Alphabetical (38 page)

As a dictum it certainly applies to the various sign systems used by blind and deaf people. Braille is a system of writing based on raised dots which readers feel with their fingertips and it too owes its origins to military endeavour. Napoleon wanted a secret code system for conveying messages and Charles Barbier de la Serre, a captain in the army, devised ‘Ecriture Nocturne' – ‘Night Writing'. It's based on a code that Polybius devised – the same Polybius who wrote up hydraulic semaphore. The basic trick with ‘Night Writing' is to draw up a matrix, 6 × 6; then fill the matrix with letters or letter-combinations, and these letters can be represented by the numbers you read off the top and side, rather as we identify a particular street with map
referencing. Barbier figured you could replace the letters with dots. The problem was that it needed so many dots that it was too complicated for people to learn. However, Barbier also figured that it was a system that blind people could use and in 1821 he took it to the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille.

Braille was born in 1809 in Coupvray, a small town east of Paris, where most people were ‘petits cultivateurs' (small farmers). His father was a leather-worker and saddler. Like all children of farmers and artisans, Louis spent time playing around his father's gear. When he was three he was in the workshop, trying to make holes in a piece of leather with an awl; he pressed down hard to get the point into the leather, and the awl skidded and stuck into one of his eyes. No treatment could save the eye; when it became infected, the infection spread to the other eye and, by the time he was five, he was completely blind.

His parents taught him how to get about using a cane and he was allowed to go to the local school. From there he went to the National Institute for the Blind's school in Paris where the children were taught to read by the ‘Haüy System'. Valentin Haüy was born into a family of weavers, and was educated by monks at the abbey where his father rang the Angelus bells. He became a skilled linguist and interpreter to Louis XVI. In 1771, when he was having lunch in the Place de la Concorde, he was horrified to see blind people being mocked in the street during the religious parade known as ‘The Fair of St Ovid'. They were given dunces' caps and giant cardboard glasses and were forced to play musical instruments that they didn't know how to play.

On impulse, he decided to set up a school for the blind and there he devised a system of reading based on the idea of raised letters, produced by embossing the paper. In 1785, he founded the Institute for Blind Youth. The republicans of the French
Revolution regarded him with some suspicion and ‘retired' him albeit with a state pension. In 1806, at the request of Tsar Alexander I, he went to St Petersburg to found a school there.

Back at the National Institute for the Blind's school, Louis Braille grew frustrated by the tiny number of books – all very expensive and delicate – which had been given the Haüy embossing treatment. Even more frustrating was the fact that it wasn't possible to write this way. Meanwhile, Louis's father gave him letters made from leather and Braille was able to write home to his family. We can get some idea of what motivated him from his own writings later: ‘[It] is vitally important for us if we are not to go on being despised or patronized by condescending sighted people. We do not need pity, nor do we need to be reminded we are vulnerable. We must be treated as equals – and communication is the way this can be brought about.'

In 1821, Braille encountered Barbier's ‘Night Writing' and decided that this was the system he could use to create a blind person's alphabet. He had pretty well worked it out by 1824, when he was only fifteen. Braille created his own raised-dot system by using an awl, the same implement which had blinded him. Later, he worked on the development of what would become the ‘brailling machine' which children have used with me when I've done poetry workshops in blind schools. The non-electric kind was quite heavy-handed. It required a good old push on a group of keys to emboss the card with the right combinations of dots. Louis turned out to be a great student and ended up teaching History, Geometry and Algebra at the school. He was also a talented musician and went on to become a professional organist in two Paris churches.

You might have thought that the Braille method would have been hailed as a great breakthrough by the Institute but the system wasn't used there in Louis Braille's lifetime; in fact, the
head teacher was sacked for transcribing a history book into Braille. Braille himself died in 1852 at the age of forty-three. Two years later, largely due to the pupils' demands, the Braille system was finally adopted at the Institute.

Having served many blind and visually impaired people extremely well for over 150 years, the system is in some decline, particularly in the face of computer-based speech recognition and screen-reader systems.

Much more complicated, but just as inspiring, are the many systems of signing that deaf and hearing-impaired people have developed all over the world over many centuries. As early as the fifth century
BCE
, Socrates refers to one of these and by the seventeenth century in Europe, people were trying to formalize the matter, basing signing on parts of the body whose initial letter would provide the letters of a word, while others used hand and finger shapes to represent letters and words. When I've worked with a signer in a performance, I often look across to them to see how they are turning my poems into signing. What always strikes me is how the system uses the entire body: fingers, hands, arms, chest, face and whole body movement.

Unlike the sign systems devised by sighted devisers of sign languages in the seventeenth century, most signing is not directly related to either a written or spoken language. So, rather than thinking of relating a sign to, let's say, a written or spoken form of ‘hello', we should think of it as ‘a greeting in sign language' and its ‘meaning' is in the way the greeting is expressed with hand, face and body. However, that too is misleading if we just think of signing as a form of mime – nor are the signs equivalents to, or borrowings from, the gestures that hearing people use. Most signs in sign language are not related directly to the objects, descriptions and processes being communicated, just as
the word ‘apple' doesn't look, sound or feel like an apple. Though some mimetic features are involved, as a system it doesn't rely on mime.

Like all languages, the signs rely on mutual intelligibility. This means that where two deaf or hearing-impaired people get together, and no one is specifically teaching them a sign language, they will invent and develop their own – surely a great testimony to the fact that human beings need to cooperate and communicate with each other. In many circumstances, where families have a mix of hearing and hearing-impaired people, the family will adapt a given system or, where there is none, they will invent and develop their own. This has been observed all over the world. Different situations produce different requirements: two hearing-impaired people wanting to understand each other are not the same as a room of people, some of whom have impaired hearing and some who don't; they are different again from a hearing-impaired person wanting to be understood by someone who has no hearing impairment; or an international meeting of hearing-impaired people and so on.

Across small and large communities, many sign languages have developed and so the question of standardization has arisen many times. There are several front-runners and different countries have tended to develop their own versions, American, French, British and so on, though not all the deaf and hearing-impaired people in that country will use the ‘national' system. What's more, different self-defining communities develop their own variants.

As with all disability matters, things have changed rapidly over the last few years, with deaf and hearing-impaired people wanting to take control of services and the systems of communication. Power has shifted. Some people working in this area have favoured lip-reading either as an adjunct to signing or as
a substitute for it. The deaf people I've met use lip-reading only as an occasional alternative or additional way of interpreting but, famously, it is very open to misunderstandings. To say in English, in many English dialects: ‘Where there's life, there's hope' looks very similar to ‘Where's the lavender soap?', though your facial and body movement is not likely to be the same!

Now when I visit schools, I'm often given an amplifying system to wear round my neck and I'm told that the hearing-impaired children are using it in conjunction with lip-reading me. However, listening and reading are quite obviously not the same as talking and writing. Signing remains a key way in which deaf and hearing-impaired people can produce thoughts and feelings in language, not just receive them.

THE STORY OF

•
T'S ANCESTOR IS
found in ancient Semitic inscriptions from 1800
BCE
as a sign looking like our simplest lower-case ‘t', i.e. without an upward tail-flick on the bottom. By 1000
BCE
, Phoenicians were calling this sign ‘taw' meaning a ‘mark' and it signified the ‘t' sound. Placing a line across another to make an ‘x' or a lower-case ‘t' is one of the simplest ways we can show that ‘I was here'. A single line can be a scratch produced by mistake or by an animal. Cross the line with another line and it's clear that something has been intended by someone.

The ancient Greeks adopted the Phoenicians' ‘taw' in around 800
BCE
, calling it ‘tau'. The Greeks put the cross-stroke on the top like our upper-case ‘T', perhaps to distinguish it from ‘X', which in rough writing can slip round to the vertical. The Etruscans adopted ‘T' in around 700
BCE
and passed it on to the Romans a hundred years later. By this point the Romans called it ‘te' (pronounced ‘tay') and on their most fancy inscriptions in Imperial times it acquired its serifs and thin-thick lines.

t

Charlemagne's scribes kept the ‘hat' on ‘T' but they started to curl the bottom of the downstroke in their ‘Carolingian minuscule' script of the tenth century. The stroke across the downstroke doesn't appear until around 1200 and Italian printers in the late fifteenth century adopted this form as their lower case. The ‘t's were crossed.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Norman French arrived in Britain calling it ‘tay' and
by the process of the Great Vowel Shift this sound turned to ‘tee'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

We make ‘t' in our mouths in more or less the same way as we make ‘d' but without using our vocal cords. Because it appears in ‘the', ‘it', ‘to', ‘at', ‘they', ‘them', ‘this' and ‘that', it's in the top two words for frequency in English, only beaten by ‘e'.

Consonants that come after it at the beginning of words give us most commonly ‘tr' (as in ‘tray') and the two kinds of ‘th' sounds as in ‘thorn' and ‘this' (see ‘
D is for Disappeared Letters
' for how English used to manage this). The word ‘two' indicates an old pronunciation you can revisit with ‘twice', ‘twine' and ‘twain'. The loan words ‘tsar' and ‘tsetse' give us a rare ‘ts' start to a word.

At other places in words we can use consonants after the ‘t' to make ‘hurtle' and plurals like ‘bats'. Consonants in front of the ‘t' can give us ‘start' and ‘past', the chocolate firm ‘Lindt', ‘lift', the ‘gh' words like ‘right' and ‘thought', ‘empty', ‘plenty', a loan word like ‘diktat', ‘silt', ‘fact', ‘apt', ‘mint', ‘next' and ‘betwixt' (a favourite of mine), and the artist's name ‘Klimt'.

A ‘t' on the end of some verbs gives us an alternative way to make the ‘simple past' as in ‘dreamt' and ‘learnt'.

‘Double t' appears when we make ‘cut, cutting' and we can get through a lot of Ts for ‘tut, tutting, tutted' though the sound is sometimes written ‘tsk-tsk'.

We can end words with one ‘t' or two, and make distinctions in meanings that way: ‘but' and ‘butt', ‘set' and ‘sett'.

The diminutive ‘-let' enables us to have ‘piglets', ‘ringlets' and the like, and if we retain the French form we have
‘omelettes' while Americans have ‘omelets'. The ‘-tte' ending also crops up in the old word ‘fytte' meaning ‘a part of a story or poem', in the name ‘Charlotte' and in ‘St Mary-atte-Bow'.