Alphabetical (2 page)

Each letter in the book is linked to a topic. Each chapter takes on different aspects of how the alphabet has been used. Each chapter is preceded by the short story of how that particular letter evolved, how its name came to be pronounced that way
and something on how the letter itself is spoken and played with. At the end of the book I have set some alphabetical challenges (see ‘
The Oulipo Olympics
').

The alphabet is not simply a phenomenon or a structure, it's something we each come upon, learn and use in our own idiosyncratic ways. Our personal histories and feelings are wrapped up in what the letters and their means of transmission mean to each of us. The biography of the alphabet is intertwined with one's autobiography of the alphabet. I hope that my inclusion of my personal narrative will alert you to your own stories. It most certainly wasn't included in order to take precedence over yours.

THE STORY OF

•
‘A' STARTS ITS
life in around 1800
BCE
. Turn our modern ‘A' upside down and you can see something of its original shape. Can you see an ox's head with its horns sticking up in the air? If so, you can see the remains of this letter's original name, ‘ox', or ‘aleph' in the ancient Semitic languages. By the time the Phoenicians are using it in around 1000
BCE
it is lying on its side and looks more like a ‘K'. Speed-writing seems to have taken the diagonals through the upright, making it more like a horizontal form of our modern ‘A' with the point on the left-hand side. The ancient Greeks called it ‘alpha' and reversed it, with the point on the right-hand side, probably because, eventually, they decided to write from left to right. Between around 750
BCE
and 500
BCE
the Greeks rotated it to what we would think of as its upright position. The Romans added the serifs which you can see on inscriptions like Trajan's Column in Rome.

Writing the lower-case ‘A' by hand seems to have produced first an upside-down ‘v' shape, which slowly acquired a connecting loop making it resemble the ‘two-storey' ‘a' you're looking at now. This belongs to the standardized script known as ‘Carolingian minuscule' which Charlemagne's scribes created.

The ‘single-storey', lower-case ‘a' that persists in children's reading books and a good deal of advertising began its life with Irish scribes.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The people who preceded the Romans on the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans, were probably the first people to give the name of the letter a monosyllabic sound: ‘ah', derived from the Greek word ‘alpha'. The Romans followed suit and gave that name to the Romance languages of Europe. Surely, then, with the arrival of the Norman French, we anglophones should be calling it ‘ah' as well? However, between the Normans and us lies the ‘Great Vowel Shift', a phenomenon that caused people between 1400 and 1600 to change their ‘ahs' to ‘ays'. (In case you think this is beyond belief and some hokum invented by linguists, you should talk to New Zealanders who are, even as I write, in the throes of turning their ‘pins' to ‘pens' and their ‘pens' to ‘pins'. Shifting our vowels is something that groups of us like doing sometimes.)

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

In English, ‘a' – either as a single letter in the middle of a single-syllable word, as the initial letter of a word, or in conjunction with other vowel-letters, ‘y', ‘w', ‘r' and ‘h' – can indicate a wide range of sounds: ‘cat', ‘was', ‘all', ‘and', ‘late', ‘father', ‘hail', ‘haul', ‘Michael', ‘ray', ‘threat', ‘beat', ‘boat', ‘dial', ‘ah', ‘raw', ‘cart' and so on.

On rare occasions we can write ‘aa' as in the names ‘Aaron' and ‘Saab'.

‘A' and its partner ‘an' does service as our ‘indefinite article'. In many cases, this indicates that we are not referring to something that I the speaker or you the listener have referred to just before. ‘I was at a football match', ‘I was eating an apple'. The plural of ‘a' is no article at all or ‘some', ‘both' or a number. ‘I was eating apples.' However,
we do say things like, ‘That was a day to remember,' where the total construction indicates we are ‘referring back' to something that we all know about.

(The ‘definite article', ‘the', is usually for when you want to indicate that you, the listener, or the world beyond has been talking, writing or referring to the thing spoken about before. ‘I was eating the apple,' i.e. the one you mentioned.)

The history of ‘an' is a peculiar one. It seems as if there was once a sufficient number of words like ‘nuncle' (‘uncle') for the ‘n' to migrate across from the ‘a'. King Lear's Fool calls him ‘nuncle'.

‘Ah!' is a very useful sound. It can mean many things depending on the notes you hit as you say it. You can indicate that you're surprised, that you knew it all along, that you're satisfied, that you've been hurt, that you're sympathetic, or you're pretending you're sympathetic, that you've caught someone out and so on. It can be linked to ‘ha' as in ‘Ah-ha' or to four ‘hahs' if you're the BeeGees.

A
IS FOR ALPHABET

A
N ALPHABET IS
a stunningly brilliant invention. We could call it a ‘cunning code' or a ‘system of signs' whereby we use some symbols (letters) to indicate some of the sounds of a language. By combining two or more letters (as with ‘th' or ‘sch') we can indicate more of the sounds. Though it is wonderful, there are some snags for users of what I'm calling the ‘English alphabet':

•
     
We do not use these letters and combinations to indicate the same sound every time we use them. The letter ‘c' can be the soft ‘c' in ‘ceiling' or the hard ‘c' in ‘cook'.

•
     
We do not always use the letters to indicate the same sound to different readers over time (i.e. between now and the past), or across space (i.e. from region to region). In Shakespeare's time, ‘do' rhymed with ‘go'. People with a London accent pronounce the ‘u' in ‘hut' and the ‘a' in ‘hat' differently from people with a Yorkshire accent.

•
     
We do not always use the same letter or combination of letters to indicate a given sound. We can make the ‘oo'
sound in ‘root' by writing ‘oo', or ‘ou' as in ‘you', or ‘ough' as in ‘through', or ‘o–e' as in ‘lose', or ‘u–e' as in ‘rune'.

•
     
We write letters side by side but this shape doesn't always represent the timing of the sounds we make when we speak. Say ‘head' and the ‘h' carries over into the ‘ea'.

•
     
Letters don't represent all the sounds we make when we speak. Think ‘due' and ‘sue'.

Becoming or being a reader of English involves absorbing all these variations and then forgetting that they exist. We're able to do that mostly because we write and read in order to pass messages or ‘texts' between us – messages that we want to be full of meaning, full of stuff that matters to us. As we read and write these messages, we learn the shape and look of words including the ones that grammarians call ‘irregular'. We learn that the word ‘debt' sounds like ‘dett' but is written ‘debt'. After all, we see it often enough.

Though it's possible to describe all this as a ‘system of symbols and sounds', it's not only that. Our forebears devised alphabets so that they could store and retrieve meaning. ‘Meaning' can be the meaning of names, directions, reports, feelings, ideas, dreams, experiments or investigations . . . We store meanings when writing with the alphabet, so that these meanings can survive over time and/or space: a graffito on the side of a train does both, as does an instruction on how to build a flatpack wardrobe. An inscription on a gravestone is usually intended to last over time but we want it to stay put. A tattoo is usually intended to last a lifetime, stay put on a person but move with that person. A birthday card travels from sender to receiver, lasts for the length of the birthday celebration and more often than not is destroyed. Some books have survived long beyond their authors' wildest dreams, sometimes by staying in the same place for hundreds of years.

In the case of the alphabet I'm using, people have used some
of the letters in a constant way over thousands of years. Someone in what is now Italy, whose name began with an ‘s' sound two thousand years ago, may have had someone carve an ‘S' on a stone after he died just as someone might do that for ‘Sam' in England today. This continuity has enabled us to access meanings going back hundreds or thousands of years.

Some aspects of how we use letters change. Film-makers invented subtitles so that we can hear words in one language, whilst reading it in another; people with impaired hearing can read what people on a screen are saying. When the Norman French took over the ruling class in England from 1066, they brought some sounds (like ‘j') that the Germanic peoples living in England did not use. Over time, the ‘j' in ‘jam' came to be used by everyone in England. Meanwhile, most people in England stopped using the ‘ch' sound that most Scots people make today when saying the word ‘loch'. These changes show up in the letters of the alphabet. This is part of why and how the alphab
+et is such a clever invention. We get it to do what we want it to do.

At any given moment, people in a locality or a country speaking the same language do not use the alphabet in the same way. For thousands of years, most people hardly used it at all. The storage of meaning in letters was something that only a very few people knew how to do. The origins of the alphabet lie within those castes of people who had the right to write: priests, the makers and executors of laws and punishments, and accountants, mostly. With TV available on smartphones, voice recognition, automated translation and the digitizing of image and sound, the use of the alphabet is changing rapidly. Another kind of code – based on the serial variations of two numbers – is storing meaning. Though using the technology to store and read meaningful symbols (e.g. pictures, music, speech and writing) is very simple, very few people know how to do the
coding. It is quite possible that the use of the alphabet of letters will decline in the next hundred years. We could ask whether a new clerisy has already emerged who have become the tiny minority who know how to write this digital code.

The ultimate reason why the use of the alphabet changes is because we change, whether that's through war, migration, new technology, new kinds of work and leisure, new systems of government or new forms of education. It seems odd to think that the reason why I say a ‘j' sound and that there is a letter for that sound is because, nearly a thousand years ago, in the wars between the tribal warlords of northern Europe, a French-speaking group got the upper hand in the part of the world where I happen to live. I can hold an instrument in my hand and tap the letters ‘y-is-s-s-s' and ten seconds later my son hundreds of miles away knows that we are both celebrating the same goal. The instrument that makes this possible comes after 250 years of scientific industrialization and some dubious exploitation of labour and mineral resources that took place far from where I live. My freedom to write a word in this non-standard way comes as a result of the mass education and artistic revolts of the last 150 years: my son and I have both learned to write but we don't get nervous making up new spellings. We're not scared we might get told off by the invisible teacher, grammarian or priest in our heads.