The pictographic source for the letter B is a house. The Indo-European root for the word ‘house’ means ‘to cover or to hide’. Certainly, one of the functions of the house to this day in many traditional societies is to hide women and girls from the eyes of the outside world. The pictograph itself is much like a simple diagram of a walled space with a single opening, a door or a window. One can still glimpse a suggestion of this today in the letter B: turned on its flat edge, it resembles a rounded hut of two rooms.
City life, agriculture, written language – how strange that they all started roughly in the same period. As if language is written into the walls, the dwelling places, the ordered streets and squares. The city and the tilled field become, literally, a kind of text. This world speaks in a different way than it spoke to the nomad, whose ear was tuned to the cry of the jackal, the rumble of coming weather, the singsong of the headman’s tales. Written language offers its user a certain kind of power and control, but something too is lost.
And yet, an echo of the oral tradition remains. These letters, these oxen and houses, have their sounds. They also speak. The letter A is a vowel – the mouth is open when the letter is voiced. The letter B is softly spat from closed lips. Open fields, closed houses.