Alphabetical (23 page)

It is related to the motives behind horn-books, battledores and primers (as in ‘B is for Battledores'). These invented alphabets are like a lever, levering people into close, word-by-word contact with the texts of a religion. If nothing else, this reminds us that the religion in question prizes not only the word as a concept – as John 1: 1 says, ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God' – but also the written word. Whether you're Christian or not, it is clear that many ideas about the meaning, value and purpose of writing originate in what Christians did with their sacred texts.

The point at which some Christians thought that it was necessary for everyone to read these is not only crucial in the history of the alphabet and writing but it is also double-edged. On the one hand, it involved drawing people into a set of ideas that was considered to be absolute and true and that had to be obeyed. On the other hand, the idea that everyone should be able to read it and talk about it was itself dissident: both authoritarian and subversive at the same time.

You can see this dual nature playing out in the ideas and practices swirling around in the English Civil War. A newly literate class overturned what had been thought of as divine power – the monarchy – and replaced it with a centralized
republican power, while a pamphlet war unleashed ideas about equality of worth and power for the people. As we will see in ‘P is for Pitman', the idea persisted that letters and writing can bring about equal status and it's no coincidence that Isaac Pitman's father also adhered to the form of Christianity followed by those who had overthrown the monarchy 150 years earlier.

I think it's probable that today the alphabet and writing are on a cusp. On the one hand, the alphabet is used to encode the language of power: governance, administration, law and business are conducted using the alphabet. Plus ça change. On the other hand, we've invented new ways for that power to be conducted, starting off with radio, film and TV; the storage of voice and imagery on discs, tapes and now digital systems; moving on to voice recognition on computers and smartphones, turning text to speech or speech to text; automatic translation; video conferencing . . . At present, most schooling handles these ways of passing information and ideas between us as ephemeral and trivial, and those who design education become interested in digital media only when the alphabet is used for word processing and surfing the internet for information for essays.

Something odd is going on here. People are governed through the medium of the alphabet
and
through digital media. People are initiated into the alphabet in mostly traditional ways going back hundreds of years. People are initiated into digital media through going to the movies, watching TV, listening to the radio and using their computers. In very short and irregular bursts, with an overwhelming emphasis on alphabetical methods, they are only initiated into digital media in low-status lessons in school. (Schools are not judged or ranked according to test scores in this area.) The idea that schools could spend regular and serious time critically examining digital media, or indeed
developing new and creative ways of using them, is thought of as not ‘rigorous' enough – even a bit off-the-wall. In recent years, this time has been squeezed by alphabet-based activities. Even the study of the digital alphabet itself – computer-programming languages – is a low-status activity.

Yet in my own work, for most of the time I operate in a dual world of alphabet-digital literacy, flipping between recordings and texts, comparing recordings, using recordings in order to speak without text and so on. YouTube recordings, DVDs, and JPEG voice recordings of speeches, readings and performances pass between me and my employers and producers. I am sent a digital copy of a politician's speech from last week, which I will be discussing live with two academics; I am sent copies of the 1931 German film
Emil and the Detectives
and the 1935 English version so that I can write a short essay for a DVD pack. This partly involves comparing the visual languages of the two films.

I made videos of myself performing my poems. In order to do this I used the alphabet to write the poems, and an autocue to read them. Children watch the videos without reading the poems. People ‘grab' the videos on their computers and use software to chop up the videos so that I appear to be saying odd, crazy or obscene things. They use the literacy of computer language (which they don't need to learn) to create a new kind of art form. When the US and the UK decided that it was a good idea to invade Iraq, General Colin Powell used the editing of digital media at the United Nations in order to show the world that this was a necessary and desirable thing to do. He and his colleagues operated in this dual world. Through that dual world he convinced sufficient numbers of people in powerful positions to turn the idea of invasion into a fact. This was high-status digital alphabetical activity.

Inventing and using alphabets (or any other method of encoding ideas, laws, administration, business and feelings) involves the matter of power. The alphabet had exclusive rights on this from ancient Egyptian times up until the invention of radio, film and TV. At that point, the masses couldn't get their hands on the new forms. They were mostly consumers. In the present era, the majority of people can record images, speech and written words and then transmit them locally, regionally or even worldwide. Though the processes involved are owned by large corporations, the access is mostly open. Is this a Korean moment, where people in power have helped create a new ‘literacy' so that the people not in power can express themselves? Or is it a Puritan moment, where the people learn the new literacy in order to be initiated into a doctrine – in this case consumerism? Either way, to me it seems suspect and absurd that education – the litmus paper of what a society prioritizes – is not yet about critically examining these questions, whether through investigation and analysis, or through creating similar or alternative forms.

I'll finish this chapter on invented and new writing with a mystery. Consider the Voynich manuscript. It dates from the early years of the fifteenth century, probably comes from northern Italy, and is named after the book dealer who bought it in 1912. It is a beautiful little book, looking like a ‘herbal' with pictures of plants, each accompanied by some text. There are scientific pictures and diagrams that look astronomical, pharmacological and biological.

Two problems: the pictures and the text. Most of the plants are fictitious; the meaning of the diagrams is obscure; no one has ever been able to read the writing. The world's greatest codebreakers have been put to work on it, including Enigma
specialists, but so far, nothing. Not a dicky bird, as my father would say in rhyming slang.

The alphabet is an invented one, drawing on about the same number of letters as ours, and the language, say the experts, has the feel of a real language. Every mark and combination of marks has been put to the test but so far, as I've said, nothing. Not a jot.

People are coming to the conclusion that the whole thing is an elaborate hoax. The problem is that no one knows why anyone would want to do such a thing. To my mind, it's case closed. Of course it's a hoax. At the height of the Renaissance, with every part of the literate and educated world intent on pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, along comes a joker, an elaborate form of the court jester, who thinks that he can produce a parody of the whole movement. He inverts the idea of discovering and creating knowledge. He creates a pseudo-scientific document, which no one can understand. What's more, no one ever will. He uses writing – the very thing that has evolved to reveal, explain, investigate and communicate wisdom; the very system devised in order to wield power, to encode and enact laws – only to block that process and prevent it happening. It doesn't communicate. It doesn't convey wisdom. It doesn't encode crucial knowledge which will enable someone to exploit resources, or secure great wealth, which in turn will help him to enslave thousands in order to go on exploiting those resources and running governments.

The Voynich manuscript looks as if it could be a handbook for a merchant venturer, someone waiting at court in order to secure monopoly rights to dig valuable stuff out of a bit of land or to collect the fruits of the earth in order to sell them. At the very moment that it looks as if it's doing the job that a book should do, the author doesn't allow it to happen. With one
beautifully executed volume, he causes instability and doubt at the heart of the production, ownership and use of knowledge. It's a carefully constructed absurdist joke.

I salute the hoax alphabet of the Voynich manuscript.

THE STORY OF

•
IN ANCIENT SEMITIC
inscriptions from around 1800
BCE
, there appears a hook-shaped letter called ‘el' meaning ‘god'. The Phoenicians straightened out the hook and reversed it, calling it ‘lamed' (‘lah-medd'), meaning the stick you stuck into cattle to get them going. And you could certainly prod cattle with a stick looking like a ‘lamed'. The ancient Greeks took ‘lamed', facing in what we would think of as the wrong way round, flipped it over when their writing settled down as running from left to right and by 725
BCE
renamed it ‘lambda'. Up till Roman times, the bottom stroke tended to run upward at a diagonal, but the Romans turned it into a right angle and in their classic inscriptions added the serifs and the thin-thick strokes.

l

The lower-case ‘l' derives from Charlemagne's scribes and their ‘Carolingian minuscule' lettering. Across twelve centuries this letter varies from being an austere little single unadorned line to being decorated with various kinds of top or bottom serifs, tails or angled lines. Helvetica, the sans-serif typeface I am using on my word processor, creates some strangely ambiguous-looking words where the capital ‘I' is the same as the lower-case ‘l', both of which could at first glance look like the number ‘1'.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

Incredibly, the name has survived from ancient Semitic times but as the sound of the letter can be made continuously, it may have had this long life so that people could
point it out clearly: ‘I said, “ellllll”.' In medieval times, in some European languages it was ‘ellay'.

In some modern British accents, the final ‘l' is more like a closing ‘w' sound so the letter for them is pronounced as a very compressed form of ‘e-oo-w' (where the ‘e' is like ‘e' in ‘bed'.)

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

For many speakers of English, this is one of the letters whose pronunciation depends on where in a word or phrase it sits. Very few speakers will pronounce the ‘l' at the beginning of ‘lake' in the same way as they pronounce the ‘l' at the end of ‘Paul'. This means that the letter ‘l' signifies two very different sounds. This is unmysterious to native speakers and very baffling for some non-natives. Meanwhile, ‘milk' and ‘film' are pronounced by many with another slightly different sound, so that they tend towards a compressed form of ‘mi-ook' and ‘fi-oom'. ‘Bottle' and ‘little', as said by some, can sound to non-natives as if we are saying ‘bottoo' and ‘littoo'.

Words and syllables can end with a double ‘l': ‘hall' and ‘palliative', though not if there is another consonant following after, as with ‘melt' or ‘kiln'. In British English you write ‘travel, travelled'. In US English you write ‘travel, traveled', the rule being that the last syllable of ‘travel' is unstressed. This was a ‘spelling reform'. It's ‘pull, pulling, pulled' but ‘pile, piling, piled' because of the ‘long vowel' sound before the ‘l'.

We have produced a variety of ways in which ‘l' combines with other consonants: ‘please', ‘slow', ‘flow', ‘glad', ‘Kleenex', ‘clot' and ‘blue'. We can pronounce ‘Vladimir' without much difficulty and at one point we
could pronounce ‘zloty' (Polish money). Rather mysteriously, Alfred Noyes wrote in his poem ‘The Highwayman' that horses made the sound of ‘tlot' as they came along the road. Other ways to put consonant sounds before ‘l' give us ‘thistle', ‘dazzle', ‘ruffle', ‘rabble', ‘tickle' and ‘ripple'.

In Welsh, there is the double ‘l' sound which is made by making the tongue take up a similar position adopted by a native English speaker for saying an initial ‘l' but then instead of voicing, you blow air round the tongue. As the places and people of Wales are frequently spoken of as part of Britain, then this ‘ll' sound has to be counted as one of the sounds of British English.