Tracy Johnson writes:

>> But even more interesting perhaps, the Arabic word for camel is "gimmel,"
from
>> which the Greeks derived their letter, Gamma, and its name -- the symbol
for
>> which is a pictograph of a camel. In fact, if you look at the letter Gamma,
>> you can still easily see the camel.
>
>  "gimmel" doesn't sound right to my Arabic trained ears, I've always heard
>  it sound more like "gamal" or "gamel", which is also a common first name.

Proving you can find anything on the web nowadays, there is very nice site
that presents "The Story of the Letter G" in short, graphic form:

     http://www.concentric.net/~Gthomp/gstory.html

Indeed, every Roman letter is an ancient pictograph, inherited a thousand
years later from its original inventors: A is an upside-down ox, B is a
sideways tent (or house), etc. Because the letters were often written at a
significant slant, they were rotated through time by subsequent transcribers.

There is much longer history of the evolution of the alphabet at:

     http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~skoyles/lv9.htm

But as to Tracy's point, I should have said ancient Arabic/Semitic/Phoenician,
where the word for camel was apparently pronounced "GEE-mal" (with a hard
"g"). The word survives in Hebrew in that form, although my Hebrew fails me
often, also.

Wirt Atmar