Consonants

One of the beauties of history and reading is that as you progress a little in life, pennies begin to drop and you become more enriched with what we call knowledge.

I was reading about the great poems of Homer, his "Iliad" about war and his equally great discourse on  journeying and emotion the Odyssey. The question of communication brought us to the Phoenicians and their need to simplify their trading records with the creation of an alphabet, to depict what had previously been a pictorial record. Only 22 characters, vowels, to depict things and consonants to embellish the way to describe the thing.

These consonants were derived from the way we use our tongue and lips to combine certain letters into a sound which then extends the 22 letters into a range of sounds that can be recognisable by others as language, which can then be written down and gathered as a record, initially as a matter of trade but then as a record of thoughts and discovery onto which subsequent thoughts and discoveries bring us to this day with what we call knowledge.

Every European language is built in this way, only the Asian languages differ, and although language developed its own variations to reflect local culture, the basic way of expressing the letters into sounds remains common across all languages. 

Perhaps the greatest invention ever made, from a little known nation of traders with a specific need, launched, through the Greeks, what we now call civilisation.
If you were blessed with a university education you gathered this knowledge formally. You remembered it as a means of expressing what you had learnt by way of examination which then certified yourself for work. If like me you never had the benefit of higher education my knowledge comes 'piece meal' and as I try to fit together the mosaic of facts and fiction that make up my life these terms which others have consumed from their nannies knee, come to me as I sit with time on my hand in the closing chapter of my life. Imagine the pleasure of tying together the ancient and modern, the Hittites with modern Turkey,

The Syrian who we see through the prism of Aleppo and exodus in fact comes from a proud civilisation which existed when we were painted  in woad.

Those consonants are at work the moment we open a book. They are the 'enablers' of the mind to think wider and further than the propaganda of our immediate environment.