Alphabetical (19 page)

Because I played rugby, ‘H' is connected in my mind to being unable to kick a ball over it but ultimately the rugby posts too can be traced back to some kind of fence that blokes with nothing else to do would practise kicking inflated pigs' bladders over. It all fits together.

And so to hotels and historians.

The world is full of people laying down the law about the ‘correct' choice between linguistic alternatives: is it ‘a hotel' or ‘an 'otel'; is it ‘a historian' or ‘an historian'? People try to derive rules from stressed and unstressed syllables, whether ‘hotel' is a French loan word, and so should be pronounced ‘otel' and so on. If the unstressed syllables rule applied, then we should say ‘an hostility' and ‘an hysterectomy'. If the loan-word rule applied then we should say, an ‘oop-la' at the fair. Once again, I will pull out my logic-of-the-variants argument: all the above are fine. There is no single correct version out of the above. You choose. And once you've chosen, please don't tell someone else that they've got it wrong. We have no academy to rule on these matters and, even if we did, it would have only marginal effect, and wouldn't apply across all English-speaking communities in the world. Just think, if people didn't choose how to pronounce things on the basis of wanting to be understood, then the whole of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Romania would be speaking Latin. The people living in those territories made choices on how to speak and ended up speaking languages that are no longer Latin. Pronunciation changes because people make choices to change it.

Talking of Latin, I would like to bring in Catullus here. Gaius Valerius Catullus (84–54
BCE
) lived in pre-Imperial times, in the Roman Republic. He came from the ‘equestrian' class, which meant high status, high prestige – so high in fact that his parents
knew Julius Caesar. Catullus spent most of his adult life in Rome and prominent contemporary Romans appear in his poetry including Cicero, Caesar and Pompey.

One hundred and sixteen of Catullus' poems survive to the present day, thanks to the Italian copyists of the medieval period, the printers of the early modern period and an amazing find in 1896 by William Gardner Hale, the American scholar and expert on the anticipatory subjunctive in Greek and Latin. He found a Latin manuscript from around 1390 of Catullus' poems lying in a ‘dusty corner' of the Vatican Library where it had been ‘lost' for several hundred years. The manuscript happened to have been catalogued wrongly. There is a good reason why this was done: many of Catullus' poems are highly insulting; some are about love and sex; some are about love and sex between men; and the word ‘obscene' has been attached to a good few of them.

Here are the first two lines of Catullus' poem to Arrius:

    
Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda vellet

    
dicere, et insidias Arrius hinsidias.

Without necessarily knowing what this means, you can see in the first line there are the words ‘chommoda' and ‘commoda' and in the second ‘insidias' and ‘hinsidias'. Catullus is remarking on the use of our friend ‘h'. The lines translate roughly as: ‘Arrius says “hopportunity” when he wants to say “opportunity” and “hambush” for “ambush”.'

The last two lines of the poem read in Latin as:

    
Ionios fluctus, postquam illuc Arrius isset,

    
iam non Ionios esse sed Hionios.

They translate roughly as:

    
After Arrius has been with the Ionian waves,

    
it's no longer Ionia but Hionia.

Catullus has picked on this feature of Arrius' speech in order to mock him for a very particular reason: he thinks that Arrius is trying to sound more Greek than he is. With Greeks hired in Rome as teachers and scholars, with their ideas and literature given great esteem by the Romans and being recycled by Roman scholars, ‘trying to sound Greek' was an act of pretension. From the evidence of Catullus' poem, it seems as if the little out-breath of ‘h' could carry all that significance. In different ways, whether from its presence, absence or with an alternative sound being used, it can still bear burdens just as heavy.

Poor letter ‘H'.

THE STORY OF

•
AROUND 1000 BCE
, ‘I' was the letter ‘yod', meaning the whole of the upper limb, i.e. the arm and the hand as one item or unit. The ancient Semitic, pre-Phoenician form of the letter looked like a backwards ‘F' with a tail on the bottom. Perhaps this derives from an arm held aloft with a stylized hand on the end? The sound designated by the letter was the ‘y' sound we make at the beginning of ‘yod' or, in modern English, at the beginning of, say, ‘yes'. The Greeks adopted this letter as ‘iota' and it became not much more than a vertical two-jointed squiggle. By 700
BCE
it became the vertical straight line we know today. The Romans added the serifs.

i

Charlemagne's scribes gave us the ‘minuscule' version around
AD
900, a tiny head plus a small downstroke with an upward tail on the bottom – almost a shadow of the early Greek ‘iota'. The Italian printers of the 1500s added an accent above the stroke which slowly evolved into the dot. This leaves us with a cluster of words about dots, jots and iotas, all signifying next to nothing and the proverbially pernickety necessity of dotting your i's. Crossing t's can wait till we get to ‘T'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Normans pronounced this letter as ‘ee' which evolved in the late medieval period into the present-day ‘eye' sound. It has occurred to me that the old rhyme, ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum . . .', with the first ‘Fee' usually pronounced ‘fee', holds a memory of this vowel change.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

‘I' in consonant-vowel-consonant words like ‘pin' is ‘short', and in combination with an ‘e' after the last consonant becomes ‘long' as in ‘pine'. We use ‘i' to combine with the other vowels to give us quite an array of single and double sounds (diphthongs) as in, say, ‘daisy', ‘dial', ‘view', ‘pie', ‘sleigh', ‘sleight', ‘quoit', ‘riot', ‘ruin', ‘suit' and ‘suite'; and it combines with the letter ‘r' to give us ‘first', ‘fire', ‘iron', ‘fair', ‘coir', ‘choir' and ‘liar'. We also manage to keep it as a separate sound in words like ‘lying' or in loan words like ‘naive' and names like ‘Eloise'.

In the Roman alphabet there was no ‘J'. Many words that we start with a ‘j' derive from Latin words that began with an ‘i': ‘iustitia' (justice), ‘Iunius' and ‘Iuno' (giving us the month of June). However, we have to remember that at this stage in Roman Italy these words were pronounced with the ‘y' sound of the opening sound of ‘yes'. This continues in modern Italian. When Latin evolved in the mouths of the Norman French, the ‘y' sound became the way we pronounce the ‘j' in ‘judge' today. So, the Normans arrived making a ‘j' sound at the opening of some words (and some syllables) that were written with an initial ‘i' (like ‘iustice' and ‘majestie'). The speakers of Old English had no ‘j' sound in their speech.

So, we have to say that amongst the words spoken in Britain, there was a time when the letter ‘i' also signified in some circumstances the ‘j' sound. When I was ten or eleven, I remember being taken by my parents to a little tower opposite the Houses of Parliament. The Beefeater-like guard pointed at the initials ‘I. R.' carved on a door or wall and said, ‘I bet you don't know what that “I” stands for,' and I said, ‘James? John?' And in that moment my
path towards a particular kind of irritating know-all way of life lay clearly ahead of me.

One of the most famous sound-plays with ‘i' was in the song about the ‘itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka-dot bikini'. The phrase ‘In the beginning' from John 1: 1 is ‘i'-heavy and may well help to capture our attention.

In the 1950s, we were told that the plural of ‘radius' is ‘radii'. If we failed to write this, the skies would open and a large hand would grab hold of us, remove us from the classroom and fling us into a raging furnace.

I
IS FOR IMPROVISATION

T
HE ALPHABET OFFERS
improvisers two overlapping playgrounds: a place to represent sounds beyond what we think of as words – or indeed any sounds around us, of cars, animals, wind, avalanches; and a place to invent new things you can do with letters. Here's the problem: you want to show someone blowing a raspberry. You don't want to write: ‘And then she blew a raspberry at him.' You want to be more immediate, following the timing and chronology of the dialogue. He says, ‘I'm too tired to do the washing-up.' And the raspberry is her response. How to do it? Unlike ‘moo' or ‘burp' or ‘crash', there is no consensus on what to do about raspberries. Is it ‘thpbpthpt'? Or ‘ffpbttphhhftt'? Or ‘thhhbbt'? Or ‘pppphhffttt'?

This comes together in the world of cartoons where the writers and artists enlarge, shrink, twist, and squeeze letters to do all these things at the same time: represent animal noises, snoring, farting, grunting, cars revving, aliens being threatening and so on. Because the letters are often drawn, not typeset, the letters themselves express the sound. This is obvious to us now, but of course it had to be invented.

Perhaps Aristophanes ought to get some credit here. At the Festival of Dionysius in Athens in 405
BCE
, he put on his play
The Frogs
. His frogs have the power of speech but they also make frog noises, which the god finds very annoying. Aristophanes had to use Greek letters to represent frog noises: Βρεκεκεκ
ξ κο
ξ κοάξ, which when translated into English comes out something like this: ‘Brekekekèx-koàx-koáx'. This is sufficiently on the button for zoologists to have identified them as marsh frogs.

Animal noises become standardized in two ways: in the noise itself and in the official naming of what they do. In British English (because that's what the animals in Britain speak), dogs go ‘Woof!' and they bark. Cats say ‘Miaow' and they mew. Pigs say ‘Oink!' and they grunt. Many British Aristophaneses are responsible for these inventions and of course there are thousands more across the world: in France, ducks are nasal and say ‘Coin, coin' (pronounced ‘kwang-kwang'); in Turkey, horses' hooves go ‘deg-a-dek'; in Italy cockerels say ‘Chicchirichí'. When I was a boy, frogs said ‘Croak'. Under American influence, they now say ‘Ribbit, ribbit', adapted for this joke: ‘Why are frogs the most educated animals?' ‘Because when you say, “This is a good book,” they say, “Read it, read it.”'