M is for Mother - the letter that predated the alphabet by millennia

Mother's Day is in about a week. The "mmm" sound babies make so naturally lends itself to "ma," or "mom," one of their earliest sounds morphing into one of their earliest words.

I recently read Peter Watson's Great Divide, the story of how human cultures evolved separately in the Americas and Eurasia after the Bering Strait closed about 16,000 years ago, and came across this fascinating tidbit about the letter M.

“The ‘birth-giving Goddess,’ with parted legs and pubic triangle, became a form of shorthand, as the capital letter M as ‘the ideogram of the Great Goddess.’” 

This thousands of years before linear writing. Kind of fascinating to think that the birth of the alphabet was itself a symbol for birth. That seems fitting.

Happy (almost) Mother's Day.