Alphabetical (13 page)

THE STORY OF

•
‘E' STARTS OUT
life 3,800 years ago as a stick man with two arms but only one central leg, a continuation of his body. This is a Semitic letter probably named as ‘he' and pronounced ‘h'. By the time the Phoenicians get hold of it in 1000
BCE
it looks like a reverse form of our ‘f' but with two horizontals instead of our one. It's still pronounced ‘h'. The first ancient Greeks kept this but later either they or the early Romans flipped it. In around 700
BCE
the sign came to indicate the sound ‘ee'. The Romans created the serif, thin-thick ‘E'.

e

Latin manuscripts from around
AD
450 start to show the upright stroke bending into a crescent shape until the top two lines join up. It was this shape that the printers of the 1500s took as the lower-case ‘e'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Norman French came to Britain pronouncing it along Etruscan lines as ‘ay' and the Great Vowel Shift explains how it became ‘ee'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

In almost all counts, ‘e' comes out as English's most popular letter and with the rise of emails and e-commerce (‘e' for electronic) its future at the top of the charts is assured. It's present in some of the most commonly used words: ‘the', ‘me', ‘he', ‘she', ‘we', ‘they', ‘them', ‘her', ‘hers', ‘their', ‘theirs', ‘here', ‘there', ‘where', ‘some', ‘same', ‘are', ‘be', ‘have' and ‘were', along with many past tenses
(ending in ‘-ed') and plurals ending in ‘-es' and ‘-ies'. As with all English vowels, ‘e' is given many jobs to do, very few of which are 100 per cent consistent. We can be sure that in consonant-vowel-consonant formations like ‘peg' and ‘bet', it will be pronounced with the ‘short e' – apart from in New Zealand.

We have several ways of getting it to signify the long ‘e' – doubling it in ‘feet', adding ‘a' in ‘seat', putting another kind of ‘e' one consonant later as in ‘discrete' and ‘Pete'. The one-consonant trick used to be called ‘the silent e' or even ‘the magic e'. This was to ‘explain' to children that ‘hat' turned to ‘hate' by magic. Present-day wisdom tries to show that the ‘a' in ‘hate' is made by both the ‘a' and the ‘e' one consonant later.

The history of this represents one of many efforts to make sense of English spelling. Some Old English words had a final ‘e' that was sounded as a ‘schwa' sound, as with ‘name', pronounced as Germans do today ‘nah-mer' (but without the ‘r' being voiced). However, when ‘wif' acquired its ‘long i' as we say it today, the spelling reformers of the seventeenth century decided that long vowel sounds, like ‘ay', ‘ee', ‘i' (as in ‘I' on its own), ‘o' (sounding like ‘owe') and ‘u' (sounding like ‘you'), should have an ‘e' on the end of the word to tell readers what to do, thus: ‘same', ‘Pete', ‘wife', ‘gnome' and ‘plume'. All well and good, but there are some words ending with ‘e' where the ‘e' doesn't do this kind of work for us: like ‘some', ‘have', ‘shove' or ‘gone'. Loan words like ‘cafe' (which has mostly dropped its French accent over the ‘e') are a rule unto themselves.

Spelling reformers would have us adopting double-vowel letters: one long, one short, then all these complications
could be stamped out. It would up the alphabet to thirty-one letters by adding a long ‘a', ‘e', ‘i', ‘o' and ‘u' but would simplify spelling by miles. If for a moment we imagined that the long vowels were ‘aA', ‘eE', ‘iI', ‘oO' and ‘uU', we could write, ‘MiI wiIf and iI lov eEting a niIc hot meEl at middaA.' NeEt, eh?

The little ‘eh?' sound is extremely useful, as it gives us a way of asking questions in different ways depending on the tone of the ‘eh?' It can be inviting, contemptuous, rhetorical, all-knowing, wink-winking and so on.

‘Eeee' can mean excitement or fear or a mock-version of both. ‘Eek' is even more jokey. A Jamaican singer in the 1970s called himself ‘Eek-a-mouse'. One girls' skipping song begins: ‘Eevy-ivy-over'.

For ‘er' see ‘
R
'.

e
IS FOR e. e. cummings

I
N ABOUT
1960, my father showed me some poems by e. e. cummings. (Note: not E. E. Cummings.) For a while, I felt dislocated, at a loose end. The point about our conventions of print are that they tell you where you are, without telling you. That simple little duo, the full stop and capital letter, not only tells us of initials, abbreviations and the beginning and end of sentences. Since their invention, they have been part of how we have invented continuous prose. In the history of writing as a whole, they are relative newcomers and their arrival was slow and inconsistent.

Using capital letters to begin things started out as early as the fourth century where they were used at the start of a page. Take a look at the illuminated manuscripts in the great national libraries and you'll see that the scribes must have taken many hours creating these staggeringly ornate openers. By the fourteenth century, many scribes were using capitals to begin sentences, so by the time printing began with Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in the early 1450s, this was the convention that he used too. He seems to have overreached himself a little though.
On his first go, his plan was to typeset everything except the capital letters, leaving a gap for them to be added on the second run-through. Having used black ink first time round, he now fixed the capitals in the frame, changed the ink to red and ran the sheet through for a second time. After a few goes at it, he decided to jack it in and do the capitals by hand. Gutenberg is consistent with this, but it wasn't until the sixteenth century that pretty well all printed material was sticking to the ‘sentence must begin with a capital letter' system. Note, it is not grammarians or scholars who are deciding this. It is inky-handed sons of toil.

Gutenberg lived from around 1394 to 1468 and his first work was in Mainz, polishing gems and turning out mass-produced mirrors for pilgrims. His assistant, Peter Schoeffer, a former scribe, is given credit by some for having designed some of the press's letters.

For many years it was thought that Gutenberg created the ‘punch matrix' system of printing. Think of a rectangular piece of steel. On one end, the mirror-image of a letter is carved, probably by a highly skilled metal-worker, like a goldsmith. This piece of steel was used as a punch, to make an indentation of the letter in a piece of softer metal, like copper. This is the matrix. To make the ‘movable' type (in other words, a metal letter which will be mounted into the printing machine), the printer pours molten metal (an alloy of lead, tin and antimony) into the indentation in the copper matrix.

It was long believed that Gutenberg invented the punch matrix method, but this has been challenged. In 2001, two researchers at Princeton University, Paul Needham and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, studied Gutenberg's type by looking at close-up digital images of individual letters in his Bible, produced around 1455. They found that the letters varied so much in appearance that
no two pieces of type could have been cast from the same matrix. In other words, the punch matrix system may not have been what Gutenberg used after all.

Needham and Agüera y Arcas think that Gutenberg may have used an earlier technology to make his type, using moulds of sand. Because these moulds had to be broken to remove the finished piece of type, a new mould had to be used for each individual letter or punctuation sign. This technology had been used in Asia long before Gutenberg's time.

If this is right, then Gutenberg must have had to create thousands of pieces of type. About 300 different sorts were needed for his two-volume, 1,282-page, mechanically printed Bible (which was in Latin), of which he produced 180 copies, including upper-case and lower-case letters, punctuation marks, special characters, and common abbreviations. Each page required approximately 2,600 individual pieces of type.

To digress for a moment: an interesting question to pose here is whether the invention of the practice of using capital letters at the start of sentences helped construct formal prose or whether it's the other way round: that formal prose in its popular printed form adopted capital letters to mark what was already there. Just to be clear, we don't talk to each other in formal prose. A transcript of you in conversation will show you interrupting yourself, tailing off, interrupting others, completing what others say, repeating last words, using many exclamations and single words, far more pronouns, far more colloquial and local dialect forms, and slang connected with your locality, work or leisure activity. This would suggest that we don't think in formal prose either – or at least not for much of the time.

Meanwhile, we call on formal prose to do many things: tell fictional stories, give accounts of events, present arguments,
summarize views, pass on news, inform friends of arrangements, make pleas and complaints, give reports of people's behaviour, outline the characters of others, make conclusions for future action and so on. In all these cases and more, the capital letter, in tandem with the full stop, does its work as the marker, separator, segregator, announcer, and initiator of the next thought. The reason why it's hard to learn when we're children, and hard to do when we have to write in a way that is not familiar to us, is that our thoughts really don't flow in sentences. We hold several ideas or several feelings in our heads at the same time, often not similar in length or even in order of importance. Continuous prose – with its capital letters and full stops for sentences – is a way of putting this into a particular kind of order and it's apparent in the very first page of Gutenberg's Bible: Genesis 1.

People around Europe were quickly on to Gutenberg's invention. In 1458, Charles VII of France sent Nicolas Jenson to Mainz to spy on Gutenberg's ‘invention of printing with punches and curious characters'. By 1470, Jenson was producing stunningly beautiful printed books in Venice, including some of the first to use ‘roman' type in imitation of the kind of lettering you can see today on the Romans' arches and tombstones. His innovation was to create lower-case roman-style letters to match the majuscule letters from the Romans' own time. In his texts, full stops and capital letters reign. Making type and using it to print is highly skilled, laborious and extremely heavy work. Clearly, it got the better of one or two printers in these early days. The great Dutch printer Gheraert Leeu, who produced a book of fables in 1480, ended up being killed by his punch-cutter. It seems to have been a ‘labour dispute'.

We know almost nothing about how Gutenberg set his type or printed his Bible (apart from how many pieces he needed
to do it), but we do know quite a bit about traditional printing techniques in later years.

Early printers set type by arranging individual pieces of type in a line on a tool known as a composing stick. Think of the ‘Scrabble' rack where the letters of type are put into a groove. The person who did this work was known as the ‘compositor' and he worked from a manuscript. Letters were sorted into box-shaped divisions in two ‘cases', an upper case for the capital letters (‘majuscule') and a lower case (placed below the upper one!) for the small ones (‘minuscule'). Once each line of type was completed, it was moved off the composing stick onto a board known as a ‘galley'. When enough lines of type were stacked above one another to make a page or a column, they were tied together and locked into a frame called a ‘chase'.

The chase was placed in a construction called a ‘form' which was in turn placed in the bottom portion, or ‘bed', of the press. Printers spread ink on the form using tools known as ink-balls. These, balls of wool covered in leather and attached to wooden handles, were first coated in a sticky oil-based ink and were then beaten against the form.

Finally, dampened paper was placed over the inked chase, and, with a hard pull on the press, a heavy plate, or ‘platen' was brought down onto the other side of the paper. This pressure caused the raised surfaces of the type to leave behind on the paper their impressions in ink.

Probably picking up from the layout of the Bible into verses, each headed by a capital letter, poetry took the convention of starting each line with capital letters. In 1476, the English printer William Caxton did just this with his edition of Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales
. By the time I sat face to face for the first time with e. e. cummings' poems I was thoroughly and overwhelmingly tutored
in the convention that the sentence is a capital letter plus full stop, and a poem includes that convention but adds on the poetry capital letter. Though this looks neat, it pretty well defies any purpose of logic, other than to help the printer and poet announce that what you are reading is a poem.
Gawain and the Green Knight
, from a hundred years or so earlier, uses a capital only for the beginning of each verse or stanza.