So where did we get all these letters that children learn as their ABC’s? Danny Bate has the answer in his book, “Why Q Needs U.”

Born and raised in England and now living in Prague, Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster (A Language I Love is…), Bate admits to being obsessed by language and its history.

“Nowadays, the alphabet has become so successful that we rarely recognize its achievement,” he noted in his book regarding the alphabet's development over 4,000 years. “Yet over the course of its long development, nothing is fixed, and every letter has a story to tell.”

Bate tells each of the 26 letters' stories, starting logically with A. Tracing the letter’s history from Egypt, through the ancient Phoenicians to the Greeks who gave us “alpha” (as in alphabet), Bate explains how language evolves over time.

There’s a certain excitement that comes with discovering where our letters come from. In his review of the book for The Times, James McConnachie seems positively elated:

“I have been able to tell everyone within earshot that Q has a tail because it was once a picture of a monkey, that O used to have a dot in the middle because it used to be the Egyptian hieroglyph for an eye, and that A — bear with me here — started life as a picture of an ox’s head (because it used to represent the glottal stop that began the ancient Semitic word for ox, ’alp) and then morphed into a vowel over time while also somehow turning itself upside down, the wonderful result being that the two legs on our capital A started life as … horns. And’alp, of course, became alpha.”

English has its quirks, Bate admits. We’re talking about the fact that there’s a hard c (coconut) and a soft c (cigar) and don't forget the “magic e,” which Bate explains is a split digraph. But don’t worry, it all becomes clear once you follow the explanations Bate provides.

We can thank the Romans for coming up with cursive handwriting, and we learn that the letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. Want clarification? Listen to the interview with the author.