Alphabetical (21 page)

THE STORY OF

•
IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE
, the old Latin ‘i' sound was also being pronounced in a variety of other ways, the main three being: hard ‘j', soft ‘j' (‘zh') and the back-of-the-throat ‘ch' sound that is used in Spanish. In the 1500s when printing started to standardize spelling, the letter ‘j' began to be used. The Spanish were first off as early as the 1470s; French printers adopted it about a hundred years later. In Britain, where speakers retained the Old Norman pronunciation of initial ‘i' as ‘j', the letter ‘j' appeared consistently in print from about 1640.

‘J' is the Johnny-come-lately of the alphabet. Indeed, Samuel Johnson, as late as 1755, regarded ‘J' as some kind of lower order of letter, referring to it as a variant of ‘I'. In the 1950s, in my grammar school, where doodling was an important way to pass the time when lessons got tedious, there was much silent debate (secret passing of notes) as to whether the upper-case ‘J' should have a ‘hat' on or not.

The shape of the letter derives from scribes putting fancy tails on their ‘I's as early as AD 400. The Carolingian scribes of Charlemagne adopted the tail for their upper-case ‘I' so by the time the Spanish printers were looking around for a symbol to represent their ‘ch' to distinguish it from the ‘i' in the middle of words, the old decorated ‘i' was waiting for them.

j

The lower-case ‘j' seems to have first appeared in the work of French printers in the early 1600s, who adopted the dot as part of its familial relationship to ‘i'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

At the outset, ‘J' maintained its bloodline to ‘I' and was pronounced ‘Jye' to rhyme with ‘I'. This poses a small mystery: most of the changes in letter-names are a consequence of the late medieval Great Vowel Shift, but the letter ‘J' was created in England after the vowel shift. Perhaps ‘jye' and ‘jay' were both in usage and reciters of the alphabet preferred to rhyme ‘j' with the letter after it, rather than the letter before it.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

Thanks to the Normans, this is a consistent consonant in English – ‘jam jar', ‘jetski', ‘jilt', ‘joust' and ‘January' – nearly always appearing as a first letter. We don't usually combine it with other letters, though one of the spellings of ‘genie' used to be ‘djinn' and you can spell Norwegian sea-inlets as ‘fjord' rather than ‘fiord'. The most common sighting of a ‘j' on the end of words is in the word and name ‘Raj' and I wouldn't have got through university if it wasn't for regular visits to ‘The Taj'. We do have other ways of making the ‘j' sound – as in ‘gorge' and ‘bridge' – but these haven't as yet evolved into ‘gorj' or ‘brij'. I confess there are times when I've texted words like ‘frij'.

The words ‘jelly', ‘gel' and ‘jello' mean nearly the same things but not quite. ‘Jo-jo' and ‘J. J.' crop up a lot and ‘J.' or ‘Jay' are going through a popular phase for singers' names.

The word ‘judge' with its two ‘j' sounds has a weighty air about it, so when we say someone is acting as ‘judge and jury' we can sound even heavier.

J
IS FOR JOKES

T
HESE ARE FOR
sharing. It's disastrous to put any kind of commentary on jokes, but I'll make the observation that the alphabet is a source for humour because it is a seemingly obvious bit of knowledge. Alphabetical jokes are really different ways of pointing out that there is an aspect of this that you hadn't thought of. For children, there is an extra twist in that the alphabet remains mysterious until it is so embedded that they've forgotten about it. To release these hidden meanings is comedy magic – like conjuring. Talking of which, how do you turn a rabbi into a furry animal? Give him tea.

The most alphabetical kind of a joke is the ‘letter rebus' where some way of saying letters will give you a word or part of a word.

You could write, ‘Are you ready?' as ‘RUE?' (that is, if the ‘E' were coloured red).

2Ys UR, 2Ys UB, ICUR 2Ys 4ME

is: ‘Too wise you are, too wise you be, I see you are too wise for me,' though purists write it: ‘YYUR YYUB ICUR YY4ME.'

You can also write things to add up like arithmetic:

UR

2  GOOD

2  ME

2  BE

4  
GOT

10

Or: ‘You are too good to me to be forgotten.'

Try this in a South African accent:

F.U.N.E.X.? (‘Have you any eggs?')

S.I.F.X. (‘Yes, I have eggs.')

F.U.N.E.M.? (‘Have you any ham?')

S.I.F.M. (‘Yes, I have ham.')

I.L.F.M.N.X. (‘I'll have ham and eggs.')

A comment on our common biology:

    
IP

    
UP

    
we all P,

    
don't we?

People use these letter rebuses as a kind of abbreviation. In the film industry people will write ‘sound effects' as ‘sound FX' and there are shops in Essex and on the Essex Road called ‘SX stores'). Marcel Duchamp's moustached
Mona Lisa
of 1919 has the title: ‘L.H.O.O.Q.' Sound that out (in French) and it sounds like ‘elle a chaud au cul', meaning ‘she has a hot bum', or, in animal terms, ‘she is on heat'.

Which US state is this? EEEEEEEEEEC. (‘Tennessee'.)

LOV

is ‘endless love'.

N N N N N N N

A A A A A A A

C C C C C C C

is ‘7-up cans'.

R. P. I.

would be a grave error.

UAMAAME

‘You amaze me.'

NOPPPLEE

No peas please.

BAYBGGUS

Baby Jesus.

UFOFOL

‘You effin' fool' (or ‘“f” is in the word “fool”').

I met Tiger Woods once and said,

‘In your line of work,

UUUAT, don't you?'

And he said, ‘Yes.'

(‘You use a tee.')

These circulate in the playground:

Which 3 letters of the alphabet make everything in the world move?

NRG.

    
Old Mother Hubbard

    
Went to the cupboard

    
To fetch her poor dog a bone

    
When she got there

    
The cupboard was bare

    
so she said:

    
O-I-C-U-R-M-T

Which two letters are always jealous?

N-V.

What begins with T, ends with T, and is filled with T?

A teapot.

I'm only close friends with twenty-five letters of the alphabet because I hate U.

Why has the alphabet got only twenty-five letters at Christmas?

[sing] No-el, no-el, no-el, no-e-e-el . . .

Teacher: Millie, give me a sentence starting with ‘I'.

Millie: I is . . .

Teacher: No, Millie . . . Always say, ‘I am.'

Millie: All right . . . ‘I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.'

What do you call a deer with no eyes?

No idea.

What do you call a dead deer with no eyes?

Still no idea.

If you leave alphabet soup on the stove and go out, it could spell disaster.

Why can't pirates learn the alphabet?

They get lost at C.

I can never remember how to get to the end of the alphabet.

I don't know Y.

But I can say the alphabet backwards.

Go on then.

T, E, B, A, H, P, L, A, E, H, T.

But my favourite alphabetical joke of all is a joke alphabet. The cockney alphabet has to be said aloud to get the jokes but it's a good grounding in how to sound like an East Ender of old. There are many versions but these are my favourites, which I offer you now – explanations in brackets.

A for 'orses (hay for horses)

B for mutton (beef or mutton)

C for miles (see for miles)

D for ential (deferential)

E for brick (heave a brick)

F for vessence (effervescence)

G for police (chief o' police)

H for consent (age for consent)

I for lootin' (highfalluting)

J for orange (Jaffa orange)

K for teria (cafeteria)

L for leather (hell for leather)

M for sis (emphasis)

N for a penny in for a pound (in for a penny etc)

O for the wings of a dove

P for relief

Q for a song (cue for a song)

R for mo (half a mo)

S for Williams (Esther Williams – pre-war Hollywood star)

T for 2 (‘Tea for Two')

U for mism (euphemism)

V for la France (Vive la France)

W for a quid (double you for a quid)

X for breakfast (eggs for breakfast)

Y for mistress (wife or mistress)

Z for 'is 'at. (his head for his hat)

THE STORY OF

• ‘K'
STARTS OUT
life as an Egyptian hieroglyph in around 2000
BCE
. It looks like an outstretched hand, as seen from the side, with only one finger visible and the thumb laid on top. The ancient Semites took the notion of the hand, showed the palm (minus the thumb) and called it ‘kaph', meaning ‘palm of the hand' and signifying the sound ‘k'. It's a wide ‘U' with two unattached strokes within the frame of the ‘U'. This sign appears on inscriptions dating from around 1750
BCE
.

The Phoenicians turned this into a three-stroke sign, three lines converging on an apex at the base. This was around in 1000
BCE
. Two hundred years later, it has rotated to look like the reverse of our ‘K' with the downstroke as a diagonal. The ancient Greeks took this as their ‘kappa', with the downstroke now in a vertical position, and when their writing moved to be consistently left to right, ‘kappa' flipped to resemble our ‘k'. The classic Roman inscriptions added the serifs and the thin-thick strokes.

k

The small ‘k' derives directly from Charlemagne's scribes in ‘Carolingian minuscule' in the ninth century and the typographers of the 1500s picked that up for their lower case. The key difference between lower- and upper-case formations of the letter are that the lower case's upper diagonal stroke doesn't reach the height of the top of the vertical stroke.