Language – Page 3

Mayday, May Day, May Day

Mayday’s roots are in French, while May Day’s roots go back to pagan spring celebrations.

The distress call “mayday” was invented in 1921 at the Croydon airport in London. Much of the traffic to Croydon airport at the time was from France and so “mayday” was chosen because it sounded like the French “m’aider” (“help me”).

Mayday the distress call has nothing to do with May Day, the May 1st pagan spring holiday celebrated in various fashions since the Ancient Romans. Eventually, in an attempt to stop paganism, May 1st was appropriated by the Catholic Church and dedicated to Mary.

In the early 20th century May Day also became the International Workers’ Day, celebrating labor & workers around the world (except in the United States, where it’s called Labor Day and celebrated the first Monday in September).

Added info: In New York City, May Day was also Moving Day. From colonial times until 1945, May 1st was the day all leases would expire which (for the leases not renewed) resulted in thousands of people moving at the same time causing pandemonium in the streets. It was eventually ended with the creation of rent-control and the post-war housing shortage.

A : turning the Ox upside down

The letter we know today as “A” has its roots in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics where it was originally the pictogram of an ox head.

From Oxen to Alpha

The letter “A” we use today is descendant from the Greek letter Alpha. The first letter of the Greek alphabet, Alpha is actually the evolutionary result of other letter forms from other alphabets most notably the Phoenician letter / word Aleph meaning “ox.” Aleph looks like a sideways “A” pointing to the left which not-so-accidentally resembles a sideways ox head. But the history of the letter A goes back even further. The Phoenicians created Aleph as a simpler form of the even older Egyptian letter / sign of an ox head. The Egyptian pictogram for an ox is essentially an upside down “A”.

Egyptian roots

History of the Alphabet by Art of the Problem is a great video that explores the history and changes of language & writing from the more conceptual pictograms to the sound signs we use today. The invention of papyrus as a writing material gave the Egyptians a quicker way to record information than carving into stone. As papyrus became increasingly popular the Egyptians created what was essentially a hieroglyphics shorthand … hieroglyphics-lite if you will. This system eventually became the hieratic system of writing. It was a faster writing system designed to take advantage of this new writing technology they had created.

Hieratic became easier to remember than hieroglyphics because it started to use less pictograms / word signs and instead used more sound signs, like our letters do today. With word signs you had to remember thousands of symbols to communicate. With sound signs you could combine symbols to create words. Hieratics eventually gave way to demotic, an even faster way for Egyptians to write. Over time the demotic sign for an ox became the basis for the Phoenecian aleph sign, which became alpha, which became our letter A.

So the letter A started as the image of an ox head in Egypt and as time passed it worked its way around the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean up into Greece where it got turned upside-down into the letter Alpha and eventually our letter A.