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- [00:06]
A
Which letter in the English Alphabet did Benjamin Franklin think we'd be better off without? Why must the letter U almost always follow the letter Q? And what is the point of silent letters? From the first scratches carved into stone to the maddening mysteries of modern English spelling, the Alphabet has had a long and extraordinary journey. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Emily Briffet is joined by linguist, writer and broadcaster Danny Bate to explore the history of the English Alphabet and the strange story behind the letters we use every day.
- [00:42]
B
Thank you very much for joining us on the podcast to talk all about your new book, why Q needs you. Now, we are going to be talking all about the history of the English Alphabet, but I. I suppose my first question for you would be, if we could travel through time back to the birthplace of the Alphabet, where and when would we end up and what would it look like? Would the Alphabet be something that we would imagine?
- [01:06]
A
Well, I suppose, firstly, we wouldn't want to because then history podcasters would be out of a job because we could just travel back and wouldn't have any lovely discussion today. But to answer your question, seriously, we would be traveling to ancient Egypt, specifically one of the three eras of Egypt that's known as the Middle Kingdom and the Alphabet. The kind of origination or the moment of creation of the Alphabet is within the Middle Kingdom, round about the year, let's say 1900 to 1800 BC. And I'm happy to talk more details about this, but basically I must preface that by saying everything is dependent on our sources, and our sources are limited and fragmented, and a single new discovery, an archaeological find, could upset everything I've said so far, and I haven't said
- [01:50]
B
much, I'm guessing that this is going to be a bit of, kind of patching together of things. So let's find out what we do know.
- [01:58]
A
Of course. Of course, what we do know is that we have some lovely fragments of evidence. And that's great. These come in the forms of bits of ceramic or inscriptions in stone and things like that. And from that limited sample of evidence, we can say that around this time a kind of new writing system is born. But it owes everything to kind of its prototype, which is Egyptian hieroglyphs. So people will be more familiar with hieroglyphs. They're very famous for appearing on tombs and in the sarcophagi of mummies and things like that. And hieroglyphs by this point in time are already about a thousand years old, and they're very sophisticated. They're a great writing System that works really well for the Egyptian language, for Egyptian speech. What seems to happen is around about this time there seems to be a population of people in Egypt who are not native speakers of Egyptian. Perhaps, perhaps they are first or second generation immigrants who are not fully assimilated into Egyptian language and society because their first language is a Semitic language. Semitic languages, big family of languages includes Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, other languages not beginning with ar, but they seem to be present. Some sort of early West Semitic dialect is present in Egypt. And these people look at hieroglyphs and think, well, this is great, but we'd like our own script and we'll make it work really well for our own particular kind of speech and the moments of creation. The point at which we can say our Alphabet is up and running, as opposed to hieroglyphic writing, which is already on the scene, is basically when they take all these hieroglyphs and they say, now get rid of all the possible ways you can use a single character on your page or papyrus, whatever it is. Now it's just one character for one consonant of speech. And at that moment we have an Alphabet.
- [03:50]
B
Amazing. So how do we get from these more pictorial representations of letters to something that we would maybe recognise today?
- [03:58]
A
It takes time. It honestly takes time. And I think one of the major factors is just simple efficiency. As you correctly say, to begin with, our alphabets, letters look like things, they look like objects in the world and it's from these things that they get the sound that they stand for. They could be animals. So A, for example, used to be a head of cattle, an ox's head, Q used to be like a hieroglyphic monkey or a baboon. A capital Q still has that little tail which is just clung on. But these symbols are fairly sophisticated, they're complicated, they've got details like A, as an ox has a mouth and eyes and that's not great. So as writing as this new system takes hold and is spread around the Mediterranean in a kind of anti clockwise motion, we see the letters decrease in their complexity. This is not a bad thing. It's efficienc if you are. Let's say if I'm writing a shopping list out today, I'm scribbling things down. I don't have time to draw a full baboon or a full ox or something like that, just to spell Q and A right. So they reduce in complexity as characters and within about, let's say 800 years, by the time that we get to the Phoenician rendition of our letters, let's say a standard Phoenician, I'd put that around 1000 BC. These really don't look like things anymore. They look like our letters.
- [05:19]
B
Now we need to talk about the Phoenicians. But before we do, I just wanted to ask you one thing I was curious about when I was reading your book. Is, is it possible to ask who actually invented the Alphabet, or is that just a question that's just completely wrong? We can't answer that.
- [05:35]
A
You absolutely should ask this question because it's a great question, but it is not one with a straightforward answer. As I said, the evidence is limited. Our earliest texts and examples of alphabetic writing, they're not autobiographical. It doesn't come with like, you know, name, gender, date of birth. That'd be awesome if it did, but they don't. So we do have to look at all sorts of aspects of the evidence, the context of the evidence, to maybe have a go at who these people were. And I say, unfortunately, it's a great debate, but I can't give you just one answer. It is an accepted theory that the people who set that whole Alphabet off, these West Semitic speakers in Egypt, were very humble people, so miners or soldiers or people who are not actually the cream of Egyptian society. And that, for me, makes it more interesting because that would speak to some sort of underlying linguistic talent that these people can recognize. We have speech, what sounds our speech is made of and what we need our script to look like. But it's just one theory. The evidence comes from the fact that the examples are not very standardised to begin with. They're kind of all over the place in the direction of the letters, the choice of the letters. They're found, for example, in places where they've got mining activity, so in the Sinai Peninsula, where people are digging for precious minerals, all of that speaks to fairly humble people setting up the Alphabet. But that is just one answer I could give you.
- [07:00]
B
And I suppose that those humble roots leave us with that question of lack of sources as well, then.
- [07:07]
A
Yeah, unfortunately, yes. But there is this kind of ghost or this specter that haunts every aspect of this discussion, which is that we are bound to what sources we have, what has survived until the present day. Right. And so not just with the origins of the Alphabet, but also in later stages, as it's being passed from people to people. In the ancient world, there is this kind of specter that haunts every answer we could give, which is perishable materials, so, like papyrus, that just hasn't survived in a way that ceramic and stone have survived, and that kind of warps our answers, and we just need to be very careful. Maybe somewhere out there in Egypt is a piece of papyrus that has, you know, profession, date of birth, national language, everything, but it hasn't been found just yet.
- [07:53]
B
The ghost at the alphabetical feast, then.
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A
Nice.
- [07:56]
B
So we said we were going to talk about the Phoenicians. So the Phoenicians often get credited with really spreading the Alphabet. How true is that perception?
- [08:04]
A
Very true, very true. I think the Phoenicians absolutely deserve to be the stars of the alphabetical story. If people haven't heard of the Phoenicians, that's okay, but they are brilliant. I do recommend indulging yourself with the Phoenicians. And I would say that there are two interconnected reasons or factors why this is true, why it is fair to give them this accolade. And one is that their technological prowess, their maritime prowess. They're great sailors, traders, adventurers. They go up and down the Mediterranean and they establish a presence all over the Mediterranean. So you can find, well, most famously, Carthage in what is now Tunisia. That's a Phoenician settlement. Lots of Spain, places in Spain like Malaga and Seville. They're originally Phoenician. The words Spain and Spanish themselves do come from Phoenician, so they absolutely deserve it. And connected to that is a simple matter of prestige. They're really prestigious, they're really impressive as a fairly disunited culture in what is today Lebanon and that area, the Levant. I mention this not only because we find them across the Mediterranean and that is evidence of their maritime strength, but also the rest of the Middle east, where they're not going over sea, they're going by land. And the main evidence for this is that not only is the Greek and the Latin script descendants of the Phoenician, and that's to the west of Phoenicia, but so too are the Hebrew script via Aramaic and the Arabic script via Nabatean. So Aramaic is sort of to the east of Phoenicia, and the Nabataeans were to the south of Phoenicia. So their version of the Alphabet, because of their prestige, is just going in all directions.
- [09:42]
B
So we should maybe pinpoint a couple of these. So could you tell us about the Alphabet's journey, say, to Greece?
- [09:48]
A
Yes, absolutely. I suppose, because it is the most relevant to the one that, well, you and I, Emily, use all the time. We are indebted to that. The Phoenicians head west, and somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean could well be the coast of what is today Turkey, could also be Cyprus. That's in sight of Phoenicia. So that's a potential meeting point. Phoenicians and Greeks are encountering each other. And the Greeks like what they find. They're very impressed. You know, they're great traders. They're great sort of political navigators as well. The Phoenicians managed to survive what's known as the late Bronze Age collapse, which, I mean, huge theories what this actually involved, but fair to say it was an awful time to live through. But the Phoenicians did live through it. And all of this paints a picture of a very impressive civilization. And the Greeks say, well, we like your Alphabet. We like how it works for you. Thanks very much. So now I have to put a date on this interaction, and the date that I'm going for is 800 BC because after this point in time, we start to get our first examples of alphabetic Greek writing. So it's the Greek language using this already old established Alphabet. The reason why I have to be so academic y and cautious around this is because this is debated and there actually is an ongoing scholarly project. I think it's starting up last year or this year, basically examining all the complicated evidence to try and push that date back in time. So maybe say it was even earlier. Evidence for this comes from the shape of the letters, the way that they look, the way that they're oriented on the document. Loads of evidence. But crucially, the Greek sources start after 800 BC. We have Greek writing earlier than that. We have the wonderful linear B for Mycenaean Greek, but that's a separate tradition that's kind of unrelated and dies out. So they take it, and the Greeks say, thanks very much. To begin with, we can really see how the Greeks keep the Phoenician script fairly constant. But the Greeks do really make it their own, because Greek is a very different language. It's a very different type of speech. It has certain properties which mean that they have to make additions. The big one is vowels. The Greeks add vowel letters to the Alphabet. The Phoenicians didn't need them before. And that's the Greek chapter of the story. And from this chapter, our own Roman letters will come into being a couple of centuries later.
- [12:14]
B
I've got to ask you, before we get to Rome, how important was the addition of vowels and what was the reason for that?
- [12:22]
A
Basically, to begin with, the early Alphabet is being passed around a group of related languages, dialects, essentially Semitic dialects in the Middle east and Egypt. The script can be passed around with very few modifications. You know, if you're somebody living in Judea, you can use it basically the same way as somebody in Phoenicia is using it. You would have differences in your dialect, but it's more or less that the differences are pretty minimal. Greek, however, is a totally unrelated language. It's an Indo European language, which means that it has different sounds. The sounds are put together into words in different ways, and all of this basically means that suddenly vowels become all important. If you have Greek at any stage of this language and you can't write down the vowel sounds, it might be quite confusing to your readers. Like Greek, words can begin with a vowel. That's something that Semitic languages have historically avoided. So if you don't have a writing system, then people don't know that your word begins with a vowel, or they can't tell the difference between a word like genos, which is ancient Greek for like a type of something, and genus, which is a jaw or a chin. And if you don't have a letter O and a letter U, your reader doesn't know. They won't know what you're talking about. So they could make mistakes. So vowels are all important, and it's really that it's a jump from one language family to another that necessitates the vowels.
- [13:43]
B
They sound incredibly important. Don't want to confuse those two at all. Rome. We should talk about this. By the time that the Romans got involved, what's the Alphabet starting to look like?
- [13:52]
A
Well, firstly, it's starting to look much more recognisable to us today. Of course, the Greek script hasn't gone anywhere. It's still used in Greece and in Cyprus to this day. But a version of it, a particular Western variant of the Greek Alphabet, makes its way to Rome. And again, with all due caution around the dates, it probably lands in southern Italy in round about the year 700 BC. And again, this is on the basis of evidence when we start to get our first sources. But crucially, Italy at this time is politically and ethnically and linguistically disunited. So Rome has not yet risen to its position of prominence. Rome is just a collection of villages overlooking the Tiber. It's a nobody at this point in time. The big players in Italy are, in the south, the Greeks, and in the north, the Etruscans. Etruscans, my favourites, my darlings. They are great. They're an impressive civilization. They're an enigma for lots of reasons in terms of where they come from and where they went, I guess. And what we do see is it's probably the Etruscans who are the leading players, the ones with the most prestige and their version of the Greek Alphabet. They take the Alphabet from the Greeks and they say, thanks very much, but their version of it becomes quite influential and they mold it, they make it work for their needs. They repurpose some of the letters according to their own sounds. It's this version that the Romans, to begin with, are using in that sort of 700 to 500 BC, but as the Romans established themselves, take over Etruria from the Etruscans, take over all of Italy in due course, they really make the Alphabet as well their own. And we start to see, maybe hard to put a date on it, but maybe 200 to the year 1 BC, we see a standard Latin version of the Alphabet emerge and it really is the one that we've used for the next two millennia. It really has not gone too far. That kind of square capitals, round letters, 21 members, not 26. We've got additions, later editions, but yeah, in the age of, say, Caesar and Cicero, the Roman Alphabet that we would recognise as our own is up and running.
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B
Sounds like it's almost there, not quite. When do the next five letters come in?
- [16:10]
A
That's a funny one. I mean, there's a couple that are post medieval and there's a couple that are maybe classical or late antique. And we see a really interesting thing in the Romans conquer Greece and this naturally integrates Greek speakers much more closely into the Roman Empire. This, in time, will of course, become the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine situation, where Greek is as Roman as Latin. And consequently the Latin language gets flooded with Greek words, firstly from ancient Greece, philosophy, rhetoric and all that. And then, of course, Christianity brings a whole load more and because of this, more letters are needed. So it's that that we have to thank for. The letters Y and Z, to begin with, these are really confined to spelling Greek letters in the medieval world. Their usage goes far beyond that. But to begin with, they're for Greek names and Greek words. Basically, Y is needed because it needs to spell the letter U, as in French tu, whereas Z is needed for, I don't know, biblical characters like Zachariah and Zebedee and things like that. But Cicero and even Quintilian writing after him, don't recognise these letters. They say they're not ours. X comes last. So that's Y and Z. They're sort of semi members of the Alphabet in the later Roman centuries. But then you have things like W. W I've described as a child of the fall of Rome because you have all these barbarians in inverted commas coming in, and with their Germanic languages, and they basically need a letter W to spell their own names because they have lots of W sounds. So W comes to the fore. It's a double U or a double V. It's complicated. And that brings me on to U and V. These two letters separate themselves out over the course of the Middle Ages. To the Romans, they're just one letter. And they slowly divorce in the same way that I and J slowly divorce over the. Very gradually, even up until as late as the 18th century, people are listing these letters or thinking these letters as kind of one and the same. Dr. Johnson, for example, 1755, is great dictionary. He calls them not I, J, U, V. He calls them I vowel, I consonant, U vowel, U consonant. He lists that as their names. So that does take some time.
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B
But.
- [18:22]
A
But with that separation, finally, with maybe J being last, we reach R26.
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B
Why is WW and not double V? What's the difference there? Why?
- [18:33]
A
Oh, God, this was such a fiendish letter to write about at the end of the day? Because basically, in English, we call it W. That's fine. Especially lowercase, it looks like a W. But if you're a French speaker, for example, it's double V. So it's a double V. And basically the variation in the name of this letter is a product of the fact that the separation of U and V is not complete. So it's being named after a letter that kind of has two names and is two versions of one letter. So the confusion with W is due to the confusion with U and V. Is this one letter. What do we call it? Is it called U? Is it called V? Honestly, U and V fiendish letters to write about, I can tell you that much, because you want to talk about the way that letter's used for the Romans, but you want to make it accessible to somebody. The Romans are calling it ultimately, which is not very helpful. And it looks like a V. It looks like a pointed V. So it gets quite tricky as these letters slowly separate themselves out.
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B
That is incredibly confusing. I'm glad I don't have to write about this. Okay, so obviously we're talking about the English Alphabet here. When does the Alphabet arrive in England? And what kind of linguistic beasts does it encounter when it arrives in England?
- [19:48]
A
Yes, absolutely. I would just be difficult, first and foremost, and say that we probably we could talk about two arrivals in England, but hey, this is history extra. We can do this because firstly, you have the Alphabet as it's brought to what becomes England by the Romans to begin with. And we have an abundance of sources from Rome, from Roman Britain and the Roman way of using it, it never dies out, it never goes away. There is a kind of an endurance that leads on into post Roman periods. And you have Celtic languages like Welsh and Cornish that take up the Alphabet. So there's continuity there. But the second time is when it re arrives in the. Of the 6th century AD, which is with St. Augustine and Pope Gregory and all that great stuff, that whole thing with basically bringing Christianity to Britain, but with this second arrival of the Alphabet in what becomes England. England is now a beast of a different nature because you have all your Angles and Saxons, you have these new kingdoms, and the linguistic layer of the land has changed too. These kingdoms are more or less now speaking Old English. And this is a Germanic language. It's different. Old English, probably. I mean, we do have a lot of evidence, but probably the dominant way of writing to begin with is actually in runes. So we have lots of evidence that the first way of writing down the English language is in runes, but with the sort of package deal of Latin, Christianity and writing in time, the Roman letters get applied to Old English and let's say from the year 600 onwards, you start to see more and more Old English written in Roman letters. And if I may comment on that, it works really well. It's clear to me I want to sort of advance a personal theory that the letters are adapted and modified and repurposed in such a way that the letters that were designed for Latin work really well for Old English in a way that I think suggests the sort of status of the Angles and Saxons outside the borders of the Roman Empire. They like Rome, they think it's very prestigious, but we're not romantic. So consequently, we can adapt our letters in a way that we don't see kind of post 1066. Old English writing is, in my view, very sensible. It works well for speech. And this sort of defines the Old English period up until the aforementioned battle, when everything changes.
- [22:06]
B
Oh, dare I ask, dare I ask what changes in that fateful battle? Dare you name the year?
- [22:11]
A
Yes, indeed, 1066 and all that. I mean, it's famous, you know, historians can rightly challenge whether it needs to be famous or not. As a historical linguist. Yeah, it does. It does deserve to be as famous as it is, because language does not operate In a vacuum, language works through society and through different kinds of prestige. People will emulate people that they see as socially superior. They'll try to get away in language from people that they see as socially inferior. And we see all of that with the Norman Conquest because England is completely overthrown. And you have the big changes. You have the fact that basically your local bishop or your local lord is now speaking some kind of old Norman, like a relative of French. That's going to change. I mean, you're not going to go to your bishop and maybe use every possible English word because that's of low status. Now. You might try and speak his old Norman language or even try and use some of his words. So that's a big factor, but in a more precise way. We do see a disintegration as well of the court of Anglo Saxon England. So this is the Court of Wessex, originally in Winchester, does move to London in time, gets set up in Westminster and things like that. But the court disintegrates or is kind of overthrown. And a lot of its traditions of writing go along with it. And we find that whereas in the later years of the Old English period, a kind of standard spelling had been set up. That standard spelling, well, nobody's using anymore. It's thrown out the window. And so the Middle English period is really characterized to begin with by great variation in the way that people are spelling, because the standard has gone, it's not used anymore. So that's the way that Middle English looks, the way it does. It's not chaos, it's variation.
- [23:55]
B
Okay, I was going to ask. I've heard people talk about the English language and the English Alphabet almost as three languages or alphabets or many languages or alphabets in a trench coat trying to disguise itself as one. How true is that? Do you think that's a fair perception of the Alphabet and the language?
- [24:13]
A
I mean, so the linguist in me, who am I kidding, I am 100% a linguist, wants to say that that is, yes, maybe, but also that's not unusual. So so many languages of the world do feel a strong influence from other languages. This could be in the vocabulary, it could be in their sounds, it could be in their spelling. So this is perfectly possible. English's situation is somewhat unique in the history of Europe. I would say that in that English is not completely replaced by old Norman and old French. It is just heavily drenched in them. And that's distinctive, as the story goes. But it's just not ultimately that unusual to feel such a strong influence from Another language, English. Yes, I agree. It owes a huge debt to the continent, to Normandy, to France. And in a way that is reflected in so many aspects of the language. There are certain English sounds that are products of this period. There are certain absolutely English words. I just used the word absolute. I mean, that's an example of them. But spelling 100% is very much beholden to this time, this time period, because who is spelling, who's writing in this period? It's people with access to money, time, resources, and consequently these are people who tend to be more prestigious, maybe a little bit more influential, more powerful. They could be in the church, they could be in government, and they are juggling Latin on one hand, Old Norman, old French or Anglo Norman on another hand, and in some sort of, of third hand English as well. So consequently, English as the underdog in this situation is very much influenced in terms of spelling by the consonants, things like qu that comes back for words like, you know, question, quick and queen. That's not really there in the Old English period. So there are all sorts of influences that we're still with today. I don't know what the right term is. I think English is a hybrid and that's not a bad thing. Ultimately.
- [26:04]
B
We need to talk then about the title of your book. It's why does Q need you'd? What's the story behind that oddly inseparable duo?
- [26:13]
A
I do appreciate this question, firstly because you've left it later on. So actually the ingredients that I need to tackle this pretty big question are already there. I've already laid some of the track for myself, which is great. Basically, the history of the Q and U is very old. Q is one of the original set of the Alphabet, so it certainly deserves our respect as a great survivor. It goes back to the original Semitic languages. It goes back absolutely to a Phoenician letter that the Phoenicians are using. But crucially, it's standing for a distinct sound. It's earning its keep in the Phoenician Alphabet. It's standing for a sound that I won't replicate, but it's kind of like a K with a little bit more input from the throat. And this is a distinctive sound, so it gets its own distinctive letter. But the letter Q gets passed on to the Greeks. And the Greeks, probably all the evidence really indicates that they don't need the separate letter. They don't need it because kappa, the origin of K can perform the same function. So Q or Koppa to the Greeks is performing the same K function as Kappa. You do see it to begin with. There's a little bit of variation, different regions and dialects and kind of city states of Greece. Hold on to the two letters. And like the people of Corinth, for example, great Greek city, they seem to have had a special affection for the letter q because they use it in spelling Corinth, and you find just Q alone on Corinthian coins. It's like the little. It's our letter, you know, it's what we do, our little quirk. Quirk. It's kind of redundant at this point. Already. It survives in the Greek Alphabet long enough to make that journey to Italy, but by the time that the Alphabet has passed through Italy, through the Etruscans, and makes its way into Rome, it's doubly redundant because not only is it performing the same function as k, but also C. C, thanks to the Etruscans, is also a K sound. Right. So k ckq. This is actually reflected in their English names to this day. The fact that K and Q don't end in the typical e sound in their names, like C, b, d. This is because the Romans had to give them different names to distinguish them. Right. So that would have been kaer, ka and ku for the Romans to begin with. But as they are establishing themselves, pruning their Alphabet, making it work for Latin, K is gone. It's basically chucked out completely into the bin. And Q could have gone the same way, but it's been consistently partnered up with U. And because qu is spelling a qu sound, and because the Romans think of that as a distinctive sound, not as a sequence of two sounds, not as k plus w, but as single qu, it can keep its own spelling. That's the crucial thing. So I think it's very fair to say Q not only needs you, you saved the life of Q, it stopped it from being chucked out of the Latin version of the Alphabet altogether, because together they spell quo. The Romans, in my opinion, should have got rid of the U and just used Q on its own to spell that sound. But they didn't. They didn't take that step. There are indicators that they were thinking about it, but they didn't ult it. And no language has since has taken that step. But English could.
- [29:28]
B
Are there any other letters that you think perhaps we could throw in the bin, the historical bin for the Alphabet?
- [29:35]
A
Yeah, I mean, there are a few, and some members of English spelling have gone that way. So you have, you know, lovers of Old English will know that you have things like ash and wyn and thorn and edd, letters that have gone, you know, fallen away for various medieval reasons, performs the same function as I, more or less. So we could get rid of Y. It's saved in that function by being a consonant. So in words like yes and yellow and yoke and things like that. So Y was in the region of the bin, the dustbin of history, but today it's got to be X. We don't need it. CS or KS could perform exactly the same function. And Benjamin Franklin over in the United States, he thought so he wanted to get rid of it. So if you don't listen to me, listen to Benjamin Franklin.
- [30:19]
B
Historical top tips from historical people. Now, I've got to also ask you about the, you know, we said a little bit about the sort of spelling and the fact it's almost a little chaotic. But when it comes to the pronunciation, sometimes spelling doesn't necessarily line up with the way things are pronounced. Is there any reason for that? Historically, yes.
- [30:39]
A
And the short answer is too many reasons. That's the problem. And that's not a cop out. That's me. You know, I love this question, but it's a big question. And when I say too many reasons, what I mean is that there are too many valid principles behind English spelling, and they're in competition, so they're fighting over the different ways of spelling. They're fighting for the same job in many cases as well. So, you know, there are sometimes it's a matter of spelling, it's a matter of letters serving the same purpose. It's a matter of letters both being used in distinctive ways, but ultimately they have the same pronunciation. So. So take, for example, English to create what are known as the long vowels of English that tend not to be straightforward in that but the sounds like A, E, I, O, and o. We've got two ways of spelling them. We can double the vowel letter, as in a word like, I don't know, meet, as in meeting. Or we can add magic E at the end. So in a word like athlete, take away the magic E, it becomes athlet, which is not a word, but there you go. So. So we've got doubling your vowel letter and adding magic e. And both are valid, both work, but we've just kept the two around. They're sort of in competition for the same job. And that instantly is making things look irregular, despite actually everything under the surface being regular. To take another example, we have this great debate within English. English spelling is somewhat fragmented and divided today just as much as speech. Well, actually, actually Speech even more so. And you have the hotly debated letter Z or Z, right? Its name is debated, but also the way that it's used. And I will spell a word like realise with an S because that's British. It's not, it's more complicated than that, than assigning it to just one country. But the problem is, firstly, if I choose to put a little bit of Britishness and to stake my spelling as not being American spelling that's kind of valid, it's okay. All through history we see people using writing to reflect something of themselves. It could be their politics, it could be their ego, their society. You see this in the Renaissance and humanist periods where people are making English words look more Latin, like so putting the B into debt, right? It's never been pronounced in English, but it was pronounced in Latin, it was spelt in Latin. So it gets put back in. If I choose to spell realize with an S, I'm following the same principles. I'm putting myself into my spelling. But everything, and this is the bigger point, basically Z on the one hand and S between two vowels are both valid principles of spelling. They both work. So I mean Americans wouldn't insist that we spell nose with a Z, right? It's perfectly happy for it to have an S between the O and the E, or surprise with an S between the I and the E there. They don't spell Americans, broadly speaking, don't spell these with a Z because S between two vowels is a really old practice or rule of spelling. Goes all the way back to old English times. And it works, it's just, it's in competition with Z now. So this is where this sort of apparent inconstancy comes from.
- [33:55]
B
I think you might be settling some arguments there. What about silent letters? What's the historical root of those and what's the point of them?
- [34:04]
A
Ah, see, you've got two questions there. You sneakily asked two questions wrapped into one. Silent letters are a complicated phenomenon. So some of them, as I mentioned, are well and truly silent and always have been. So that's ones like, I don't know, the be and debt and doubt. It is pronounced or was pronounced in Latin in debitum and dubitum, but it's not, it's never been pronounced in English, generally speaking. And these are additions into spelling. But then you have to make a division and separate out all the silent letters that aren't due to this kind of artificial or non linguistic reason. Instead, these are instances where the letter was once pronounced, it did once represent a sound so we know from evidence from the Middle English period that something like a silent king at the beginning of knee and knowledge and knight, the one with the sword, was once pronounced. We don't have recordings, of course, but what we do have is poetry, alliterative poetry. Someone like Geoffrey Chaucer is alliterating words like kneeling with words like king. So they're probably canailing. Plus, if ink takes time and money to make, we're going to be wasting it on silent letters.
- [35:17]
B
Right?
- [35:17]
A
Silent letters are kind of a luxury that we can have nowadays with our virtual text and print and things like that, that. So there's a second big theme behind all of this aspect of English spelling, which is speech changes. Speech constantly changes very naturally in a way that does not come naturally to spelling, to writing, in that writing can stay still while speech moves on. But I will just make my defence of a lot of silent letters in that a lot of them, for various different reasons, are still earning their keepers. So if you take the GH out of night or light, the GH, once upon a time would have been pronounced. It was a kind of fricative sound, like a, or more likely a h sound, as it still is pronounced in German and Dutch today. And if you take it out of the spelling, you get nit and lit. So you know the pronunciation of the word is going to change as well. So the GH is working in cooperation with the I as a kind of trigraph. Three letters for one sound, and therefore it's earning its keep. Likewise, I mentioned magic E, which is super important. You have all of our double consonant letters, like the double T in better and letter. If I take it out, you'll get beta and lita. So it's doing something there, despite we don't pronounce it as a double T, but it is doing something. It's to do with the vowel. And then I'll just finally mention this group. You have those silent letters that. Yeah, they're not making any contribution to our pronunciation, but we don't necessarily read words as sequences of sounds. So if I read, for example, the word know, as in to know something, I recognize this not as three letters for three sounds. I recognize it as like a single chunk of meaning to do with knowledge. And I recognize this in knowledge and acknowledge and know and things like that. And that's actually how adult readers read, with that sort of more sympathetic frame of mind. You can appreciate that actually, the case deserves to be there because it's separating. No, from now, in my reading, it speeds up my reading Because I'm like, yep, great, that's. No, likewise, if you spell a word R, I, G, H, T, I know that it's right as in the opposite of left, as opposed to right, as in a rite of passage. So it's not reflected in speech, but it can help readers through silent letters, keeping words separate in spelling. At least that's it. I've made my defence for silent letters
- [37:42]
B
an excellent defence, though admittedly I might have a small crisis about all the things that I've learned, obviously at school, and I'm not in tune with now because it's just become intuitive. So I'm gonna have to go away and think on that. I think. Now, in terms of sequencing of letters, how did the Alphabet end up in the order it did?
- [38:00]
A
Ah, a great question. Without a single answer, you and your listeners will be happy to find. I would preface this by basically saying that the Alphabet, not all alphabets, but. But the one that we're talking about today, this kind of single tradition of writing has many separate qualities, or its letters have individual qualities. The way that they look, the way that they're oriented, how they sound, their name and what order do they come in? So what's their position in the alphabetical arrangement? And this, Basically, not a single one of these features can be taken for granted. They've all changed in different ways over the millennia. The alphabetical order, A, B, C, D is very constant, it's very strong. It's endured for four millennium by this stage, right? So it's super old. It goes all the way back to the Phoenicians, past the Phoenicians, probably to the earliest centuries of alphabetic writing. The problem is, once you get to that period, it's all kind of murky. What were the original members of the Alphabet? What order did they come in? It's difficult because people, unfortunately for us today, aren't writing out full alphabets. You don't need to, right? You use the letters, you don't need to write out the Alphabet beyond your first lessons. Right? How many of us have written out the full Alphabet since primary school or elementary school? We don't tend to. So that does affect our sources in that we don't have many of them. This is then complicated again by the fact that there is an alternative order we find in our earlier sources, not only the ABCD or ABGD order, abgad, it's known as for short. We also find that the Halacham order, which, if this had taken off and if this had become the norm across the entire family tree of writing. We today would not sing A, B, C, D. We would sing Elh as the start of the Alphabet. And this order does survive in the world. It survives in Africa. It survives in the Horn of Africa for languages of the sort of Ethiopic branch of the Semitic family. So for writing down languages like Amharic or Tigrinya, things like that. So languages of Africa, they used this alternative system. So both systems to begin with, were clearly rivals. But this complicates things because there wasn't one individual logic, there wasn't an obvious logic behind the order of the Alphabet. It's not to do with the way that the letters looked. It's not to do with the way they were pronounced or sounded. I've looked into this, and the pattern is just not obvious. So I have to conclude it was probably a mnemonic. It was probably some sort of memory pattern in the same way that you might have. Every good boy deserves football for the notes of the treble clef. Probably something like that, that you gave the letters an order to help young students remember them. But what that order, that logic was is lost to time.
- [40:56]
B
Incredible. Really incredible. When we left the Alphabet in its chronology, we were in the Middle Ages. There's a good deal of time since then. We've talked about some of the changes that the Alphabet has endured in that time. Could you bring us up to modern day? Are we at the final version of the Alphabet? Is there another version? Is there another change, do you think?
- [41:17]
A
I think every single generation of alphabetic users would said, yeah, this is it. We've reached the final Alphabet at this point in time. So we're not special. We are living through history. We will be living through a particular era of history that historians of the future will recognize and say, aha, this is early 21st century writing. In the same way that your expert listeners in Tudor history can go, aha. I recognize this style of writing, this hand from the 16th century. So we're no exception, we're not special, our generation. And I don't think that we've reached the final version of the Alphabet. What I would say is that there are many defining characteristics that are all caught up in technology, in society, in that, I would say, specific to the English branch of this family tree and the English version of the Alphabet, maybe we have seen a consolidation of writing. So we've seen a standardization of the Alphabet and the way that we use it over the past few centuries because we have the technology and the politics to achieve that. So we have, for example, nation states that have governments and have departments of education that set curricula and things like that. This is going to affect our spelling. It's going to standardize spelling, keep the standard strong, because it can also we have technology. You have spell checker, you have AI nowadays as well, predictive text. All of these things which are really enforcing one particular way of using the Alphabet. That doesn't mean it's eternal. The inevitable updates have perhaps slowed down a little bit because the technology's against it, the society's against it, education. Also, the fact is that English is now so disunited, we'd somehow, if we wanted to update spelling, we'd have to get all of these countries to agree somehow. You know, America, Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, the uk, you know, of course. So all of the factors at the moment are against reform and that may slow down changes to spelling. And we have kind of seen that English has so many sounds. I cannot stress as a spoken language. English has so many vowels, not the five that we think of. It has A, I, U, et cetera, things like that. We couldn't just invent new letters for all of these sounds. We could do that. The Greeks and Romans would have had no problem with just inventing new letter. But we don't do that because of standard spelling, because of the prestige of Rome. All of these factors are against it for the moment. But the future of the Alphabet is wholly dependent on the future of the world. That was linguist, writer, researcher and broadcaster Danny Bates speaking to Emily Brifitt. Curious to find out more about the ancient civilizations who greatly influenced the Alphabet. Check out the description of this podcast episode for further listening. Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them.
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