Alphabetical (22 page)

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

Down through the centuries, the sound ‘k', whether attached to a ‘c', a ‘q' or a ‘k', has had the option of being
called ‘kah', ‘koo' or ‘kay'. The Etruscans probably called their ‘c' ‘kah', their ‘q' ‘koo'. The Normans would have called it ‘kah' and this evolved into ‘kay'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

Apart from its silences in ‘knock', ‘know', ‘knuckle' and the like, ‘k' is a consistent consonant: ‘king', ‘kind' and ‘keen'. The typographers and lexicographers seemed to think it needed bolstering with a ‘c' when it ends syllables or words: ‘lack', ‘pluck', etc, though it can stand alone when it ‘makes cakes'. The silent ‘k' wasn't always silent and that first sound was more like ‘ken' or ‘kan'. The Yiddish word for a know-all or clever-dick is a ‘knakke' (pronounced ‘ken-ucker'), a word that has the double distinction of doing two things we don't usually do in English: pronounce a ‘k' in front of the ‘n' and double the ‘k'. As the word came my way, far too often for comfort, it seems only too familiar. In a Yiddish word sometimes used in the entertainment industry, ‘k' combines (in a rare combination for speakers of English) with ‘v' to give ‘kvetsh', a word that can mean ‘whinge' or ‘be sick'.

In the 1950s ‘k' got a boost from advertisers and brand-namers who decided that we would be more likely to buy something that was ‘kumfy', ‘kwik' or ‘kleen' and cartoonists created ‘kats' and ‘karts'.

For several centuries, any loan words from the rest of the world – especially from the British Empire – carrying a ‘k' sound seemed to be transliterated with a ‘k', perhaps to avoid the ambiguity of the letter ‘c' and the cumbersome deal with ‘q' requiring its ‘u'. So we have acquired ‘kiosks', ‘skunks', ‘kiwis', ‘kung-fu fighters', ‘kepis', ‘kayaks' and ‘polkas'. ‘K' does very well in names of Russian and Polish
origin – my mother's maiden name was Isakofsky – and the Old Norse ‘sk' sound is a ‘k' in ‘sky', ‘skin' and ‘skip' but not in ‘scum', ‘scoot' or ‘scar'. Other ways to put consonant sounds before ‘k' give us ‘silk', ‘stink' and ‘disk'.

It now exists as a stand-alone initial-word meaning a thousand metrical somethings. People can earn, run or weigh ‘100k'.

In some parts of the English-speaking world, the ‘k sound' gives people an alternative to the ‘sh-word' with ‘cack', ‘cag' and ‘cuck', or my mother's version, ‘cuckleberry'. Some people's trousers are ‘kecks', and ‘kick' is probably onomatopoeic, as is ‘click', ‘clack', ‘cluck' and ‘crack'. The ‘cuckoo' says ‘cuckoo' but who knows why ‘cook' is so percussive in sound? In Britain people do the ‘hokey-cokey' but in the US they do the ‘cokey-cokey'.

K
IS FOR KOREAN

I
N
2004,
EIGHT
years or so before ‘Gangnam Style' became the world's first YouTube video to reach a billion hits, the singer ‘Psy' or ‘PSY' (real name: Park Jae-Sang) was the subject of linguistic scrutiny. The question winging around the US press was whether Psy had been singing: ‘Kill those fucking Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives' or did the words say nothing about killing but talked instead of ‘foreign barbarian Americans'? Now that he is, by some counts, the world's most popular pop video star, millions more people have got stuck into deciphering the meaning of Psy's lyrics.

Perhaps the Korean language has never aroused as much worldwide interest. All it took was a joker to pretend to be a horse while singing of a district in Seoul. Linguists had been interested in Korean for many years before all this, partly because it is the earliest known successful example of a sudden, conscious, total transformation of a country's writing. This is what's meant by a ‘constructed script'. Of course all scripts are constructed by human beings, but the commonest way for that to happen is through incremental evolution, as with the script you're
reading now. Throughout the world, though, there are examples of one person or a small group of people devising a script for the local language and for this to become that community's written language. This is what seems to have happened with Korean. The names of the two very similar alphabets of the two Koreas are ‘Hangul' – South Korea; ‘Choson'gul' – North Korea. What follows concerns Hangul.

For centuries, it wasn't known for certain how the Korean alphabet was created but then in 1940 a crucial document turned up. It was the
Hunmin Jeongong-Eum
(literally
The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People
) published first in 1446. It told how an entirely new way of writing the Korean language was invented two or three years earlier by, or under the auspices of, King Sejong. The key passage from this document, roughly translated, goes:

    
As the speech of this country is different from that of China, this spoken language does not match the Chinese letters. So, even if illiterate people want to communicate in writing, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have had 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that this will turn out to be convenient for daily use.

This is a remarkable statement: it expresses a wish that everyone should be literate; that for this to happen, a simplified script is necessary, following which everyone can express what concerns them; and that it saddens the ruler that illiterate people cannot make their condition known. I cannot think of anything in the world of alphabets more humane than that.

What the king and his scribes had invented was more than an alphabet of letters: it was an alphabetic system where what
we would regard as letters are combined to fit the sounds of the Korean language. So where we put one letter after another to show sounds that aren't represented by a single letter (‘cl' or ‘oy', say), in Hangul the letters are amalgamated on the page, forming what we might call syllabic monograms.

Then again, in English we make ‘t' and ‘d' with the same part of the mouth. What differs between the two is what we do with our voice-box. So we might imagine, in a new Korean-style alphabet for English, the unvoiced letter ‘t' could be voiced by putting, say, another stroke across the ‘t' to make it sound like ‘d'. Now imagine that this is exactly what you do to turn the letter ‘f' to ‘v', ‘p' to ‘b', or ‘s' to ‘z'.

The same goes for other pairings, let's say, when elongating vowel sounds: turning the ‘i' of ‘pin' to the ‘ee' of ‘sheet', the ‘schwa' sound in the middle of ‘look' to the longer (and narrower) sound of ‘oo' in ‘food', or – particularly important for Korean – the addition of a ‘y' sound at the beginning of a vowel-sound as we do without an extra letter in ‘refuse' and ‘huge', but which we mark with the letter ‘y' with ‘yellow' or with ‘i' in ‘palliative'. One stroke across a vowel could indicate the addition of the ‘y' sound, let's say. The Korean way of running an alphabet, it's said, makes it very simple and easy for new learners. Admirers of Hangul have other reasons to praise it.

Our letters can be traced back eventually to the initial letters of words for images and from there back to pictograms (see ‘
H is for H-Aspiration
' where it's suggested that the letter ‘H' owes its shape to a picture of a fence). The only problem with this is that ‘fence' doesn't begin with ‘h' (though I suppose we could cheat and call it a ‘hedge').

How about another system of letter design? You analyse which part of your mouth and throat makes a sound, you create a
symbol (a stylized pictogram, if you like) to represent that action, and then you create groups of letters which use that core symbol for the different parts of the mouth and throat. I've already mentioned ‘t' and ‘d' as linked but you could also add ‘n' which we make in almost the same place of the mouth with very similar tongue movements. It's just that we ‘explode' ‘t' and ‘d' but create a continuous sound with ‘n'. So let's have one core symbol for all three – and make it so that it looks something like a tongue meeting the very front of the roof of the mouth just above your front teeth. How about a semicircle to represent the roof of the mouth, a short line down to represent the teeth and, where those two lines meet, draw in a line to represent the tongue: a ‘c' balanced on the stroke of an ‘i' with a line into where they meet? That'll do for the ‘t'.

Now, put a stroke somewhere to indicate you've ‘voiced' it to make it into a ‘d'. You'll need another symbol (a curvy line?) to indicate a continuous sound to turn it into an ‘n'. You could repeat the process to create ‘p', ‘b' and ‘m', indicating closed lips, or the sounds of ‘k', ‘g' and ‘ch', indicating the back of the mouth or the entrance to the throat.

In effect, this is what the amazing Hangul letters do.

Because it is all so consciously designed for purpose, people have tried to figure out where it all came from. All the Korean consonants, it's claimed, derive from imitations of the mouth movements needed to make the sound. For vowels, the traditional answer is that they derive from and build on three symbols: •, – and |. Here, • symbolically stands for the (sun in) heaven, – stands for the (flat) earth, and | stands for an (upright) human.

What also remains remarkable with the Korean example is that there was an already existing system of writing which was, to all intents and purposes, overthrown in its entirety – not adapted. This wasn't done because a new power invaded and
demanded that the people switch to the new rulers' writing system – as has happened in world history – but because one part of the ruling elite decided that a total change was the only way in which everyone could read and write easily.

Another reason to create an alphabet is because one doesn't exist for that language. Up until the early nineteenth century the Cherokee nation didn't have a writing system. A man who wrote his name as Ssiquoya (English speakers tended to call him George Giss, or George Guess, though nowadays he is called Se-quo-ya) is the only known example of someone from a non-literate people independently creating a working system of writing. Se-quo-ya, who lived from around 1770 to 1840, worked as a silversmith. What's truly remarkable is that he was himself non-literate prior to devising his writing, which is called a ‘syllabary' rather than an alphabet because the symbols represent what we would think of as syllables, though Se-quo-ya experimented first with a one-symbol-per-word system.

He started work in around 1809, soon switching from word-symbols to syllables, ending up with eighty-six ‘letters', later reduced to eighty-five. He took the letter shapes mostly from a mixture of Roman and Greek letters, though the sounds don't match the Roman and Greek ones. It took him about twelve years to devise, adapting it as he went, and pretty soon after it appeared, it's claimed that most of the Cherokee nation was literate. As a writing system, Se-quo-ya's syllabary is alive and well amongst some 10,000 Cherokee people. Newspapers, books and websites are being written with the syllabary, and there's a readily available keyboard ‘cover' to type it with.

Another example of an indigenous inventor of a script is Solomana Kante who, in 1949, invented N'Ko, meaning ‘I say' in the Manding languages of West Africa. Kante created this
writing system as part of the increase in what the poets Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire called ‘négritude' – a rising awareness of the need for indigenous African peoples to assert their identity and culture for themselves rather than being written ‘for' or ‘about' by the colonial powers. I would like to think of Kante's invention as an earlier literal (pun intended) way of ‘writing back' too. Today, his script is used in Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire.

Other kinds of invented alphabets are: those introduced by missionaries from outside; technical alphabets such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with specific technical purposes (see ‘
S is for Signs and Sign Systems
'); shorthand alphabets invented in order to write more quickly (see ‘
P is for Pitman
'); asemic alphabets (made-up writing with no direct relationship between specific signs and specific meanings); fictional alphabets to fit fictional languages as with Klingon (
Star Trek
), Aurebesh (
Star Wars
), D'ni (Myst computer game) and from the daddy of fictional scripts, J. R. R. Tolkien, who composed at least nine – in chronological order: Tengwar of Rumil or Sarati, Gondolinic Runes, Valmaric, Andyoqenya, Qenyatic, the New English Alphabet, the Goblin Alphabet, Tengwar of Feanor, and the Cirth of Daeron.

When Captain Cook was the first European on the island he called ‘Owyhee' in 1778, he and the merchants who followed him were fascinated by the islanders' dialect. American Protestant Missionaries arrived in 1820 determined to learn the language and construct a working alphabet. Initially using twenty-two Western letters, they discovered that the sounds of Hawaiian could be transcribed accurately (and taught much more easily) with just thirteen letters and a special letter to represent the glottal stop crucial to Polynesian dialects – the ‘okina'. Their aim was obvious, to convert the islanders to Christianity and (eventually) to translate the Bible into Hawaiian.
Other scripts devised by nineteenth-century Christian missionaries, include Cree, the major language of the Algonquian family in North America; the Fraser script for writing Lisu, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan province in China, and in Burma, India and Thailand; and the Pollard script, devised for the Ta Hwa Miao people of Yunnan province. They all represent efforts to use an alphabet to convert people to a new way of thinking. It also enabled one native wag to write: ‘Once we had the land and they had the Bibles. Now we have the Bibles and they have the land.'