B

reasts, vaginas, and tools:

Musings on the roots of our alphabet
by Jennifer Ball June 2009

If you want to describe something to someone, but neither of you speak the same language, drawing a picture is the simplest way to get your point across. A picture is worth a thousand words because it can disseminate information without using the conventions of spoken or written language. Visual communication does not require human-human interaction. Anyone can draw a picture. Anyone else can look at it. If the sender and receiver share enough traits: transmission accomplished. Homo sapiens share traits because we evolved from natural selection, which is neither moral or arbitrary, but it is consistent. Humans have been genetically similar for at least a couple hundred thousand years. Consequently, we want the same basic things. These base requirements are reflected in the shapes and sounds of our letters. Our alphabet is a hierarchy of early mans needs. Writing is roughly five thousand years old250 human generations. Tokens, markings, figurines, and cave paintings are much older. Written documentation progresses slowly when youre a nomadic hunter-gatherer. Survival takes precedence over scholarly pastimes. Writing flourished once people had enough to eat. No surprise that hunger is featured in the sounds of our letters. The phoneme of Mmmmstarts the word mother in almost every language, and this mmm is probably due to the mewing a baby makes when wanting to suckle. Mmm is the sound of hunger; it is the sound of pulling the lips into the mouth. Think Mmm good, in those old Campbells soup commercials. In our alphabet, this m sound signifies individuals who can generate multiples and feed themwhat we call mama. M depicts replication in both its upper- and lowercase shapes (M, m) and looks a lot like the Egyptian hieroglyph for birth. M demonstrates mimicry in its design, as well as emulating stylized breasts pointing toward heaven. A mothers breasts were heavenly because they were key to survival. You can even see this breast-character relationship better in our capital B which, you notice, is second in the hierarchy of our alphabet. Women are so important to survival that there isnt a one-to-one correspondence of woman-to-letter: women are all over the alphabet, and mostly as body parts. The Chinese character for milk as well as A bevy of Bs? breast, lady, suckle (#2 below) is composed of two characters: the one on the left On the left is our means woman, the one on the right (highlighted in blue) means to be and looks Times Roman

B
1. Roman (English) 2. Chinese 3. Ancient Egyptian 1

4. Thai

capital B. Next is the character for milk in Chinese. Third is the Egyptian hieroglyph for milk, rotated 90 clockwise. Fourth is Thai for mother, an individual known to have milk. The breast imagery has been highlighted in blue.

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

Granda lot like our capital B. To be is to exist: we are human beings. Chinese speakers tell me that this B mother in Chinese doppelganger is a picture of a womans breasts, com- (nainai) mon knowledge in their country. This character of woman plus to be is pronounced nai. A concuMama in bine is er nai or second breast.1 (Nai is proChinese nounced like the beginning of our word night, and (mama) well get to the significance of that later, though there will be the precocious among you who might guess at Female, mother the relationship.) in Chinese, rotated How is it that these twoBandare 90 counterclockalmost identical, yet most Chinese can acknowledge wise (mu) the resemblance to womens breasts and most English speakers cannot? This resemblance between the Milk in Korean two symbols is especially strong if we see our B as (uyu) handwritten: BBB (in the typefaces Marker Felt, Papyrus, Zapfino, Brush Script, and STFangMrs. in song respectively). The last B is really Chinese Mandarin Could you tell? (taitai) The Chinese B shape might start with an N sound, but it means breasts just like our B signifies breasts, a relationship that becomes clearer Mama in after one has analyzed enough words that have B Japanese in them. No coincidence that baby and babble (haha) start with B. Where you find babies, you find milk. Where you find milk, you find mothers. All of these concepts involve full breasts. Large breasts are so de- Mama in sirable in our society that women pay money to have Arabic (mama) perfectly nice ones cut open just to stick something in them in order to make them larger. This is because The Power of 2. These representations of eons of hungry primates sought out milk, and larger women and milk on pages 1 and 2 depict the number two because human females have breasts appear to hold more volume than smaller ones. Our cultural attraction to large breasts is really two breasts and milk comes out of them. Note that each of the concepts above ina capacity issue. cludes a double or a very similar twin. On the surface, when you compare nai and milk and breast and mother, the sounds and the words themselves seem unrelated. Its when one pans backas they do in the movies, or in map view on the Internet when youve found the street and now you want a perspective of the citythat one can see these words do have a relationship. With the alphabet, you must move from big picture to small picture repeatedly Ones ability to do this, as well as mentally rotate characters helps when decoding the alphabet. The Sumerians, as a culture, rotated their writing 90 counterclockwise around 3,000 BC for reasons unknown; our lowercase b, d, p, and q are essentially the same letter, just in different orientations. Toying with the alphabetrotating, flipping

axes, resizingis easier when one can do mental gymnastics, but these days the graphic capabilities of the computer help. The Alphabet Game started with Find a Word in a Word: secret in secretary, execute in executive, strum in instrument. This has been a pastime of my chemist husband and mine for years. Words are combinatorial we discovered, like genes or programming code. Each unit is divisible, down to the shape and sound of the letter. The alphabet has meaning on the letter level. Yes, this is radical. Fights have started at dinner parties in my house over this. Who knew the alphabet was some kind of religion? But consider this a Darwinian lens, a new way to perceive language, and you will discover that, for example, some words contain pictures of themselves, like the word eye which looks like a face. The sound eye/I/aye corresponds to our identity. It is no coincidence that the window to our soul has the same one-syllabic phoneme as the graphic human icon meaning oneself: I. In Spanish ojo means eye, another word which resembles a face. A face can also be seen in the Greek word opo, which, too, means face. If you consider that the two sides of our face are opposite, you can see an example of how our Filial Charity by Jean Goujon, abstract ideas are based in reality. Somewhere in the middle of mid-sixteenth century. According to Marilyn Yalom, The origi- 250 generations opo morphed from meaning face to meaning nal Roman story of Filial Charity opposite. Concrete examples are the underpinnings (visualize tells of a daughter nursing her a pin holding my argument in place) of abstract notions. (Argumother in prison. The Renaisment comes from the mirrored clarity of silverargent.) These sance interpretation of this story root conceptssuch as the facial similarities in words related to changed the parent to a father faceleave a trail that I follow like a linguistic Hansel, or in thus introducing a heterosexual incestual note. History of the this case, Gretel, by comparing all languages for crumbs of conBreast, page 26. gruence. We are too similar and too influenced by our ancestors to not have it show up in the sounds and definitions of the worlds most rudimentary wordswords that every language has. If you think cleavage is important now, imagine if you were starving. Milk, mother, breasts, woman, female animals all meant food. They all meant we dont starve. Think end of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck knew (spoiler alert!) a grieving mother breastfeeding an old man was the depths of degradation. Hunger is hard to get behind these days when obesity is one of the biggest problems facing our culture. To understand the alphabet, you have to forget lunch just once in order to remember what its like to miss food. Surviving is huge when there is a possibility you might not. To survive: that vive in there means live. Beati hispani, quibus vivere bibere est. Happy [are] the Spaniards, for whom to live is to drinkA reference to the Latin accent of the Spanish,

Our cultural attraction to large breasts is really a capacity issue.

eye

The Independent, Aug. 26, 2009 2 3

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

The most poorly drawn house in the world. A Wikipedia chart showing the roots of the first three letters of our alphabet, with the letter B delineated as house, though the Phoenician character (circled in blue) looks more like a lowercase g, a backwards e, or an angular 9. This shape also resembles arms in a breast-feeding pose and a combination B/V character, which is the sound this shape represented.

in

which v was pronounced as b.2 Both B and V mean woman. B is balcony,3 V is valley. B is in the high rent district of the alphabet, V sits low. B is on the top of a womans body, V is not. Try this: hold two fingers up to a woman as if giving the peace or victory sign and ask her what letter that represents; shell probably say V. However, if you ask her what body part it reminds her of, she might slap you (especially if you put your tongue in the middlethis happened to a friend of mine). B: the picture of pronunciation. No coincidence that most words related to vaults, vacuums, and caves (I have added the blue B to have V in them (vac and cav are palindromes; Bill Bryson claims illustrate.) The following picture palindromes are at least 2,000 years old4). It makes logical sense beshows the pronunciation of [p] or cause the shape of V looks like a valley (or, rotated, a cave). The most [b] (bilabial plosive. If voiceless or voiced can not be told from a pic- infamous cave being, of course, the vagina. One of the things that makes the alphabet so successfulbesides ture). Again, the lips are closed, but the velum is risen, so no air is the fact that there only 26 letters to learnis that the shapes of the letescaping. ww.frufrusphonoweb/ ters are derived from universals about the world that all humans recogeng---chapters/consonants/mannize, coupled with sounds that relate to what those letters depict. And ners-of-articulation/Stops we dont even realize it. B looks like breasts because breasts matter to humans. And so do the lips that hooked onto the breasts that got the milk (in the house that Jack builtexperts claim B comes from a symbol for housesee abovebut only in the same way that bathroom is the name for the place where you poop: House is a euphemism for women because women did not roam freely back then). Our B sound came from the bubble that arises when one is bloated from bread or beast or bodacious tatas. The second sound of the alphabet is the noise one makes when one has been fed. BAA. BEH. BUH. The phoneme of our letter B is the noise you make when you burp or belch: a bilabial plosive, meaning that the sound explodes out of two lips. You dont always know a burp is coming, which is why your lips are closed, and certainly someone new to the world, such as a baby, would be more likely to be surprised by an up2 3 4 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Latin_proverbs The Riot Act in L.A. circa 1983 had bit that included the womans name Lotta Balcony. Mother Tongue, page 227. 4

rush of air from the stomach. A burp says that youve been fed. A burp says youre no longer in pain. And no wonder youre happy: no pain, youve been fed. Next is bed. B is second because it means two in the most obvious way: with two lobes that also demonstrate the pronunciation of the sound. You can see that B has the shape of two lips if you were looking at a face in profile. Lips, and breasts and the concept of two are all seen in the double-looped character of our second letter. A letter thats been around as long as B has picks up a few meanings. Polysemy means many meanings and the beginning letters of our alphabet can be shown to have many sources, which is why they congealed into the shapes and sounds they did: there was a consensus. Women figure in much of the alphabet because women produce babies, milk, and a lot of fun for men. We are the G in gene and gyn. We are the D in dame and damnation. We are the T in tits, and were clearly the V and U and W (if you cant see this, just wait). Ill give men A, P, and R. Language is complex, but humans are relatively simple. We evolved because we liked sex. We wouldnt be here if we didnt. (Shakers were a religious sect who didnt believe in having sex. Do you know any?) Every day some major figure is disgraced because he couldnt keep his penis in his pants. Sex is everywhere. Why wouldnt it be in the alphabet? So dont blame me, the messenger, to point out what the Chinese know, what the ancient Egyptians knew, and what we have forgotten because our alphabet cleverly disguises it. Synedoche (pronounced si nek da key) is the use of one thing to stand in for another, as The sails on the horizon really means that there are boats on the horizon. Synedoche is key when understanding the alphabet, where breasts and lips stand in for women, and things that stick out and rise up stand in for men. The alphabet is coded so well that even other languages transformed into our letters follow a logical pattern. Pinyin, a phonetic form of Chinese meaning spelled sound, uses Roman letters to sound out Chinese words because only 26 letters are needed as opposed to thousands of characters. This makes computer input much easier. Sex is written as xing in Pinyin and is pronounced tshing makes me think of Waynes World. We see xing everywhere in the U.S. near crosswalks and think crossing or intersection. Sex and intersection are not dissimilar concepts when you take the map view. That broad perspective is needed when analyzing all languages for correspondent sounds, especially in vulgarities and slangareas where humans are their most honest. Classic linguistics would argue that there is no relationship between sound and meaning. If you consider that the word caca is 5

Intersection on both sides of the world. In Pinyin, the phonetic form of Chinese, xing means sex. (Photo:
mathpropress.com.)

com.)

Who knew Wayne spoke Chinese? Sex is written as xing in Pinyin and pronounced tshing. The show Waynes World on Saturday Night Live made a similar word famous. Just having a photograph of a babe would cause Wayne and Garth to exclaim, Schwing! accompanied by a brief moment of standing, aided by their chairs (the implication being that their pants had suddenly gotten too tight for them to sit comfortably). (Photo: webpronews.

SCHWING!

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

not in most dictionariesclearly it is not considered a word by enough literate peoplelinguists are superficially accurate. However, if you admit to yourself that you know what the word caca means, then you can see there is a disconnect between what linguists tell us and what we know about words and human beings. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and expert on language, believes that humans have an innate ability to form, in their brains, the structures needed for communication; concepts like nouns, verbs, and syntactical order. This idea was first expressed by Noam Chomsky, but Pinker is more comprehensible. He writes of Chomskys theory: From a Martians eye-view all humans speak a single language...based on the discovery that the same symbol-manipulating machinery, without exception, underlies the worlds languages.5 If we all speak a version of the same language, it seems like some of our words would be onomatopoeic, because our ears have been pretty similar for a good 200,000 years (this may change with headphones). When you consider sigh and moan and screechwords one would not need to know to understand their meaning after hearing them oncethe fact that these words exist renders classic linguistic theory suspect. We are too similar to each other not to have some universality show up in our language. Pinker acknowledges this in his book The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Researchers in the human sciences have begun to flesh out the hypothesis that the mind evolved with a universal complex design.....this shared way of thinking...makes us look like a single tribe, which the anthropologist Donald Brown has called the Universal People, after Chomskys Universal Grammar....Its not that every universal behavior directly reflects a universal component of human Queen of Milk, Strongs #4435. Milkah bore her uncle naturemany arise from an interplay between eight children, because that was the close relationship universal properties of the mind, universal properyou had with your uncle in those days. At SearchGodsWord.com you can hear the pronunciation of the both ties of the body, and universal properties of the ancient Hebrew and Greek as part of definitions which world.6 are ordered according to Strongs Concordance. One universal property of humans is they need to eat. Another universal property is that women produce food. Yet another: eating makes us happy when were hungry. Babies babble when theyre sated and demand mamamama when theyre not. Our alphabet has been successful because what sounds like happinessbbbblooks like happiness to Homo sapiens. In our uppercase B, the sound of lips that have been fed has been linked to the shape of full breasts. As you can see to the left, in Biblical times enough milk can make you queen. The sounds and pictures of our alphabet are clues to solving not only the origins of all alphabetswhich, according to David Diringer, probably derived from one original alphabet7 (Jared Diamond reiterates this in his Pulitzer prize5 6 7 The Language Instinct, 1994, page 238 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002, page 55 The Alphabet, A Key to the History of Mankind, David Diringer, D. Litt, 1948, page 195 6

winning Guns, Germs and Steel8)but also the origins of man. Using cuneiform, hieroglyphs, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek, Korean, Thai, Japanese, Czech; plus many other languages, alphabets, syllabaries (alphabet-like groupings of consonant-plus-vowel units), and abajads (alphabets with no vowels, which includes both Hebrew and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), the alphabet can be shown to have inherent meaning in the sound, shape, and order of the letters, a meaning that corresponds to the words the letters make up. A perfect alphabet would have the marriage of one sound to one symbol. Our English alphabet often has several sounds per letter shape, but it still manages to handle most sound combinations with only 26 letters. Compared with any other system, the alphabet requires much less rote memorization. This wedding of aural to pictorial, of audio to ocular is not one of accident. The amalgam demonstrates both the democracy of the alphabet, and the reason it is learned so quickly by most children: the alphabet has a pattern. This pattern underlies all languages in a broad sense. Writing is a code, but if you see the alphabet as a ranking of survival skills, it is possible to decipher the relationship of symbol to meaning. A stands for pain in the form of beaked and horned animals that could kill oneand the alpha males who tamed them; it also represents the archaic architecture of the pyramid and a reverence for the dead in the form of angels as it points to heaven (and includes a step up). B stands for females in the form of milk/breast/butt/vagina, G stands for the throwing stick that got the game that provided milk. (C came much later.) How do I know this? The proof is here and at www.OriginofAlphabet.com: the labor of the last three-and-a-half years of research, with 70+ documents online; Im in my second year of Mandarin, with an emphasis on the writing. The only thing I cant provide is the sound, but you can hear the words as they were pronounced long ago on SearchGodsWord.com, which has both Greek and Hebrew lexicons. These lexicons use the numbers of Strongs Concordance, which is an index to the Bible.....[and includes] 8674 Hebrew root words used in the Old Testament....[and] 5624 Greek root words used in the New Testament.9 Hebrew has an oral and written tradition that goes back to 12th century BC.10 This oral tradition is one of the few ways we can glean how words may have been pronounced four or five thousand years ago. It turns out people sounded a lot like sheep and birds back then: dark, drawn-out vowelslike an animals bleatand guttural throat soundslike a birds caw. Being musical facilitates language ability. My sensitivity to pitch (Ive played the French horn for 44 years) is useful when thinking about early speech and what humans might have sounded like when there were no mothers or teachers around to imitate. It turns out there was a lot of throat clearing in the dawn of man. A love of cryptograms also helps when thinking about language. Here are two easy ones: Micciccippi Ahbbi Pyldathi

The first step in solving a cryptogram is to look for the most common symbol. In English, this turns out to be letter E because it is the most common letter in our language. But if theres no E, you have to search for the next most common letter, or something else that clues you in. 8 Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997, page 255 9 Wikipedia: Strongs Concordance. 10 HEBREW Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Ed. Tom McArthur. Oxford University Press, 1998. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. 7
17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

In Hebrew, Bet, stands for the B sound and Vet stands for the V sound, however, they are considered one character, both of which resemble the numeral 2. That dagesh (dot) in Bet sure makes Bet seem like a breast and Vet seem like a vagina.

With Mississippi, if you read the letters out loud, or at least loudly in your head, you might have gotten it immediately because the rhythm of this word has been drummed into us as children: MIssIssIppI. A one-letter switch isnt enough to confuse, but Happy Birthday was probably harder because every letter was substituted. There were no Es in this one either, so it had to be solved using a different method, perhaps one that looked for syllables, which usually have consonants at each end and vowels in the middle. Now imagine solving Ahbbi Pyldathi if you took all the vowels out because early languages, like Hebrew and Egyptian, didnt have written vowels. Hbb Pldth is a lot tougher to solve without vowels, but the double letters would be the first clue. All writing is a kind of cryptogram, but the most common repeated symbol in written languagethe E if you willis milk and mothers. This symbol usually comes in twos because the word for milk and mother emulates breasts. Double characters or double sounds in words can signify aspects of bilateral symmetry. We are all bilaterally symmetrical, which means we are composed of two halves that match. All animals, excluding radian sea life, are bilaterally symmetrical. For mammals who stand upright, mammaries are the most obvious difference between females and males. On human females, they are prominently placed and reduced in number to one per lateral side, consistent with our other sense organs and appendages. The dominant two-ness of bilateral symmetry can be seen in words related to milk (from two breasts) and sight (due to two eyes) because breasts and eyes were characteristics that were important to early mans survival. Double characters can function in decoding our language much as the E does in decoding cryptograms. Pictorial languages like Chinese and Egyptian demonstrate this breast-character relationship using a double symbol, but when we get to Hebrew, its a different situation. The second position in the Hebrew alphabet has the sound value of both /b/ and /v/, but the character itself looks like a 2: . Females are number two after the alpha male (other males are competitors). The second character of the Hebrew alphabet signifies for female mammal due to the fact that the character mirror plane is pronounced /v/ when it is represented as above, but it has the sound value of /b/ when a dot (known as a An example of bilateral symmedagesh) is put in the middle: . That dot is a nipple. This try. All mammals and most animals character represents the two salient aspects of the female are bilaterally symmetrical, meanmammal: breasts and vagina. So this 2-looking character ing that each half of an entity is a demonstrates female mammals in a much more coded way mirror-image of the other half, and than simple bilateral symmetry. One has to know the system that a theoretical plane down the middle separates the two halves. in order to break the code: sometimes females are represented (Illustration: www.uic.edu/classes/bios/ by a doubled breast-like symbol, sometimes they are bios100/labs/bilateral.jpg.) represented by a breast/vagina relationship. This difference 8
17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

Bet Vet

Two

Two

demonstrates why decoding the alphabet is so difficult: It takes a survey of all languages to see the consistent representation of female mammals. B is the second letter of our alphabet because female mammals have mammary glands that look like the letter B. B has two lobes. Bi means two in Greek. Biology is the study of lifeand no coincidence that the root of bios is two because life takes two. is the Greek spelling and this word is pronounced be-os. Considering that os stands for bone in Greek, this could be interpreted as two bones. Walking on two legs makes man a fairly unique animal. The Greek letter shows two lips, possibly the labia from which life emerges: females have two sets of lips. Mammalian life is created by two. Everything about female mammals bespeaks two, including the female humans status in society. Women standing for #2 is not a judgement call (in my society, of course, theyre #1, but so are men; in my society we have several number ones...). However, the Hebrew character which comes second in the Hebrew alphabet, bet/vet, clearly demonstrates that early humans associated the sound of the second character with both the sound Women tend to have shorter vocal cords of our current letter B (still found at the beginning and therefore higher pitches. This chart was of the alphabet) and the sound of the letter V (now created in 1956 by Daniel Jones, a British relegated to the end!). Learning Spanish, I always phonetician. (Source and photo: www.azlifa.com.) wondered, whats the relationship between B and V? When you see vaca, which is cow, you pronounce it baca. (In Hebrew this B/V switch is exactly the opposite though not as consistentAbraham is pronounced Ahv-rrrrra-hum.) Looking at a V but making the sound for B just didnt make sense to me. It seemed odd that the teacher didnt explain this, like of course B and V always go together. I thought it was a B/V conspiracy: that everyone was pretending the letter B sounded like V when they dont sound anything remotely alike. You dont form them the same way. Buh takes both lips. Vuh takes the lower lips and the top teeth. Just making the sound vuh seems vulgar, as in va va va voom. We dont know what va va va voom means, but it sounds racy (I cant even show you Googles image results on a Moderate Safe Search). Eight different languages have a B/V swap: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, Bengali, English, and the Russian alphabet goes A, B, V... Even Chinese has the sound be which means vagina (the swear word c--t) in a completely orthogonal way: . If you rotate Vet 90 clockwise and then flip it horizontally, you have a lowercase u (see above right). This means 2, U, and Bet/Vet all signify women. The sounds of u, which include you, t (you in French and Spanish), vous (formal you in French), ooh as in ooh la lasuggest the vocal range of women because, as you can see by the chart above right, the u vowel is a higher pitched sound (highlighted in blue). Women have shorter vocal cords than men, which is 9
17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

Vet

u
U

The number two rotated 90 and flipped horizontally, Vet in the same orientation, and lowercase u side-by-side in order to show their resemblance to one another: all cul de sacs or uteruses.

why they sing soprano and altothe higher registersand men sing tenor and bassthe lower. U sounds, which include double-UWas well, are the province of women. The Egyptians had a helpless little quail chick represent this sound, and Gardiner uses a w as the phoneme for the quail chick. If this all seems too incredible, remember our alphabet started as graffitiwhat does graffiti normally concern itself with? This is why B is second and M is 13th in alphabetical ranking because breasts full of milk were more significant to the originators of the alphabet than mothers. The precursors to our A, B, Cs were scratched on stones in the Sinai desert by men living on the outskirts of society. Miners and soldierswho probably cared more about eating and sex than they did about progeny were the unknown originators of the alphabet; these men carved pictures of things that were important to them, just as the Egyptians had for 1,000 years already at this point. Being in outposts like Serabit el-Khadim, where there was a turquoise mine, and Wadi el-Hol, which was midway along a desert road between Thebes and Abydos, these men were not controlled by the boundaries of civilization, so their depictions were cruder, fewer, and more to the point. They didnt have to use someone elses stinking hieroglyphs to make sense. They could make their own talking pictures. Once the idea of pictoralizing sound was introduced to society, anyone who could make a symbol that had congruence with a recognizable object would succeed in communicating. Breasts, vaginas, uteruses, the number two, and high pitches all bespeak women when you pan back and look at the big picture. The second sound in the alphabet is complicated because thats a lot of info to pack into one character. This is why the second symbol changes shape and sound so often: the form and tone depend upon which aspect of a woman is being mirrored. Sometimes its balcony, sometimes its valley. Sometimes its house, sometimes its bed. Bet the second symbol of both the Phoenician and the Hebrew abajads, is purported to have stood for house, but habitat includes more relevant consonants. Habitat comes from habit which originally meant to have, to hold. If that reminds you of a marriage vow, no surprise. Women were possessions in many early cultures, especially once writing started, because the roots of language are in accounting and commercethe need to keep records. The potential worth of womenas a food and generative sourcewas too valuable to early man not to control. Robert K. Englund of UCLA writes about slave records found from 3350-3,000 BC. These then are the higher-level qualifications of persons in proto-cuneiform accounts, quite possibly chattel slaves, or humans in some form of servitude to Late Uruk households....Why did archaic accountants so exactingly record the ages of children from their first through their third years? This system of dating bears an uncanny resemblance to herding accounts of large cattle and of pigs of later periods.... The age designations of domestic animals employed in those accounts are explicit tools known to any dairy or pig farmer; they track age to know when to wean the young, to judge weight gain, and to prepare sexually mature animals for breeding, or to train oxen for the plough. It is difficult to recognize a comparable need in accounting for young children, aside possibly from the intent of accountants to retain strict control of juveniles as they grew to working age. As slave laborers, after all, they would have represented a substantial chattel asset to ancient households.11 We can speculate why the ages of children would matter. A child from infancy to three years might indicate that there was a lactating or fertile woman associated with said child. Fertile slave women were the source of a future work force. 11 http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlj/2009/cdlj2009_004.html 10

To make ti ti. In Egyptian, ir means to make. The reed brush and the eye stand for ir; the character on the right, the determinative, pictorially determines the meaning; in this case: a milk jug. The half-circle stands for the sound T. One could translate this depiction as to make ti ti or to make ta ta. Egyptologists claim this half-circle shape is a loaf of bread. However, the importance of breasts predates bread, especially in a desert.

sound rotated looks a lot like our capital B. The Egyptians had a variety of B sounds, but it was the T sound that was their feminine ending. As the feminine ending, this character is often the only difference, besides the determinative, between a male and female occupation (such as man/woman, son/daughter, male slave/female slave, etc. See page 12).

A harem is a place where many women and one man have children. Evolutionary biologists tell us that there is wider genetic diversity among women than men.12 No doubt this was because men died off in war and only the powerful procreated. To procreate is to have offspring. Offspring means they were of you, but they sprung off. Of, like have, is a word signifying ownershipav is father in Hebrew, the owner of the family; ov is egg in Latin, the thing to be ownedand here is a good example of where figure can switch to ground in language. Ovary comes from oophor which is egg carrier (oo = egg, phor = ferry). Ova is a common female ending in all Slavic languages. Woman as egg carrier is not a new concept. In the Czech Republic, women not only add the mans name when they get married, but they also must add the ending ova. Only two years ago, in 2008, did women start bucking this trend: one Czech fiancee claimed she didnt mind taking her husbands name, she just didnt want to add ova.13 An Eastern Bloc friend was who Ive known for more than 20 years was unconvinced: Ive heard it means possessive, he argued. I yelled, Of course its possessive! Its the biggest kind of possession. Possession comes in a variety of formsforms that do not always acknowledge female identity because the sex of a possession is often immaterial. For example, in the word milk above, there is no clear association with females, yet we know that only the female mammal produces significant lactation. The two humps signifying the sound of tt, combined with the fact that only females lactate, would cause one to rethink the roots of our alphabet, because this tt

12 http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1000202 13 http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/national_world/stories/2009/06/28/LAT_czech_ names_0627.ART_ART_06-28-09_A14_IUEAJ65.html 11

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

The loaf shape (highlighted in blue above) which codes for the T sound is shown only on the right and, notably, not on the left. The sole difference between left and right columns, besides the determinativewhich is a picture of what the noun actually looks like and is to the right of the wordis this T sound, repreForeign countries are feminine (feminine concepts highlighted in blue) be- sented as a half-circle cause the Egyptians would have wanted to dominate them (if this isnt clear, the or loaf shape. Note word vile should make it so). Things or property are feminine because you own that even a sow gets a loaf. Odd. Or is it a them, which was common for these times. Masculine gender (masculine concepts highlighted in red) is used for something or anything. Tree is feminine teat? A goddess gets two loaves because because it provides sustenance (see page 16). You get fruit and wood from a tree. The T sound seems to be inherent in the concept of bounty. The last item, she provides bounty to mankind, as does a number 4, seems obvious because the only bellies those in power cared about hereditary princess. were feminine ones. Feminine bellies could be forced to replicate.
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Bread or breast? Sir Alan Sir Alan Gardiners Egyptian Gardiner, in his 1927 Egyptian Grammar, the Bible of the hieroglyphs, Grammar, calls this T sound was written in 1927, and it is still consida loaf, but he does not call it ered the definitive reference on Egyptian bread. Loaf connotes a shape, not an entity. By analyzing the writing. Gardiner was meticulous, but words in which this character is the character he refers to as loaf (see above) is another euphefound, it would appear this half mism. The word loaf connotes a shape, not an entity. Imagine circle has more to do with the his books reception in 1927 if he had claimed this shape was a image of female sustenance breast. This half-circle is very similar to our D letterform, just than it does with bakers. rotated 90 counterclockwise. The sounds of D and T are the same, except for the humming of the larynx.14 Words like udder and utter demonstrate this: so close sonorally that only superb enunciation distinguishes them, but pictorially the D signifies teat in udder (its shape can hold milk) and the T signifies tongue in utter (its shape sticks out). The relationship between milk and tongue seems pretty clear, and here is another example of figure/ground in language: lips to breasts, milk to tongue. Often what is the conceptual 6 in one language is a 9 in the other. One generation takes the previous generations language and flips it to be novel. In my generation wicked was good, goody two shoes was bad, bad was cool, and cool was hot. We havent changed that much over timehumans still want to be important, and they do so with passwords and special titles and secret handshakesshibboleths that cause each generation to achieve a higher degree of density and complexity. Language works by a combinatorial system,15 writes Pinker. Though people modify their language every generation, the extent of these changes is slight...Because of this overall conservatism, some patterns of vocabulary, sound, and grammar survive for millennia. They serve as the fossilized tracks of mass migrations in the remote past, clues to how human beings spread out over the earth.16 Migration is not the only pattern to be unearthed by the trail of language because the alphabet has embedded within it the secret history of the people who developed itthemes which coalesced and ultimately became the ranking that goes from A to Z. Female mammals come in at #2. The word Beta(as in Alpha, beta, gamma, the first three letters of the Greek alphabet; similar to Hebrews aleph, beth, gimel) signifies second best, as you can see by the consistency of the alphabetical order: alpha/aleph being first and some version of beta/bet/beth being second. The alpha male is numero uno. Beta which also means unfinished, has both a B and a T consonant. The T sound, being the Egyptians feminine ending, would seem to be their #2 concept as well. On page one I proposed that our B shape stood for breasts, and now Im proposing that the Egyptians T sound also stood for breasts, and these are not inconsistent because breasts were so important to early man that T is not the only sound, and B is not the only shape that ended up signifying mammary glands. Our uppercase D looks like the Egyptians T sound, our uppercase B looks like the double-T sound, and the word titty is not foreign to our ears either. Ir meant to make in Ancient Egyptian. To make titty sounds a lot like milk to me. Considering that nefer meant beautiful in ancient Egyptian, this perspective gives a new

12

14 15 16

The Language Instinct, Pinker, page 167 The Language Instinct, page 175 The Language Instinct, page 248

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A figurehead is a carved wooden decoration, often female or bestial, found at the prow of ships largely made between the 16th and 19th century. (Wikipedia.) The Egyptian word depicted above shows both beast and breasts.

The Hathor barque has the Egyptian cowwoman goddess fronting the boat like a bow maiden or bow sprite. Karnak, Egypt, 18th Dynasty, around 1,400 BC. www.britishmuseum.org

http://2.bp.blogspot.com

Two loaves of bread would not seem to have much to do with the front of ships, but clearly two breasts do, as you can see from the bounty above. Photos far left and right from

The root of our word idiot? In Greek, idiotes meant private person. The purple highlighted fallopiantube symbol means bicornuate of heifer and seems to indicate the same structure in women. (Egyptian Grammar, page 556.)

meaning to the name Nefertiti. T and A are two letters that we recognize as parts of female anatomy; the musical A Chorus Line has a song devoted to tits and ass. Just as prostitution is the oldest profession, tits and teats (see the word eat in there?) are the oldest words. And these base sounds are universal. No surprise that the double T sound also meant trample down in the Egyptian hieroglyphs17 (similarly mastos is breast in Greek and masticate means chewmore figure/ ground relationships). Sexual frenzy plus appeasing the gods would manifest itself in ritualistic taking of captives and sadistic orgies. The spoils of war. No wonder women front the boats of conquest. They were one of things to be plundered. Slave-concubines figure into the dynasties of the Egyptians up through the 1890s in Egypt.18 Hathor, the partial cow-partial woman Egyptian goddess, seen on the front of this boat (above) from 1,400 B.C., is the precursor to the bow maiden, the female figurehead found on the front of ships between 16th and 19th centuries. Breasts precede women as they enter the room. They are the first thing men look at typically and historically. Breasts preceding ships is consistent with vehicles being named after women, ostensibly because you ride them. (Ma, besides meaning woman and scold, also means horse in Chinese, a beast of burden: a mare.) This female figurehead is similar to the word maidenhead which is a term for hymenfunny that the hymen would be considered the head of a maidenand not her actual headbut women, cows, and sheep have been all viewed as animals to be domesticated, and their intellect was never something to be considered. The hieroglyphic definitions above are from Gardiner. They demonstrate that the Egyptians were not politically correct. Note how close these words are to our word idiot. The Greeks 17 Egyptian Grammar, Gardiner, page 627. 18 Harem years: the memoirs of an Egyptian feminist (1879-1924) / by Huda Shaarawi ; translated, edited and introduced by Margot Badran, 1986.
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defined idiotes (Strong #2399) as a peculiar or private person, which is what someone would be who is sequestered and uneducated. In a culture where women are sheltered, the average man might rarely see oneand then, only a relativeso the enclosure where women lived would stand in for them, a kind of synecdoche where a whole stands in for a part, or, as in this case, the house stands in for the woman. No wonder linguists think B stood for house because women and houses were synonymous. Uppercase H and B share horizontal symmetry, a kind of visual repetition. According to From Sign to Signing: Iconicity in language and literature 3, Repetition [is] a very common device in language, which is often used in a concrete iconic way. Indeed it is likely that all conventional repetitive patterns in language were originally iconic....It is well-known that reduplication is a common feature in Malay (for instance the plural is formed by repeating the stem), as it is in many languages derived from a pidgin.19 Pidgin, a proto-language created by the mixture of speakers of different languages, would have been a common occurrence in the beginning of all speech. Because writing started as pictures, a simple way to show two of That double-T sound doesnt just stand for milk. Here the loaf shape is used to define something would be to draw it twice. The twosimilarity, because what is more similar than a humped symbol of the Egyptians which stood for womans breast and its companion? the double T sound is an example of such repetition. How better able to impart the sense of something repeating than to look toward natureand the twins of sustenanceas the easy illustration? This was the way the Egyptians showed succor, as well as female, as well as resemblance and equality (one breast looks like the other, and they always come together), and all things that breasts could be used to demonstrate, such as the rope on the front of a ship, which has little to do with bread, but a whole lot to do with mammaries, as the bow maiden can attest. 19 Wolfgang G. Mller, Olga Fischer, FriedrichSchillerUniversitt Jena 15
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 A commodity as important as milk doesnt just show up in only one form in language. A personage as important as femalethe container milk comes indoesnt just show up as one depiction either. Once that ubiquitous symbol of milk became the recognized sign of sustenance, it soon became a sign of similarity That which is an equivalency. This hieroglyph shows two items and equivalency: a metaphor Not is represented by the which everyone knows are equal: for these concepts. It turns out arms. The tablet stands for breasts. The wavy line is water and writing, an abstraction that is that metaphor is more than represents the N sound. Water deless concrete than water. a linguistic conceit. George picts a thing that exists, the breasts Lakoff, a student of Chomshow likeness. skys who founded Cognitive Linguistics, writes: Our ordinary conceptual system...is fundamentally metaphorical in nature....But [it] is not something we are normally aware of.20 It is the use of metaphor that allows us to have abstract thought, and appears to have separated the Neanderthals, who did not innovate for thousands of years, to the Homo sapiens, who did. Lakoff uses the examples of personification: We need some new blood in the organization, where blood stands in for people, and There are a lot of good heads in the university, where heads stands in for intelligent individuals. Lakoff calls this metonymy whereas traditional rhetoricians have called [this] synecdoche.....In the case of the metonymy... there are many parts that can stand for the whole. Which part we pick out determines which aspect of the whole we are focusing on.21 In the case of women and the alphabet, the B shape focuses on breasts and milk, the V shape focuses on the vagina and reproduction. Both of these shapes and sounds refer to the whole of women. Egyptians used our D shape and T sound to refer to sustenance. The Egyptians used two such D shapes to refer not only to milk, but also to similarity. One womans breast looks a lot like the other, and this demonstrates likeness. Two loaves of bread do not have inherent similarity. Two breasts do. Metaphor is the basis of our alphabet. The Egyptians used a bird to represent their letter A. Phoenicians used an ox. The ox was a tool to plow the fields. The sound that came to represent the third sound of the alphabetGwas a food pot in Egyptian, but in Phoenician, it was the tool that got the food: the throwing stick. Like a boomerang, the throwing stick knocked animals down. This stick also eventually turned into our L, the shepherds crook that made animals, once they were down, stand back up. Theres the beginning of our alphabet: plows, boomerangs, crooks...and women. Why the alphabet is breasts, vaginas, and tools, I told my husband after researching this, and he said, Arent they all just tools? 20 21 Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, 1980, 2003, page 3 ibid, page 36 16

Those toolsor whatever you want to call themstill Bakery, Old Kingdom, Tomb of Ti, Saqqara. Illustration from Oriental Institute matter to us today because they were the means to survival. of the University of Chicago website. Note What drove early man appears to be consistent across all the conical shape of what appear to be fresh cultures. We exist because primates figured out strategies that loaves, lower right, highlighted in yellow. enabled them to further the species. One of these strategies was procuring milk, something only females have, which was the feminine ending. Baking bread wasnt even could explain why this T character specifically a womans job in ancient Egypt. According to Mistress of House, Mistress of Heaven, Women in Ancient Egypt, only one industrial craft...seems to have been exclusively [womens], at least through the end of the Middle Kingdom. This is the manufacture of linen textiles....[Women] also bake bread, an activity they sometimes share with men....these people were usually paid in measures of grain; their town sites have yielded numerous bread molds. Numerous bread molds, yet only the D-shaped hieroglyph is thought to resemble bread. Seems suspicious. The determinative for bread (yellow in the hieroglyph below) appears to be cone shaped, as were many of the Egyptian bread molds. If there was a consistent shape for bread, it would have been conical, not a half-circle. This bread determinative matches the shape that would have come out of the Old Kingdom bread mold (see lower left). Tata, titi: Food is food, no matter what form it takes, breast or bread. SusteThe cone-shaped bread highlighted in nance cannot the hieroglyph above, be underwhich appears to be estimated, the determinative, but one matches the shape form clearly of the Old Kingdom bread mold to the left. predated the
Conical Old Kingdom bread mold, from Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago website.

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17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

other. According to Marilyn Yalom of Stanford University in her book History of the Breast, women have long been viewed as sustenance. With their breasts represented like udders or fruits on a tree, women have traditionally been conflated with the animal and plant kingdoms and isolated from the thinking or spiritual realm reserved for men. Because women have breasts and the potential to provide milk for their young, females have been seen as closer to Nature than their male counterpartsindeed as the very personification Isis as a lactating tree. of Natureand assigned major responsibility Thutmose IV is nursed by the goddess Isis posing as for all the food that humans ingest on a daily Mistress of the Sycamore. basis.22 (Queens of Egypt.) On this page are two depictions of Isis (note the repeated syllable in the goddess name: isa form of to be.) The one on the right is human Isis nursing Horus. This pose is considered by many to be the prototype for Mary nursIsis nursing Horus, late peing Jesus. Because of her fierce devotion to and protection of riod. Considered the prototype her son, Isis came to be regarded in Late Dynastic Egypt as the for the Christian image of the paradigm of the devoted mother...often invoked for the protecnursing Madonna, Isis was the tion of children....From an early period, Isiss suckling of Horus symbol of the nurturing mother. symbolized her pivotal role in the transmission of divine kingship. Every Egyptian king had theoEach new king who succeeded to the throne was considered to be retically been nursed by Isis the living Horus, the incarnation of the son of Isis and Osiris. Isis because she bequeathed divinity. This gave them the right was thus the symbolic mother of each king and one of his links to to rule. (History of the Breast, the divine world.23 page 11.) Above left is a depiction of Isis, as a sycamore tree, nursing Thutmose IV, from the 18th dynasty. The tree lifts its breast in a gesture common to the time, demonstrating the willingness to nourish. In the lands that have become present-day Israel, almost all the clay idols from the biblical period are females, and many of them lift up their breasts for emphasis. This is particularly true of the pillar figures from the eight to the sixth centuries B.C.E. known as Astarte figurines, after the Phoenician goddess of love and fertility. This dea nutrix (nourishing deity) has been described as a kind of tree with 22 23 History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom, page 16 Mistress of House, Mistress of Heaven, page 127 18

breasts.24 Breasts separated from the body was not an oddity to early man. At certain ancient sites, breast fetishes have been found isolated from the rest of a female body. Outside the French cave sanctuary at Le Colombel, Pech Merle, for example, a stalactite from around 15,000 B.C.E., resembling a female breast down to the nipple, was circled with dots of red ocher.25 Almost ten thousand years later, at atal Hyk, in south-central Turkey, rows of clay breasts were plastered onto the walls of a holy shrine, with Saint Agatha offering her breasts, (which look a lot animal teeth, tusks, and beaks character) as depicted inserted where the nipples should like the Egyptians in the 17th century by Francisco de Zurbarn. A be.26 History of the Breast, page 35. Above right you can see Saint Agatha as depicted in the 17th century by Francisco de Zurbarn, her detached breasts looking similar to the Egyptians double-T character. Why would it surprise us that breasts would fascinate early man when they clearly fascinate the present day populace? Bosoms are everywhere: on billboards, magazines, and computer screens. And we have been bred to desire it. Bread and breast both have etymological roots in similar ideas: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says bread may come from piece, bit and breast from buds or sprouts. Bit and bud sound similar and share smallness of size. They are also a piece of the whole. A piece is a term that women are often called disparagingly (also bit-ch), and this word is significant in that a piece Hathor, one attractive can only ever be part of something else. The disassociation of women cow-woman. Ptolemaic with their external organs is in keeping with early mans (and frankly, Era (circa 300 B.C.). Both Hathor and Isis sport the some current mens) ability to compartmentalize the aspects of nature horns and the solar disk with which early man was conflicted. Women had enormous power in of divinity, accoutrements their ability to nurture, but if breasts were separated from women, then which signify their ability to bequeath kingship. Mis- any entity with breasts would also have that nurturing power, even tress of House, Mistress of men. Even a tree. Like prehistoric Mr. Potatoheads, Egyptian gods had
Heaven, page 123.

24 History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom, pp. 10-11 25 Buffie Johnson, Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals, p. 44. (History of the Breast). 26 James Mellaart, atal Hyk, figs. 25-28; Adele Getty, Goddess: Mother of Living Nature, pp. 11-12 (History of the Breast). 19
17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

both animal and human characteristics that were essentially stuck on, as you can see with the Sphinx, which had a lion body, wings, human head and often a female bust. Hathor, the bovine goddess, was depicted as a mixture of cow and human parts (which always included mammaries). Confusion about the role of genetics, and the lack of prenatal care (which no doubt engendered fetal abnormalities) could have increased the idea that humans and animals could create offspring. A chimera, which is a creature comprised of a mixture of animals, was a tangible way to show that attributes, such as horns or breasts, was the province of the gods wills. Hapis with breasts. The male Nile god The bottom line: evwas often depicted as a pair of twins with mammaries (indicated with arrows) eryone wanted breasts. Here See-through feet and two and large stomachs which symbolized left hands. Egyptian artists are the twin HapisHapi is the inundation of the Nile. Flooding was often strove for concept over the Nile God usually dedesired for the fertile soil the waters left accuracy because documenpicted as a pairboth sport behind. Photo credit: http://farm1.static.flickr. tation was less concerned com/99/312037292_214f66a209_o.jpg at least one female mammary about art and more focused and a large stomach (see on propaganda. Pictures: The Art of Ancient Egypt, above left). The female breasts on the chest of the male river god page 31 Hapi symbolize his ability to overflow the banks of the Nile with the water needed for crops.27 Easy Egyptian propagandaif you wanted to show how well you provided for peoplewas to chisel breasts on the latest carving, whether or not anyone had ever seen functioning mammae on a man, or even a cow nursing a human. The message was paramount and of more importance than realism. Breasts on male twins was the best of all possible worlds, even if it wasnt possible. This apparent disinterest in accuracy can be seen on illustrations of ancient Egyptian feet, which have arches drawn so high on the outside of the foot that objects behind are visible, an impossibility in real life. The Art of Ancient Egypt points out that another common flaw is in the rendering of hands. Egyptians often depict two left hands on one figure. If you keep in mind that what you see are not the hands as they would appear in life, but symbols of hands, those Egyptian artists had not made mistakestheyd merely chosen to represent them that way.28 One could say the same for the hieroglyphs. The Egyptian scribes knew breasts only came on women, but it was the concept of nourishment they were trying to 27 28 History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom, page 13. The Art of Ancient Egypt, David Sandison, 1997, page 31. 20

impart. This could be why the half-circle T sound has no nipple. Nipples were viewed as ornamentation. Many Egyptian statues have breasts on women with no visible nipples, or they have flowers where the areola would be. In the case of the hieroglyphs, the symbol, being the feminine ending, was so ubiquitous, that the nipple may have cluttered the picture (plus have been slower to draw) because sustenance was the message, not sexuality. Arabic, which is closer to Egyptian than English, has, as its second character: , which codes for the B sound and is suggestive of a breast from an aerial view. In Hieroglyphics, the Writings of Ancient The breast as flower. A detail of MeritaEgypt, Maria Carmelo Betr, an Egyptologist from muns breast from a partial statue found ] represents a common Italy, writes This sign [ near Ramesseum. Eighteenth dynasty, (c. 1539-1292 BC). Chronicle of the Queens of loaf of semicircular form, samples of which have Egypti, Joyce Tyldeseley, page 157. been found in Tutankhamens tomb (Eighteenth Dynasty). Loaves could come in many shapes, however. The offering scenes show them as oval, triangular, and even in animal or human shapes for special religious or popular festivals.29 Perhaps they even made loaves in the shape of breasts. Eighteenth Dynasty was around 1,300 B.C. The hieroglyphics had been used for more than 1,500 years at that point. The shape of bread from Tutankhamens tomb does not seem relevant to writing created more than a millennium before the bread was baked. It doesnt surprise me that Egyptologists see this shape as bread rather than as a breast, because our culture is still unable to recognize that we are animals driven by genes, and our genes dictate that we, on the whole, must procreate. This loaf shape ultimately represents a sex organ, one that delivers manna from heaven. Considering that the average life expectancy for a women was probably in the mid- to low twenties and for men it was at least twenty-five years,30 Egyptians were teenagers with children. The 63 body parts from the Gardiner list, an extreme (Reliable birth control didnt happen until the 1960s.) No wonder example of synedoche. the hieroglyphs include 63 dissociated body parts (see below). The

29 30

Hieroglyphics, the Writings of Ancient Egypt , page 185 The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, Ian Shaw, page 435. 21
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17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009

The hieroglyph for beget includes the quail chick, the two loaves of whatever they are, and the ejaculating penis, which is the determinative, apparently, because it doesnt contribute a sound. Chick (egg?) + milk + sperm = new entity. Like a recipe for life, this definition helps us understand early man. The cute, little quail chick provides the w soundthink ooh or uh, like the beginning of quail. The double-T is our old pal B on its side. And theres no vagina in sight. That double-T sound was enough to suggest female. Egyptians liked symmetry, so the double-T could also represent testes, which is the word tes twice, as the two balls under the penis attest. Could they have equated lactation with ejaculation and thought that glandular white stuff was teaming with homunculi? This word wtt has the same vowel-consonant format as egg. Could the vowel in both be the proverbial soul (our emotions tend to be vocalized in vowels) and the consonants represent the genetic material? Could, in fact, the e in our word egg be the window to the soul and the two gs be the gametes?

da, and the Egyptians recognized the ejaculating penis but not the orifice needed in order to create life. Weve been bad-mouthing women for a long time. The cultures where the alphabet arose are still trying to control women and make them produce babies. If we dont evolve to recognize our animalistic nature, we are destined to over-populate the world simply because we are still enamored with human replication.

Egyptians liked to compartmentalize. Chimeric individuals and interchangeable parts were natural for them because they were just figuring out genetics. Above you can see a detachable penis in the hieroglyph for begeta Biblical word that means producing children, specifically by the father. This hieroglyph includes a helpless quail chick, an ejaculating phallus, and TWO LOAVES OF BREAD. Of course, theres no vagina in sight, so the Egyptians were less clear on the role of the uterus. Aristotle thought women a mere vesselkind of like the Czechs, but why single out any nationality for misguided logic? This woman is a tool concept is rooted in our metaphors, our thinking, and our language. Based on this depiction of beget and Gardiners interpretation of the T sound, womens participation in childbirth would appear to consist of bakinga bun in the oven. Maybe thats all the truth the world could handle in 1927, but its the 21st century now. Lets get real. It doesnt take two loaves of bread to have children. Those double humps are female breasts and this perfect half-circle can be seen in both our uppercase B and D. There are many words for woman that start with D: damsel, duchess, doll, Donna (which means lady in Italian), Notre Dame (our lady in French), even douche. According to Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue, dames used to be a swear word in 1949.31 Damen is woman in German; dam is blood in Hebrew. Considering that most women pre-2000s menstruated monthly unless they were pregnant, blood would be associated with the female sex. There are cultures right now that still sequester menstruating women or deny them entrance to certain buildings. Even a woman who has the potential to menstruate is a threat. My 16-year-old daughter walked down the street the other day and a guy yelled out of the car, You bitch. Why do some men hate women for just walking alone on a street? Because our alphabet reinforces this compartmentalization of humans. Reducing someone to a body part implicitly denies that he or she is a person.32 We dont realize that when we write the letter B, it still has that association of human body parts. Its easier to yell You bitch at a woman when one sees body parts as opposed to a whole human being. Thats why recognizing womens role in language is important. This role may be visible in subtle ways. If milk sustained us, why is milking an issue bad? Why is seminal the beginning and not ovumal? Why is disseminating information so great? Because language is propagan31 32 Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson, page 222. The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, page 120

"Seed" in Sumerian. Do you think the Sumerians understood replication?

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17 January 2014 3:26 PM Jennifer Ball, June 2009