Alphabetical (26 page)

M
IS FOR MUSIC AND MEMORY

O
NE OF THE
ways we are inducted into the alphabet is through the ‘Alphabet Song'. Its verses go like this:

    
ABCDEFG

    
HIJKLMNOP

    
QRSTUV

    
WXYZ

    
Now I know my ABCs

    
Next time will you sing with me?

Eagle-eyed, eagle-eared followers of the song will have spotted many moons ago that singing this in the British-English zone ruins the rhyme scheme. ‘Z' doesn't rhyme with ‘G', ‘P', ‘V' and ‘me'. It also needs a bit of crotchet work in line two and some creative pausing in line four. As people don't usually say ‘my ABCs' any more, it rhymes even better with just ‘ABC'.

No matter, it works. I always thought that it was one of those songs that was obviously composed by one or two people who disappeared into anonymity some time ago. Not so.

The Boston music publisher Charles Bradley laid claim to the song in 1830 when he copyrighted it. The tune is the same as the tune for ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep' and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star' – another set of words that many think of as anonymous but is not. The tune, known as ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman?', first appeared in France in 1762 and Mozart mucked about with it in twelve variations in 1781/2.

Sayers of ‘zed' have produced an alternative ending to the faintly moralistic ‘Now I know my ABCs'. It goes like this:

X-y-z

Sugar on your bread

Eat it all up

Before you are dead.

This sort of thing is too irregular for the present movement that teaches reading, which is ‘phonics'. You can find on YouTube (along with 15 million other people) the original alphabet song, fired out like a rap, with a souped-up version of ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman?' playing quietly in the background. This is followed by the letters being ‘sounded' rather than named, which is not without its problems: the letter ‘l' is ‘sounded' as something like ‘erll'; as ‘q' is sounded as ‘kw', it's written as ‘kw' and ‘x' is written as ‘ks', yet these are not the ‘graphemes' the children will see. This is quite apart from the age-old problem of ‘sounding' which may involve making a sound that doesn't exist in real words, like ‘ber' or ‘ker'. When we read ‘ball', we don't say ‘ber-all'. This, say the phonics experts, they have overcome with ‘synthetic' phonics which combines letters and builds syllables and words, so that children learn how to lose the extra ‘schwa' sound following the consonant. Yet, miraculously, consonant-plus-schwa creeps
back in when children spell out their names: ‘Fer, rer, er, der – Fred.'

Another musical or chanted way of using letters is through mnemonics. The Greek goddess of Memory was called Mnemosyne. She slept with Zeus for nine nights, one after the other. The result was nine children who turned out to be the nine Muses: Calliope – epic poetry; Clio – history; Euterpe – flutes and lyric poetry; Thalia – comedy and pastoral poetry; Melpomene – tragedy; Terpsichore – dance; Erato – love poetry; Polyhymnia – sacred poetry; Urania – astronomy. Mnemosyne lived in Hades, the underworld, where she sat by the pool named after her. When dead souls arrived in Hades, if they drank from the river Lethe, they forgot everything they had known in life, so when they were reincarnated they would remember nothing of their previous lives. But if they drank from the pool of Mnemosyne, they would remember . . .

Mnemonics have a long, shadowy history involving memory theory and practice, wizards and someone called von Feinagle but they emerge as a traditional aide-mémoire for anyone trying to remember sequences: the colours of the rainbow, the order of the planets, the order of the great lakes, the reactivity of metals, the first twenty elements of the Periodic Table, the colour code for resistors, geological eras, Henry VIII's wives, common-law felonies, the order of taking the derivative of a quotient, the bones of the wrist, guitar strings, the notes on the treble clef, Ionian philosophers, the apostles, the microwave wavelengths, spelling rules and metric prefixes.

The main principle is the acrostic-acronym one, but occasionally something more musical appears:

Henry VIII's wives were ‘divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived' and if you can't remember which way to
tighten and loosen taps and screws, say ‘Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey'.

To not remember the months you can always say:

    
Thirty days hath September,

    
All the rest I can't remember.

And for calculus you may find this useful:

lo-di-hi

minus

hi-di-lo

all over

lo squared.

And for spelling:

I before E, except after C

Or when sounded ‘A' as in ‘neighbour', ‘weigh' and ‘weight'

Or when sounded like ‘eye' as in height

And ‘weird' is just weird.

Alphabetical ones include:

My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos

HOMES

Pregnant Camels Ordinarily Sit Down Carefully; Perhaps Their Joints Creak

Mrs Baker

Simply Learn The Positions That The Carpus Has

Every Average Dude Gets Better Eventually

 

The Lad Zappa

Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain

BAPTIIIIISSM

Dashing In A Rush, Running Harder Or Else Accident

King Henry Died By Drinking Chocolate Milk

ASS SID

If you can remember all these, all you have to remember is what subjects they apply to. From the top, they are:

order of the planets in the solar system starting from nearest to the sun

order of the Great Lakes in the USA starting from the west

order of the geological eras

common-law felonies

bones of the wrist

guitar strings

names of Ionian philosophers

colours of the rainbow

names of the apostles (provided you let ‘I' be ‘J')

how to spell ‘diarrhoea'

metric system, counting downwards from ‘kilo' and including ‘B' for ‘base unit'

how to remember adding negative and positive numbers

And then you have to remember what names, nouns and principles they are attached to.

That's your knowledge base sorted, so you can go on to any pub quiz and get a few points, all thanks to acronym, acrostic and alphabetical principles.

One more: Every Good Boy Deserves Fish; Fat Albert Can Eat; Good Boys Do Fine Always; and All Cows Eat Grass.

That lot will sort you out for the treble and bass clefs, lines and spaces.

We can make music without giving the notes names but once people decided to do this, the question arose of which principle to use. The one I'm familiar with (in the sense of ‘familiar' but I can't read music well enough to play) goes A to G and then starts again. Many hundreds of years ago there was a scale that ran A to O to cover two octaves.

In France they use ‘solfa' or what Julie Andrews called ‘doh-re-mi' which started out a thousand years ago as the first syllables of some of the words in an ancient Latin hymn. So, musical notes in the Western tradition are, one way or another, intertwined with letters. At one time, the ‘ti' in the octave was ‘si', but Sarah Glover (1786–1867) from Norwich decided that in the doh-re-mi system all the names should begin with different letters. Sarah Glover is one of the hidden names of culture. She adapted the continental ‘solfa' system for a capella singing and it's her version that Julie Andrews is singing in
The Sound of Music
. She also invented the Glass Harmonicon, a kind of glass xylophone to help people establish pitch. The sol-fa and the Harmonicon were part of her plan whereby all social classes could get in perfect harmony with God – not just the rich.

The ancient Latin hymn goes:

    
Ut
queant laxis

    
re
sonare fibris,

    
Mi
ra gestorum

    
fa
muli tuorum,

    
So
lve polluti

    
la
bii reatum,

    
Sa
ncte Iohannes.

(‘So that your servants may, with loosened voices, resound the wonders of your deeds, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John.')

The words ‘ut', ‘re', ‘mi', ‘fa', ‘so' and ‘la' fall on the notes of the original sol-fa scale. It took a few hundred years to change ‘ut' to ‘doh' and to add the seventh note which Sarah Glover went on to swap from ‘si' to ‘ti'. So sitting behind the doh-re-mi system is a kind of ancient mnemonic.

THE STORY OF

•
‘N' PROBABLY STARTED
its life 4,000 years ago as an Egyptian hieroglyph with one very small ripple and one large one, meaning a ‘cobra' or ‘snake'. The ancient Semites took this diagonal squiggle, smoothed it out a bit, and gave it the sound ‘n' from ‘nun' meaning ‘fish'. This may have been logical if, as a people, their word for water-based snakes and fish was the same. By the year 1000, the diagonal had become vertical and the sign contained just one wave. The ancient Greeks took it from the Phoenicians, calling it ‘nu', and it now looked like a ‘v' added to a long vertical tail on the right-hand side. The Etruscans copied it and passed it on to the Romans who shortened the tail so that it was now a ‘v' attached to an inverted ‘v' or ‘downstroke, upstroke, downstroke'. By the time Imperial Rome was carving it on its victory arches, it was the ‘N' we know today.

n

The lower-case ‘n' appears in around
AD
800 amongst the letters standardized by Charlemagne's scribes with their ‘Carolingian minuscule'. This was adopted by the Italian printers in the 1500s as their lower-case ‘n'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

Like the evolution of ‘em' for ‘M', ‘n' derived from a late Roman, early medieval ‘ennay'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

‘N' likes vowels sounds, so we surround it with ‘a', ‘e', ‘i', ‘o', ‘u' and the vowel ‘y'. At the ends of syllables and words we can use sympathetic consonants to make ‘end', ‘rent', ‘rinse',
‘lynx', ‘sink', ‘Winslow' and ‘envy'. Preceding the ‘n' with consonant sounds we can make ‘isn't', ‘kiln', the name ‘Milne' and the ‘ichneumon fly'. With the prefixes ‘in', ‘an', ‘un', ‘con' and ‘en', ‘N' becomes more cooperative, as with ‘enrol', ‘condition', ‘under', ‘untoward', ‘anxious', ‘unbelievable' and so on. The ‘-nik' ending of ‘beatnik' and ‘sputnik', borrowed from Russian, introduced a new way to use ‘n' though I knew of ‘nudniks' (‘fools' in Yiddish) when I was a child.

As with ‘m', ‘n' doubles or stays single on the same basis: ‘run, running', ‘tune, tuning'.

Like the initial ‘M' in names and words in some African languages, an initial ‘N' appears in names like ‘Nkosi' and ‘Ngaio'. The world's most popular name is the Chinese name ‘Ng' and English speakers are learning how to say it.

‘N' on its own has had a new life in a pseudo-mathematical way where we talk of ‘the nth degree' or even of ‘n number of cases' as if it is an abbreviation for ‘any'. Another way that ‘n' survives on its own is the now acceptable way of writing ‘rock'n'roll', though ‘rock'n'roll' has now solidified as ‘rock'.

Modern phonics teaching tells children that the ‘kn' of ‘know' and the ‘gn' of ‘gnome' are ‘ways of making the “n” sound', rather than saying that the ‘k' or the ‘g' are ‘silent', which certainly makes it less mysterious and sinister. I was once so interested in ‘knock', ‘knack' and ‘knuckle' that I regularly wrote ‘neck' as ‘kneck'.