Alphabetical (16 page)

Before print, those who could write the letters could also appear as if they owned the law and religion. They could turn pages and, by looking at the signs, they could reveal the difference between good and bad, or what could guide you, entertain you, fine you, terrify you, lock you up, or even take your life. If you couldn't read and write, you couldn't own any of this. When print was invented, new kinds of people elbowed their way into taking possession of it: merchants, tradesmen, teachers, artisans. Lords, masters and leaders could create laws; writers could
compose stories, plays and poems; master printers alone owned the secret skills to get the writing from hand-drawn script to printed page. Only they, really, knew the letteriness of each letter. That's how it stayed for 500 years, from Gutenberg to Letraset. Of course, there were writers, painters, designers and masons who could design letters but, without a printer, they couldn't distribute what they did.

Now, with our digitized, non-sticky Letraset, up on our computer screens, whiteboards, tablets and phones, the alphabet is a much more mutable, flexible tool. Even as teachers are asked to teach the correct way to write, the designers of machines are allowing people to choose what is the correct way to write. For a lot of the time, this may seem as if it's about layout or design, but behind it all lies the fact that the choice of letter (albeit from a fixed range) doesn't have to be made by someone other than you. The smallest building blocks of the shared written language (i.e. print) are more in your hands now than they have ever been. I suspect that this shift in the materials of how the written language reaches us is at the heart of why the language of writing is changing so fast. I explore this further in ‘T is for Txtspk'.

THE STORY OF

•
THE LETTER-SHAPE
of ‘G' derives from the Greek letter ‘zeta' – a letter looking like our capital ‘I'. It was pronounced ‘z' which is how the Romans picked it up from the Etruscans. However, they didn't need a continuous ‘zzz' sound in Latin. Around 250
BCE
the Romans altered its shape to look more like an ‘E' without the middle horizontal stroke and it was at this point that they decided it wasn't a ‘zzz' but a ‘hard g' as in our word ‘gap' or in the Latin word ‘agricola' (one of the first words that I learned in Latin which I have put in here for old times' sake). The letter shape then curved to a crescent so that by the time it appears in classic Roman carved inscriptions in the second century
AD
it has the shape of our serif ‘G'.

There are two lower-case Gs: two storey and single storey. The two-storey ‘g' comes from the French typeface of the 1500s, Garamond; the sans-serif, single-storey ‘g' derives from the ‘Carolingian minuscule' drawn up by Charlemagne's scribes.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

Because we can pronounce ‘g' in three different ways – the ‘g' of ‘gap', the ‘g' of ‘courage', and the ‘g' that some represent as ‘zh', which is one of the pronunciations of the last ‘g' of ‘garage' – we have to speculate why we say the ‘g' of the letter-name as ‘jee'. In Latin it was ‘gay', early French made it ‘jay'. The Great Vowel Shift turned it into ‘jee' – which is just as well given that ‘j' is pronounced
‘jay'! (See ‘
J
' for why ‘G' and ‘J' didn't kill each other in a fratricidal quarrel.)

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

The three pronunciations depend on when and how any given word appears in the language and then what changes people work upon it. When I studied Chaucer, we were alerted to the cool way in which he slots into his English a stream of words of French origin. The experts seem to know that words like ‘courage' were pronounced at that time as ‘coor-ah-zh-er', rather than modern-day ‘curridge'. However, as you will have noticed, we don't write it as ‘curridge'.

That ‘-dge' ending is one of the ‘trigraphs' we have in English – meaning three letters indicating one sound.

‘G' combines at the beginning of words with all the vowels and vowel ‘y' as in ‘gyre', along with ‘r' as in ‘grip', and ‘l' as in ‘glad'. It's the closing letter of one of our most popular word endings, ‘-ing', which is pronounced as ‘hard g' in some parts of Britain, as a soft nasal combined sound in other parts, and not at all in London or in ‘old posh' as in ‘huntin', shootin' and fishin''. Other ways of putting consonant sounds before ‘g' give us ‘bulge' and ‘sponge'.

We also have several kinds of silent ‘g': ‘gnat', ‘sign', ‘fight', ‘delight' and even Gs that look as if they should be silent but are not, as in ‘gnu'.

However, the main reason for all this is to make children (and people for whom English is an additional language) cross, unhappy or both.

We play with the ‘g' sounds by saying someone is ‘ga-ga'; people used to play with ‘gew-gaws'; Gigi was famous; you can bet on the ‘gee-gees' and say ‘Golly, gee' which is probably to do with ‘Jesus'. We talk of ‘go-getters' who may or may not have ‘get-up-and-go'. Something can ‘get my goat' and you can ‘give it a go'. Some people used to sing: ‘Ging-gang-goolie-goolie-goolie, ging gang goo . . .' The best way to offend a ventriloquist is to say, ‘Gottle a geer'. Some people have ‘the gift of the gab'.

G
IS FOR GREEK

A
S IS OFTEN
said, we owe the Greeks big-time.

First – vowels.

The words ‘facetious' and ‘abstemious' have something in common: they contain all the vowels in the order in which they appear in the alphabet.

We are taught to say, ‘a, e, i, o, u are the vowels' as if this was something correct and significant. However, there are three problems:

1.
    
If there really is something called a vowel sound, then the letter ‘y' is an invitation to say at least two: the ‘y' in ‘lovely' and the ‘y' in ‘fly'. ‘Y' should get an invite to the party.

2.
    
By far the most common vowel sound in spoken English is the ‘schwa'. Think how you say the ‘a' in the word ‘about' in the phrase, ‘I'm about six feet tall.' It's time we had a ‘schwa' letter. On the basis of the rule that writing changes according to need, one day we will. The phonetic alphabet symbol for it is an upside-down ‘e'.

3.
    
We make many more vowel sounds than there are ‘vowels'.
We represent vowel sounds by using the ‘vowels' singly, in twos, threes and using consonants as well.

The ‘schwa' was given its name by one of the Brothers Grimm – Jacob. It's everywhere. Most of the times we say the words ‘the' and ‘a' we do the ‘schwa'. We like the ‘schwa'. The ‘schwa' is like a giant octopus that spreads over the whole of speech, sucking up thousands of words, replacing ‘ay' and ‘ee' and ‘eye' sounds with the same short noise. It is also one of the reasons why trying to teach reading purely and only according to the sounds that children make is not easy and, some would say, wrong: the ‘schwa' does uniformity where the letters do difference. To make the letters sound different, you end up ‘stressing' the unstressed words like ‘to', ‘the' and ‘a', enunciating them as ‘too', ‘thee' and ‘ay'. You start to sound stressed.

Vowel sounds are ‘open mouth' sounds, where we open the mouth, often leaving the tongue sitting on the floor of the mouth. As we rattle along in speech, we alternate between ‘open' sounds and ones where we ‘close' the sound, using the back of the throat, tongue, lips or teeth or any of the three in combination with each other. We try to signify these closed sounds with consonant letters, used in ones, twos and threes (e.g. ‘f', ‘sh', and ‘str') and occasionall
y with a vowel letter to guide us, as with ‘occasionally' where the ‘si' invites us to make a ‘zh' sound.

Similarly (to illustrate point 3 from above), a single vowel letter is not the only way we signify a vowel sound. We can do it with two vowel letters, as with ‘ee', ‘ou' and ‘oa'; with ‘split' vowel letters as with the ‘i' and ‘e' of ‘site'; when guided by ‘silent' consonant letters as with ‘fight'. We also put three vowel letters together in ‘beauty' to make a sound very similar to ‘you'. If you come from London, as I do, we also make vowel sounds when we see ‘ar' in ‘bar'. We don't ‘stop' the vowel with the
consonant letter ‘r'. For me, the three letters in ‘oar' signify a vowel sound. Again, the way I pronounce the word ‘deal' could be represented as something like ‘dee-oo' where the ‘al' indicates to me when I'm reading out loud that I should say ‘oo'.

Vowel letters have quite a lot to do with the Greeks.

One story goes that the Phoenician alphabet was consonants only. Then came the Greeks. They invented vowel letters.

The problems with this story are:

a)
    
the late Phoenicians had already started to invent vowel letters;

b)
    
the Greeks adapted four already existing Phoenician consonant letters to signify the equivalents of ‘a', ‘e', ‘i' and ‘o': ‘aleph' became ‘alpha', ‘heth' became ‘heta' (‘epsilon' was added later), ‘yodh' became ‘iota', ‘ayin' became ‘o' (later called ‘omicron' and ‘omega' – or ‘o little' and ‘o big'); and

c)
    
they invented one vowel letter, the ‘u' (‘upsilon').

The ancient Greeks get the credit for inventing everything from democracy to houmous, so maybe they can take this small downgrade in inventiveness.

Now to the Greeks, their letters and the other world of the scientific alphabet. Here's the Greek one: