Alphabetical (11 page)

d

Our ‘d' emerges in Italian manuscripts around
AD
400, perhaps as a result of turning carved letters into one penstroke, albeit with the upstroke bent to the left. The early printers of around 1500 opted for this single-loop and stroke for their lower case but made the upstroke as vertical as the one on the ‘D'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Norman French pronounced it ‘day' and the Great Vowel Shift turned this to ‘dee'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

It's easy to think of letters as having only one ‘value' but the moment you listen to someone whose first language is different from your own, you start to hear subtle differences. We make the ‘d' sound by hitting the roof of our mouth with the tip of our tongue. The further forward the tongue goes, the nearer it gets to the sound of ‘th' in ‘them'. Indeed, many speakers of English say words like
‘the' and ‘them' so that they sound like ‘de' and ‘dem'. The further back the tongue goes, the nearer it gets to the way many Indian speakers say a word like ‘dal'/‘dhal'. In a place like London, where speakers of ‘dem' and many speakers of the ‘d' as in ‘dhal' brush shoulders, we should expect some changes to ‘d'. What's more, some US speakers of English say ‘todally', i.e. ‘voicing' the ‘t'. I can remember being picked up for doing this in the 1950s, perhaps as a result of imitating cowboy movies. Keen-eared phoneticians have spotted aristocratic Brits like Prince Harry, or privately educated politicians like Tony Blair and George Osborne, doing the same.

‘D' combines with all the vowels and the vowel ‘y', with ‘r' for ‘drab' and ‘drizzle', and with an ‘h' in the loan words ‘dhoti' and ‘dhow'. At the ends of verbs it doubles as in ‘rid, ridding' but is single in ‘ride, riding'. It also doubles in words with short vowels like ‘muddle' and ‘piddle' but not with long vowels like ‘oodles of noodles'. Putting a consonant sound before a ‘d' gives us ‘old' (though I'm someone who pronounces this word more like ‘oh' with a ‘d' on the end), the shop ‘Asda', ‘abdicate' and ‘and'. Django Reinhardt's name has the virtue of including two consonant combinations with ‘d' not usually found in English: ‘dj' and ‘dt'.

D-Day must be just about the most successful use of the name of a letter ever invented. The term ‘D-Day' pre-exists the Normandy Landings as it was the phrase used by the military for any opening day of a major manoeuvre, just as ‘H-hour' marked the opening hour. ‘D' doesn't stand for anything more significant than ‘day'.

Sound-play with ‘d' gives us ‘dad', ‘daddy', ‘da', ‘dadda', ‘Dada', ‘doodle', ‘diddle', ‘doddle', ‘dud', ‘dude', ‘DD' and
‘Didi', ‘doo-doo', ‘doh!', ‘der!', ‘duh!', ‘fuddy-duddy', ‘doo-be-doo-be-doo', ‘Scooby-dooby-doo', ‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle' and ‘Doo-wah-diddy-diddy-dum-do-ee-day'.

Familiar ‘d' expressions include ‘every dog has its day' and ‘do as you would be done by'. In dull moments, you can try saying, ‘Ken Dodd's dad's dog's died'.

D
IS FOR DISAPPEARED LETTERS

O
NE OF THE
strange things about studying Anglo-Saxon, or ‘Old English' as we were asked to call it, is that it was quite possible to spend three years working away at it without ever taking a look at the writing itself. When I say ‘writing' I mean the actual, material stuff. This was in the 1960s and the texts that we looked at were mostly in printed booklets with light-blue paper covers, with light-red writing on the front. Maybe this was to give us the impression that Anglo-Saxon was a light, fluffy sort of language and if we studied it long and hard enough we would become light and fluffy too. Inside the booklets, the piece we were going to study was in what can only be called a hybrid typeface. Modern printers had modified the Old English handwriting into a font. The real thing looks quite different.

Perhaps I missed the lecture where they urged us all to nip off to the British Museum where for free we could take a look at
Beowulf
, sitting in a glass case in the gallery of specimens of writing right the way up to the Beatles via William Blake, Wilfred Owen and many others. Years later, when I was making a series of radio programmes called
Early Versions
, the
manuscripts had all been carefully moved down the road to the British Library, and I was able to get up close and intimate with this extraordinary manuscript. To this day it bears the signs of having been flung out the window of a burning library. Of course it also bears the signs of the person who decided to write down this extraordinary story.

Why would any English people – generally reckoned to be Christian monks – want to spend weeks and weeks of their lives writing down what is mostly a pagan tale of a warrior-superhero from what is now southern Sweden, fighting a ‘grim and greedy' monster, then the monster's mother and then a dragon? When you study this at university, you can easily devote all your time to learning very technical things about, say, the rhythms of the epic verse, the alliterative patterns, the grammar of the words, the meaning of the imagery and so on so I wasn't given an answer to that question, and I haven't found one since.

The material the monk has written on is ‘vellum', or sheepskin. And, when this is pointed out to you, you can see how biological that is. As the
Beowulf
scholar, Kevin Kiernan, put it, ‘Before Beowulf could slay his monsters, someone had to slay a lot of sheep.' A small flock of sheep was killed in order to make up the pages of the book; a large flock of people got to work preparing the sheep's skins. These had the flesh scraped from them and were then washed, limed, de-haired, scraped, dried, washed again, stretched on frames, scraped again to remove marks and blemishes, smoothed, polished and softened with chalk. The sheets were then folded into ‘gatherings' of eight or sixteen pages, and marked up with lines and margins. We do something like this ourselves when we fold up a sheet of paper to make a little booklet.

But wait a minute: do you write your letters and words on what was the hairy side of the sheepskin or the body side?
Or both? The
Beowulf
scribes (or are they poets?) did both. On occasions, in particular the second of the two scribes squashed his writing up to fit it all into the page. Monks wrote with quills, feathers plucked from the tails of geese, swans or crows, that had been boiled and cut. Ancient inks were made from mixtures of wine, soot, blackthorn wood, oak gall and even cuttlefish ink. I'm not sure which recipes were used by the
Beowulf
scribes but we know for certain, as we look at the manuscript, that a thousand years ago, someone breathed on every page, dipped his quill into an inkhorn probably made from a stag's antler and scraped the quill across the sheepskin.

But what lettering did the monks use? Here we have to bring in two terms: Carolingian, and Uncial.

Carolingian was Europe's first agreed standard handwriting, circulating from the the ninth century onwards. It was in what we would call now ‘lower case', or more properly when it comes to handwriting, ‘minuscule'. It's called Carolingian because it derives from the court of Charlemagne, who, ironically, was not thought to be fully literate himself. He was presumably too busy becoming a soldier-king to worry about learning how to write.

Uncial was an older handwriting, written in capital letters, or ‘majuscule', found in manuscripts from as early as the third century. One form of it was imported into England from Ireland as the Anglo-Saxons converted from the Norse religion to the Irish form of Christianity, roughly between
AD
500 and 700.

But, of course, nothing in language is as cut and dried as this (apart from vellum), and when it comes to specific manuscripts we see various kinds of blends of these two scripts. So, the modernizers, writing in the Europe-wide Carolingian, often chose to hang on to some of that old-fashioned Uncial stuff – but which letters? ‘A', ‘D', ‘E', ‘F', ‘G', ‘H', ‘R', ‘S',
‘C', ‘O' and ‘Y'. On reading this you have already undergone a part of the training to become a paleographer, someone who can decipher manuscripts. One tool in the paleographer's toolbox is a mnemonic to remember these Uncial ‘retentions': ‘“Deaf grass” may be “coy”,' they mutter to themselves as they pore over an ancient piece of literature. Or, in the letters concerned: ‘dheaf ghras' may be ‘coy', i.e. an anagram made from those letters ‘A', ‘D', ‘E', ‘F', ‘G', ‘H', ‘R', ‘S', ‘C', ‘O' and ‘Y'.

So is
Beowulf
a ‘“deaf grass” may be “coy”' manuscript? No, it's a different blend: it's a manuscript that uses Uncial ‘F', ‘A', ‘D' and ‘G'. In paleographers' slang it's a ‘FADG' manuscript – with a bit of doing the ‘s' in both Uncial and Carolingian – even on occasions both in the same word.

At one level, uncovering and describing all this may seem like dusty, scholarly work, conducted in the soft sifty atmosphere of ancient libraries, far removed from reality. Yet, in truth, this is what has revealed the human and material stuff of putting letters on pages, much of which involved what are now lost or rare skills. And if you look at the
Beowulf
manuscript, these are not the only lost things. There are unfamiliar letters sitting there, apparently doing the job that letters do: telling the reader to make a specific shape with his lips, tongue and teeth and a specific effort with his lungs and throat. They are unfamiliar because they have disappeared. So, though this language (according to the way I was taught) was called ‘Old English', and though you and I were taught that our alphabet has twenty-six letters, and this ‘fact' is a fixed point in our intellectual landscape, over time this matter has been more fluid.

So here are the disappeared letters:

1.
THORN

The noise you make when you see this letter could be the first sound of the word ‘thorn', or the sound you make for the ‘th' in ‘this' and ‘then'. You'll notice that you make the same movement of the tongue to make the two sounds, but at the outset of ‘then' you use your voice-box; at the outset of ‘thorn', you don't (in the terminology: this is ‘voiced' and ‘voiceless'). Incredibly, the letter ‘thorn' still hovers, ghostlike, over our high streets, in ‘Ye Olde Fishe and Chippe Shoppe'. As ye know, the word ‘ye' is a way of writing one of the many different ways people pronounce ‘you'. But this ‘ye' is not ‘You Old Fish and Chip Shop', it's a ‘the'. And that's because it's a memory of trying to write one form of the letter ‘thorn'. Blame the old ‘gothic'-style printers for that, who made the letters ‘y' and ‘thorn' look almost identical. The French printers didn't have the letter ‘thorn' in their box of tricks anyway, and it became common to replace the ‘thorn' with a ‘y'. Thus ‘ye' for ‘the'. At some point, when people wanted their signs to look olde, they retained that ‘ye' instead of writing ‘the'. It's a kind of retro inside retro.

Later, when we get to ‘V is for Vikings', we'll read the runes and see that it's even more retro than that.

2.
WYNN

The first word in
Beowulf
is one that many translators translate as ‘Lo!' but it could be any exclamation to announce that I am about to begin, such as: ‘Hey!' or ‘Right!' – or even rappers' ‘Yo!' Even so, when you hear the sound of it, as deduced by scholars, it sounds like someone with a Geordie accent saying ‘What!' rather pedantically by sounding the ‘wh' with a blowy sound. Lectures were optional at Oxford in 1966, so I went along to my first lecture on
Beowulf
and, appropriately enough, the first lecture was on the first word in
Beowulf
; a whole hour on the word I might write in modern letters as ‘hwaet'. I confess I wasn't gripped. Somehow or another, I just couldn't sustain an interest in ‘hwaet' for much longer than about twenty minutes.