Sonic Soma: Sound, Body and the Origins of the Alphabet by Elise Kermani.

Abstract: This paper begins with a historical and archeological analysis of the origins of the alphabet with a specific focus of the origins of the letters A and B. The second part of this paper continues the analysis of language and the alphabet as it relates to the human body and to sound. The third part of the paper takes the form of a 'new mythology' towards the broader subject of the origins of languages as it relates to the future of humanity. The author uses an intuitive approach to gathering factual information and a conceptual approach for the analysis and interpretation of this information. Concurrent with the research of this paper, the author created “Jocasta - a performance video” a 54 minute experimental film which was inspired by and is artistically related to the findings of this paper.

The main subject of this paper is, specifically, the origins of the phonetic alphabet as a subset within the larger category of the origin of languages. The mythology composed by Ovid, Hesiod and Herodotus will be analyzed. The archeology of civilizations as ancient as 8,000 B.C. composed and compiled by Maria Gimbutas and Jacquetta Hawkes will be discussed as well as the modern continental philosophical theories of thinkers such as Deleuze and Derrida. A brief analysis of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus, and Plato are presented as a historical background to the theories of Rousseau, Vernant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schirmacher, Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous. The work of the linguists Revesz, Pei, Robinson will be cited; and in literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Euripides' The Phoenician Women, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and the religious scriptures pertaining to the written word are discussed. Finally, linguistic research based on the author's comparative analysis of ancient Persian and Phoenician words are contributed to the thesis.

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