Alphabetical (6 page)

One note of caution: because to tell the story as an ‘evolution' in a lone chapter called ‘A is for Alphabet' might suggest some kind of speedy, easy-flowing passage, with one stage moving inexorably into the next. This would be a gross misrepresentation. All we can say is that at any given moment in time, a writing system is asked, by the people who know how to use it, to perform tasks. If any of these tasks break down because the symbols don't work or are thought to be insufficient or redundant, then it will follow that people will invent new symbols and processes for writing and reading.

There can be no full, unabridged story of the alphabet. That can be found only in the total mass of everything that has ever been written. This book is twenty-six scenes – with digressions – taken from the drama.

THE STORY OF

•
THE FIRST FORM
of ‘B' is an Egyptian hieroglyph from 4,000 years ago, meaning a ‘shelter' and representing the sound ‘h'. If you can't see a shelter in ‘B' it will help if you first rotate the ‘B' so that the vertical is horizontal and the loops sit below. Break open one of the loops and you have a door, a room and a roof over both.

The Semitic word for ‘house' is ‘bayt' (beginning with ‘b' of course) and this explains the shift from ‘h'. The letter itself was rotated to a vertical position by the Phoenicians in around 1000
BCE
though at this stage it was facing left or, as we would say, ‘backwards'. The Phoenicians wrote from right to left, so when the Greeks switched their own writing from left to right, they flipped the ‘B' to face in what we would think of as the ‘right' direction. They called it ‘beta' and closed the open loop so that it was now one upright and two closed loops.

A further way the word ‘bayt' (or ‘beth') survives is in Hebrew: Bethlehem is the ‘house of bread'.

The Romans added the serifs.

b

The first creators of ‘b' were the monks in their scriptoria, speed-writing ‘B' in around
AD
500. If you can get away with one loop, why bother with two? When the first typeface designers in around 1500 were creating their upper and lower cases (terms referring to the two boxes which held the two different kinds of metal letters for the printing machine), they liked the single-loop ‘b' and it's stuck ever since.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Etruscans in around 700
BCE
adopted the Greek ‘beta' and reduced its name to something like ‘bah' or ‘bay'. ‘Bay' was how the Romans and the Norman French pronounced it. The Great Vowel Shift turned it in the mouths of most English speakers to ‘bee' though ‘bay' survives in, say, Irish speech.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

Consonant sounds can be grouped according to how we make the particular sound. ‘B' and ‘p' are clearly linked because we do virtually the same thing with our lips. What makes the difference is whether we ‘voice' the letter or not – in other words, whether we use our vocal cords or not. Then again, the movement of the lips is not all that different from making the ‘m' sound, the difference being that with ‘b' we ‘stop' the sound coming out, but with the ‘m' we carry it on.

In the evolution of languages, there seems to be a relation between ‘b' and ‘v'. People who travel across Europe will be familiar with ‘tabernas' and ‘taverns'. Down the centuries some peoples have chosen to change this consonant sound by moving their lower lips forwards or backwards.

We are fond of words beginning with ‘b' in English; it combines well with vowels and the consonants ‘l' and ‘r' to make ‘blade' and ‘brave'. In loan words it combines with ‘h' for ‘bhaji' and ‘y' in ‘Byelorussia'.

It doubles in verbs: ‘rub, rubbing, rubbed' and in words like ‘bubble', but not when it's in ‘-e words' as with ‘tube, tubing'. Putting a consonant sound in front of the ‘b' gives us ‘asbo', ‘albatross', ‘amber' and, if you say it quick enough, ‘Anne Boleyn'.

Sound-play with ‘b' gives us ‘babble', ‘baby', ‘bubby', ‘bib', ‘Bob', ‘bibble', ‘B. B. King', ‘boo!', ‘bah!' (meaning ‘you're talking nonsense'), ‘blubber', ‘to blab', ‘a blabbermouth', an old children's song which began: ‘Bee bo babbity . . .' and a group of words including ‘bang', ‘bish, bash, bosh' and ‘biff'.

Some ‘b'-heavy expressions include ‘the big bad wolf' and ‘bye-bye blackbird'. ‘By hook or by crook' is a double expression in which the two halves are linked both by the rhyme and the initial ‘b' in ‘by'.

B-words are not as rude as the F-word but still too rude for me to say on the BBC, or the ‘Beeb' as I've ended up saying it.

B
IS FOR BATTLEDORE

T
HE WORLD OF
teaching children to read is full of words like ‘drilling', ‘forcing' and ‘whipping', and in the midst of it sits the ‘battledore', an object and a word which together imply battling and beating. If you travelled in the French countryside a few decades ago, you would have seen women standing or sitting next to a square pond, with stone or concrete edges sloping down to the water's edge. Women would soap up a piece of washing and then beat it with a wooden object in the shape of a bat or racket, known as ‘un battoir'. I have one from the Pyrenees.

In England this was called a washing ‘beetle' or, in anticipation of John, Paul, George and Ringo, a ‘beatle', a ‘beetle-do' or a ‘battle-door', eventually being standardized as ‘battledore'. Presumably, children, the great improvisers, would borrow these from their mothers in order to play a game which evolved into ‘battledore and shuttlecock'. The first toy manufacturers made ‘battledores' so that children could play the game and not nick their mothers' beatles.

None of this would have anything whatsoever to do with
the teaching of reading, if it weren't for enterprising folk from at least as early as 1660, who thought of putting letters, syllables and words on these toys. A few decades later they created fold-out cardboard booklets in the shape of battledores, and then from there produced teaching-to-read primers which were in effect plain book-shaped primers. Benjamin Collins, the man credited with inventing this cardboard battledore in 1746, is thought to have sold 100,000 of them between 1770 and 1780.

Battledores were at one point so common that they gave rise to an expression, ‘He doesn't know B from a battledore', meaning he doesn't know very much, perhaps along the lines of an expression my father used, ‘He doesn't know his arse from his elbow'. The battledore in its ‘beatle' form might have little more than the letters of the alphabet on it, but as it evolved, it acquired such texts as how to ‘learn Plural and Singular: YOU to Many, and THOU to One' (1660), or woodcuts of Jack the Giant Killer or Old Mother Hubbard, so that by the 1830s you had a complete package: upper- and lower-case alphabet, numbers, lists of syllables, like: ‘ab ac ad af ag'; lists of words, like: ‘add bad lad mad pad sad'; or rhymes, like:

    
Go now to bed,

    
For you are fed.

    
If Jem can run,

    
He has a bun.

    
Now my new pen

    
Is fit for Ben.

    
Tim put the fox

    
In to the box.

    
We had a cow,

    
Cat, cur, and sow.

    
You all may go

    
To see the doe.

We can see the Victorian ideal at work at the heart of teaching children to read: order in letters, syllables, words, the creation and the universe.

The first concerted and thought-through efforts at teaching the reading of English (as opposed to Latin, Greek and Hebrew) to people outside of the aristocracy had a similar end in mind: devotion. To paraphrase the famous story, we might say, ‘What big letters you have!'

‘All the better to read the Bible with.'

The first instrument for this purpose – and it was an instrument – was the ‘horn-book': a board, usually made of oak, about 9 x 5 inches in size, with a handle at its base, making it look rather like a square table-tennis bat. On one side, was a piece of horn, to protect the piece of paper that the user would slide underneath it, on which was printed the alphabet and the vowels. Below these there was usually a series of syllables (the ‘syllabary') in rows ‘ab eb ib ob ub', ‘ac ec ic oc uc', ‘ad ed id od ud', ‘ba be bi bo bu', ‘ca ce ci co cu', ‘da de di do du' and so on. Underneath this was often written: ‘In the Name of the Father, & of the Son, & of the Holy Ghost. Amen.' Underneath this was the Lord's Prayer in exactly the same wording that I was taught in school assemblies from the age of four.

It is thought that the simplest form of these began appearing some time in the mid-fifteenth century. There were more luxurious versions made of silver with bas-reliefs on the rear side. The lettering started off by being ‘black letter' or gothic style and the syllabary became more complex. An alternative
form of the horn-book was the ‘criss-cross row' which was shaped more or less like a crucifix. This strand of teaching reading developed into the battledore.

Needless to say, these bats and bat-shaped objects were not the only means of teaching children to read through the period I've described, 1450–1800. From at least as early as 1538, printers started to produce books, calling them ‘primers' or ‘ABCs', usually including the catechism, the Litany and other religious texts.

Classes in ‘Charity' schools could be as large as fifty or sixty, crammed into tiny rooms, with writing done in sandboxes or on slates with chalk or hardly at all. The main method of teaching, according to an account from 1654, seems to have involved the children reading out loud in a group, one syllable at a time, pointing at the syllables with their ‘feskews' or pointers. The children had to take turns reading the syllables for seven pages, again and again, until they had learned these off by heart, and so on for twenty-one chapters. The chapters included such lines as: ‘Ah! wee see an ox dy by an ax' and ‘Let the welch belch in a halch, if they filch' (from
An English Monosyllabary
, 1651). Though I can figure out that the message here is that Welsh people burp and steal things, I'm not sure what a ‘halch' is. A hutch?

Another method often used was to teach reading through spelling. First the alphabet was taught and then words were spelled out and learned as spelled. When writing on slates was the order of the day, this was sometimes done to order, in unison, letter by letter or word by word, with children teaching each other down the line with ‘the appearance of a machine' as a report from 1815 puts it. Given that this was the precise moment in history when children were being drafted into the factory system, this metaphor seems to serve as evidence that the methods we use to teach reading match the era in which they are employed.

Being debated were such questions as:

i)
        
whether it was best to learn to spell first in order to read

ii)
       
which syllables were best learned first

iii)
      
what constitutes a syllable and a correct division between syllables in a word

iv)
       
whether it was best to learn the alphabet in chunks or the whole lot in one go

v)
       
whether to learn the letters in orders other than alphabetical

vi)
      
whether to ‘sound' the letters as they were thought to appear in English phonology rather than simply using the letters' names

vii)
     
whether it was a good or a bad idea to spend a deal of time teaching the children to make the shapes of the letters with similes about half-moons or rakes for their configurations

viii)
    
whether the similarity in shape between groups of letters should determine the order in which they were taught