FOL University, the Friends of the Library’s scholarly lecture series, returns with Dr. John H. McWhorter speaking on “The History and Oddities of our Alphabet” on Sunday, Nov. 6 at 1:30 pm

McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University and is a best-selling author who writes weekly for The New York Times opinion pages and hosts the popular language podcast Lexicon Valley.

McWhorter’s talk will explain how the alphabet is a highly counterintuitive way of inscribing language that has never occurred to any humans originally.

Rather, our alphabet developed from writing as pictures, as people gradually figured out that you could use the first sound of a picture-word as a symbol for that sound in all words.

He explained further: “This talk will describe highlights of how the first alphabet became ours. It will illuminate, for example, why we use C and K for the same sound and then C and S for the same sound.

We will see how Z began looking like a capital I and almost got lost from the rotation completely, what the emergence of the letter F had to do with that of the letter W, and other oddities that will show the role that sheer serendipity has played in how we got our ABCs.”

McWhorter is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford.

He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, and Woke Racism.

This program will be presented in person and on Zoom. Register at www.pwpl.org/events