Gee - its a Camel

A particularly fascinating question to ask of almost any thing you may find is this: "How did it come to be?" Everything has a history and leaves a trail. We take many everyday objects completely for granted - like staples, paperclips and string - but they all come from somewhere. Not only do the objects come from somewhere, but the idea behind the object and the know-how to turn that idea into an object comes from somewhere. The world did not wake up one morning to find that paper clips had been created, as though handed down by the gods of Mount Olympus. However that is another story.


Something we take even more for granted are the letters of the alphabet. Although there are many different systems of lettering used by different languages and different peoples (and languages which do not use individual letters at all) I will be discussing the Western (Roman) alphabet. In fact I will be mainly discussing just one letter: 'C'. In the letter 'C' you will find some the of steps on the trail which leads from its origins to the present. The important thing to remember is that these apparently random signs we use to write words have a human history - this is a story of people as much as symbols.

Many centuries ago, long before the Romans held power in the Mediterranean, a people from the East held sway over a huge and powerful commercial empire stretching from the shores of present day Lebanon to Southern Spain. These people, the Phoenicians, established a great city in North Africa called Carthage, a city comprehensively destroyed by the Romans, and a mighty port in Southern Spain which still exists to this day, Cadiz. This city has a strong claim to be the oldest continuously used city in the Western World.

Apart from an apparent liking for calling their cities names beginning with 'C', the Phoenicians have another fascinating connection with that letter (and with its cousin, the letter 'G').

In both Phoenician and Hebrew the word for a Camel is 'gamal' (or 'gamel'). So people have been calling a desert tolerant animal with a hump pretty much the same thing for a long, long time. In Phoenican the symbol for the sound at the start of that word (a sound similar to something between an English 'C' and 'G') was - yes you guessed it - a simplified picture of a camel. Incidentally, in Hebrew the third letter of the alphabet is a 'G' sound and is still called 'gimel'.

So whenever you write a lower case 'g' remember the Phoenicians who called their beasts of burden 'gamel', and used its picture to name a letter - rather as we would say 'Bravo Tango Foxtrot' if we wanted to be absolutely clear about the letters BTF. You are sharing a sound and a thought with a person from the Middle East thousands of years ago.