Axons to the Ox House, what does that even mean?

I know that Axons to the Ox House probably seems like a strange title for a blog, I bet you're wondering what on earth it has to do with speech-language pathology or bilingualism? Well, for starters I'll admit that I chose the name because a) it wasn't already taken and b) I thought it sounded catchy and memorable. However, there is a deeper meaning behind the name that some of you may have already picked up on. As most already know, an axon is the prolonged part of a neuron that typically carries an electrical impulse. Cool. So that portion of the name covers my interest in neuroscience, but what about Ox House? Well, that comes from my recent discovery of the origins of our alphabet by means of a highly recommendable lecture series titled Writing and Civilization from the Great Courses on Audible. As I recently learned, alpha and beta and the corresponding symbols A and B were at one point Phoenician pictographs representing an ox and a house. In the original Phoenician script these symbols represented the first sound in the Phoenician words for ox and house respectively. In ancient Phoenician, aleph, meaning ox, actually started with a glottal stop. However, when the Greeks (who did not count with glottal stop in their phonemic inventory) adopted and adapted the Phoenician writing system, they assigned it the value of the first sound they heard and called it alpha. Of course, the symbols A and B have undergone many transformations over the years and are no longer recognizable as an ox and a house. Though, if you turn the A upside down you can see how it could easily have been an ox head with the two legs of the A being the horns of the ox. As for B, I'm not quite sure how it looks like a house, but I trust the scholars who have spent their careers researching the pictographic genealogy of B. All of this, however, is just really cool trivia.

I started this blog as a means to practice writing and externalize my thoughts about the many things that interest me in my emergent career as a speech-language pathologist and researcher. I tried to title my blog something witty that would capture the scope of everything that fascinates me. I truly stand amazed at the complexity of our nervous system. Even more awe-inspiring is how we evolved language, and later used the same breathtakingly complex nervous system that allows us to have language in the first place and invented writing with it. This is arguably one of our greatest achievements as homo sapiens sapiens. The story of writing, however, is one of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural exchanges—borrowing and adaptation. That we evolved language is remarkable in and of itself, but that we also evolved the capacity to have and use multiple languages to express the same ideas and concepts in different ways is completely baffling to me. As a future clinician and researcher in the field of Communication Sciences and Disorders, I feel incredibly privileged that one day (knock on wood) I'll get paid to study what happens in the brain when we learn multiple languages and learn to read and write in different languages (and how to fix it when things go wrong). From the neurological foundations of speech and language, to multilingualism, and the miracle of reading and writing, I look forward to exploring (while blogging about it along the way) how axons and synapses got us from using speech to label things like ox and house to the alphabet, all while being able to do it in more than one language to boot.