Alphabetical (12 page)

I am not going to let this deter me from trying to interest you in two things: the ‘w' and ‘ae' bits of the word. When you look at the manuscript of
Beowulf
you'll see that these are both disappeared letters or nearly. The ‘w' doesn't look anything like a ‘w'. It looks more like sawn-off ‘p' but difficult though it is to force yourself to say it, the sound we should make when we see it is the ‘w' sound at the beginning of ‘win', and ‘wynn' is what it's called. This is followed by an ‘a' and ‘e' seemingly stuck together and this is the ‘ash', which I'll look at in a moment. The reason why the Old English scribes needed to use a letter for the ‘w' sound was because the Roman alphabet that they worked from didn't have a specific letter for that sound, for example the word ‘equus', written by the Romans as ‘EQVVS'. This was probably pronounced at the time something like ‘ekwoose' but, as you can see, the ‘w' sound is carried by the first ‘V' while the second ‘V' is the ‘oo' sound. Old English had plenty of ‘w' words – the next word in
Beowulf
is a word we still have: ‘we' – so the ‘wynn' was a useful letter. In the end it became ‘double u', but of course should have been, as the French call it, a ‘double v'.

3.
YOGH

This is the ‘yogh' and it asks us to make the sound that most Germans make when they say ‘ich', which most Scots people make when they say ‘loch', which Welsh people make when they say ‘bach', and which some Liverpudlians make when they say ‘back'. As the Old English said this kind of sound a good deal, it was very useful to have a letter for it. They had the Roman ‘g' which we see in the first line of
Beowulf
. The ‘yogh' was used in the ‘Middle English' period (late 12th–15th centuries) to represent the ‘ch' sound, perhaps as ‘g' had other work to do.

Why did it disappear? It seems as if we can blame the French printers again. They weren't very keen on the English people's non-Roman lettering and decided that they would represent that sound with a ‘gh'. It reminds me of spelling lessons at school where I wondered why in heaven's name it was ‘night', not ‘nite'? But what if it was once pronounced ‘nichte' with the ‘ch' sounding like the ‘yogh'? Indeed, it was – in which case, what we should be lamenting is that we lost the ‘yogh'. Bring back the ‘yogh', I say. Oh no, we don't pronounce it as ‘nichte' any more. OK, scrap that suggestion then. As you can see, spelling reform is not easy.

Dumping blame on long-dead French printers is easy and ultimately lazy of me. The truth is that the years between the Norman invasion and, let's say, the 1390s, when Geoffrey Chaucer was writing, are an incredible period of language change for what we call ‘English'. In 1066, as William's army defeats Harold's, Old English and Norman French were two different
languages almost entirely mutually incomprehensible apart from a cluster of words of Latin origin which had been incorporated into both as part of Christianity. By the 1390s, Chaucer writes his
Canterbury Tales
in what is essentially a ‘creole', an elegant amalgamation of aspects of both languages. The core grammar is English with some Scandinavian touches (English acquired ‘they', ‘their' and ‘them' from the Vikings: see ‘
V is for Vikings
'), though some vocabulary (‘beauty', ‘courage', ‘gentle', ‘pork'), and some systems of turning one kind of word into another (‘morphology'), like adding ‘-able' on to the end of words, were incorporated from Norman French.

Picturing this is not easy. At the outset, the court and those aristocrats rewarded with land for their endeavours in winning the Battle of Hastings spoke French. However, you can't rule over a people for ever without learning their language. And if you serve masters who speak another language, you start to acquire their language too. After a while, some masters fell on hard times and had to hang out more with servants, and some servants did pretty well and ended up being masters.

Meanwhile, a new class of people emerged, buying and selling to both sides of the class divide (‘merchants' – a French word), some working as professionals in the offices of the state or the church: taxmen, customs officials (like Chaucer), spies, clerics, teachers and the like. In this mix of people, the languages also mix. However, it's not an even blend. The most Frenchified ways of speaking and writing English belong in the main to those uses of language which are to do with ruling, making and administering laws, the expression of ideas and religion, and most literature. The least Frenchified ways of speaking and writing belong in the main to those uses of language which are to do with the activities and ideas of the labouring classes and their domestic life, of small-time
shopkeepers and lowly officials like sextons. To this day, the language-use of an English building worker and his or her family is likely to contain fewer words of French origin than the language-use of a lawyer and his or her family.

So, my suggestion that French scribes were to ‘blame' is unfair. They were not free agents. Ultimately they served their masters, masters who belonged to what I've called the more ‘Frenchified' layers of speakers and writers of English. What's more, though scribes in medieval society look as if they're an elite in charge of the language, at most they are guardians of its written form. The evolution of speech is beyond their control. If either by consensus or by decree, when a decision like changing the ‘yogh' to ‘gh' is made, it is highly unlikely to affect pronunciation. That's being sorted and re-sorted in the jostling encounters of the populace.

4.
ASH

So now we're back with the third letter in
Beowulf
, as in ‘hwaet'. I'm calling this a ‘disappeared' letter but it has disappeared fully only in my lifetime. When I was a child, the books I read usually adopted it for ‘mediæval', now usually written as ‘medieval'. You might still spot it in the word ‘æon' or even ‘æther'. However, it was never usually recited as part of the alphabet.

The ash was originally a rune, looking like an ‘f' with slanting strokes, but in its Roman form it's a ‘ligature', tying together ‘a' and ‘e'.

5.
ETH

This letter, which came into Old English from the Irish scribes, is the voiced or voiceless ‘th' as in ‘them' and ‘thought'. If you want to know how phoneticians describe what you're doing with your tongue to make this sound, it's a ‘dental fricative'. (You may find it satisfying to say ‘voiceless dental fricative' three times quickly.)

You have to get to line three of the
Beowulf
manuscript to meet ‘eth' in what looks like ‘huda' which translates as ‘how the' – pronounced, it seems, not a million miles off the way some Scots or Geordie people would say ‘how the' today: ‘hoo tha'. ‘Eth' and ‘thorn' were interchangeable.

6.
INSULAR G

This letter crops up twice in consecutive words on the second line of the
Beowulf
manuscript. The words are ‘gear dagum' meaning ‘former days'. This ‘g' is usually called ‘insular G' or ‘Irish G' because it too came from the Irish scribes. The matter of how it is pronounced is not an easy one, with the experts deciding that, at various times, it can be pronounced as a ‘g' as in ‘go' or as in ‘massage', as a ‘ch' as in ‘loch', or as a modern ‘w', ‘x', or ‘y'. In Old English manuscripts you can find it sitting alongside the modern-looking Carolingian ‘g' doing the same job but also doing these other jobs. Bit by bit, ‘insular G'
combined with the ‘yogh' and eventually disappeared altogether, though it's used in writing modern Irish.

7.
ETHEL

This Latin ligature of ‘o' and ‘e' survived until the 1960s in words borrowed straight from Latin, like ‘fœtus' and ‘subpœna'. Originally, it did the job of the double ‘ee', the longer form of the short sound made in the word ‘kin'. Like ‘ash', it didn't make it to recitations of the alphabet. ‘Ethel' is the name of the rune that was sounded as ‘oe'.

Sometimes, people who talk of lost letters add some symbols devised for syllables and words, the most common of which is the ampersand. I think this is what philosophers would call a category shift. That's to say, though these symbols look like letters being used on the alphabetic principle, they belong in reality to a ‘syllabary' – the kind of writing system that the ancient Sumerians used: phonological but with signs representing that language's syllables. So, pedantically and fussily, I'm going to leave the ampersand, the ‘that' and the ‘eng' to another time, another place.

Also nudging to take part in this parade of letter-ghosts is the famous long ‘s' of some early print which looks like an ‘f' but isn't an ‘f' as it has no cross-stroke halfway down its upright, and always indicates an ‘s' sound, never an ‘f' sound, even though the letter ‘s' was available. (See ‘
S is for Signs and Sign Systems
').