The house picture gave us B, the door, D, and the window, E. “He” (hay) meant to look, to see, or window, and one writer asserts our familiar street cry “hey, there” can be traced to these ancient times. One side bar of the window was lost early. The Greeks at first used this sound for the long “e” (epsilon) but afterwards employed the character H or “eta” for the long sound. The Romans at first made no change except to call it “eh.” This is the letter that occurs so frequently in English words, and many no doubt recall the interesting use that Poe makes of this fact in his story “The Gold Bug.” F Our letter order does not agree with that of the Phoenicians or the early Greeks. Our sixth letter, F, is missing in classical Greek, but it is found in earlier writings. It comes from a Phoenician representation of a hook or nail (?) “vau.” The Hebrew form resembles the latter object. The nail was important in shipbuilding, a common industry of the early traders. When the Greeks used this letter they called it “digamma” (double gamma) and its form represented one “gamma” (Greek c) superimposed over the other. The Romans called it F (ef) and during the reign of Emperor Claudius the consonant V was represented by the F inverted. This was done because the Latin alphabet had but one character to represent U and V and OCTAVIA became OCTAℲIA. H Two fence posts and three horizontal boards gave us our eighth letter, H. The fence was called “cheth” (haith). The Greeks omitted the upper and lower boards thus making it like our H, and called it “eta” (ata). The Romans gave it a soft sound H (hah) just as we do today. I-J The parts of the human body also played an important part in giving form to the letters of the alphabet. The early peoples recognized the value of the hand and the head and these members gave rise to the letters I and K, and Q and R respectively. The hand in profile bent at the knuckles and wrist gives us the character “yod” (the hand) as used by the Phoenicians. The Greeks, who always liked to have their words end in vowels, added “a” and called it “Iota” (e-oˊta). When the Romans received it, it was simply a vertical stroke, I (ee) which represented the same long “e” sound as it did with the Greeks, but later they used it both as a consonant and vowel, differentiating the consonant by making the letter I longer, J; but they did not give a distinct letter form for the capital J until the sixteenth century. The small j came into being nearly a century later. The dot over the i was first introduced in a thirteenth century manuscript. K