Acrophony
In an acrophonic alphabet the initial (Greek:
acro) sound (
phonos) of a word gives the name to the whole.
Acrophony gives each
letter in an
alphabet the name of an object whose name begins with the relevant letter. This would be true in English if, for example, the letter
A was called the letter Axe or Aardvark.
The
canonical acrophony is an
ideographic or
pictographic writing system, where the letter's name and
glyph both represent the same thing or concept - if e.g. the letter
A in English, named "axe", was in the form of an
axe.
The paradigm for acrophonic alphabets is the Late
Bronze Age Proto-Canaanite alphabet in which the letter A, representing the sound /a/, is a
pictogram representing an
ox, and is called "ox" -
ʾalp. The
Latin alphabet is descended from the Proto-Canaanite, and you can still see the stylized head of an ox if you turn the letter A upside-down: ∀. 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 āleph-b"th we have 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.
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,
Buki,
Vedi,
Glagol,
Dobro,
Est. Naming the letters in order, one recites a poem, a
mnemonic which helps students and scholars learn the alphabet.
Rudyard Kipling gives a fictional description of the process in one of his
Just So Stories, "How the Alphabet was Made."
*
How the Alphabet was Made Kipling's story, online
