Acrophony

Acrophony (/əˈkrɒfəni/; Greek: ἄκρος akros uppermost + φωνή phone 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: άλφα (alpha), βήτα (beta), γάμμα (gamma), δέλτα (delta).

The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the

[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.^{[citation needed}

]

The

Glagolitic and early Cyrillic alphabets, although not consisting of ideograms, also have letters named acrophonically. The letters representing /a, b, v, g, d, e/ are named Az, Buky, Vedi, Glagol, Dobro, Est. Naming the letters in order, one recites a poem, a mnemonic which helps students and scholars learn the alphabet: Az buky vedi, glagol’ dobro est’ means "I know letters, [the] word is good" in Old Church Slavonic

.

In

rune alphabets used by the Germanic peoples were also named acrophonically; for example, the first three letters, which represented the sounds /f, u, þ/, were named fé, ur, þurs in Norse (wealth, slag/rain, giant) and feoh, ur, þorn in Old English (wealth, ox, thorn). Both sets of names probably stemmed from Proto-Germanic *fehu, *uruz, *thurisaz

.

The

Thai alphabet

is learned acrophonically, each letter being represented pictorially in school-books (chicken, egg, buffalo, snake, bell, etc.).

Rudyard Kipling gives a fictional description of the process in one of his Just So Stories, "How the Alphabet was Made".^[1]

Modern

NATO Phonetic Alphabet

, which begins with Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...) in which the letters of the English alphabet are arbitrarily assigned words and names in an acrophonic manner to avoid misunderstanding.

Most notes of the

solfege scale – namely re, mi, fa, sol, and la – derive their names from the first syllable of the lines of Ut queant laxis, a Latin

hymn.

References

^ Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling

[1] Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling

[1]

See also

References