for the answer... just in case one of the kids would ask me that same question.
One day, after school in a coffee shop - after having practiced the “alphabet song” with the kids - I suddenly got a hunch. I grabbed a pencil and drew a tabular grid on a napkin and tried to fit the sequence of letters (“abecedary”) into that row and column format: the vowels in the first column and the subsequent characters in the columns to the right... Lo and behold, it showed a surprising pattern!
I got that tabular grid idea from Sanskrit which I was studying at the time. The Indian alphabet is not linearly organized, it is in a tabular format (“abugida”) according to logical phonetic characteristics.
Initially I did not find the discovery important enough to seriously pursue it. “So what? Does knowing this, help kids learn their ABCs faster?”
Nevertheless, ca. 2000, when I got my first pocket computer (an HP Jornada Pocket PDA) with a built-in spreadsheet program, I playfully tabulated my “coffee-shop napkin discovery” on it, but now in colour as well.
In the meantime I had learned enough Sanskrit and studied India’s ancient history and archaeology well enough, that I was invited to attend an archaeology conference in Los Angeles on India’s Indus Valley history, where I was able to, quite informally though, present my discovery to some scholars.
But they did not get it, they thought I was talking about the shape of the Western letters and that those shapes were based on Sanskrit letters... which is ridiculous of course. Oh well...
Eventually I turned my speaking notes into this study, and was urged by my Indian friends - the ones who got it - to publish it.