Alphabetical (30 page)

Thanks to the author Robert Harris's trilogy about Cicero, the figure of Marcus Tullius Tiro (103–4
BCE
) has become better known than he was. He was a slave and then a free man, employed by Cicero in order to write down the orator's speeches. The system he used and probably invented came to be called ‘Tironian notes' and it consisted of 4,000 to 5,000 signs. It was a great survivor, lasting through the medieval period, and it
was on occasions still being used in the seventeenth century. Anyone fluent in Gaelic or Irish will know that in those languages, there is a symbol looking like a ‘7', meaning ‘and'. It's a Tironian note.

In his letters, Cicero frequently referred to Tiro whose job it was to take dictation, figure out Cicero's own handwriting, wait at table, do a bit of gardening and handle Cicero's accounts. Clearly, every philosopher should have a Tiro. It's thought that devoted old Tiro collected Cicero's writings and published them after his death, as well as turning his hand to a bit of writing himself, including works on the Latin language which, sadly, haven't survived. Tiro suffered from ill-health, which Cicero records in his letters. Goodness knows who did the dictation, table-laying, gardening and accounting when Tiro was throwing a sickie. It seems Tiro wrote a biography of Cicero too but this hasn't survived either. For many years in western Europe, Cicero was a kind of core curriculum in himself, studied for his thoughts on philosophy and politics along with his prose style. Some suggest that it's his prose style which helped create the formal prose style of Western languages.

As a vocal republican, Cicero found himself on the wrong side of Mark Antony following the assassination of Julius Caesar and was then assassinated himself. Tiro then bought an estate and, in spite of his record of ill-health, he survived till he was ninety-nine years old. As we've seen, his shorthand lasted for many years more, particularly amongst the early medieval monks. The system went into decline in the eleventh century, though the Renaissance saw a revival of interest in it.

Some hundred years later in the wild and windy North of England, Roman soldiers, wives, merchants and slaves would write and receive messages, written on wooden tablets with pen and ink (an iron nib with carbon and gum arabic for ink), not
all of which are letters, though. Some 1,300 tablets have been found so far in and around Vindolanda, a fort on Hadrian's Wall, and they include: travel expenses – ‘2 wagon axles, 3.5 denarii'; along with: ‘a friend sent me 50 oysters from Cordonovi, I'm sending you half' (did he know nothing of food poisoning?); and a note to the Emperor Hadrian: ‘As befits an honest man I implore Your Majesty not to allow me, an innocent man, to have been beaten with rods.' There is no record of what Hadrian did about this, but my money would be that he ignored it. Why should innocence have stood in the way of a public beating?

Amongst these are some tablets written in a hitherto undeciphered shorthand. Because no one knows what they say, we have to imagine what kind of note, from or to a fort on Hadrian's Wall, would need to have been written at speed and to someone who could read shorthand. Clearly, this was correspondence between Tiro-like servants and slaves, full of vital political and military action, dictated by their masters but secretly laced with an odd subversive postscript which their lordships would never see. General Flavius to General Brutus as dictated to Septimus: ‘Hail Brutus. Can't find Ninth Legion. Last seen heading for Bath. Send more troops. Regards, Flavius.' (Ye gods, can't the old twit figure out that they've gone native? Hope you and yours are well. Send more plonk, best wishes, Septimus.)

It's quite possible that China in the Imperial period invented a shorthand earlier than Tiro, used for court proceedings and criminals' confessions. In 1572 one Timothie Bright was in Paris – not a great place to be at that moment if there was a possibility that you might be mistaken for a Protestant; an English accent would certainly suggest you leaned that way. Even so, he escaped the St Bartholomew's Day massacre by taking refuge in the house of Francis Walsingham whom we find earlier in this book cooking the goose of Mary Queen of Scots. Bright
qualified in medicine at Cambridge and practised in Ipswich. He wrote
A Treatise of Melancholy
which may or may not have been the reason why he became a priest, a calling he practised in Yorkshire.

His book on shorthand is called – delightfully –
Characterie
. It was of course dedicated to Queen Elizabeth – you wouldn't want to risk doing otherwise. He told her that he had invented a ‘speedie kind of wryting', with ‘every character answering a word'. He too had the intention that it would be used to record orations or public speeches verbatim and would be ‘secret'. He also hoped it would allow ‘nations of strange languages' to communicate with one another, even if they did not share a common language.

Bright's system involved 500 signs, each representing one word. I make that 500 words. I'm guessing that the main reason why it didn't catch on is that we communicate with many more words than that, as exemplified by his great contemporary, Mr Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. Given that Bright's book appeared in 1588, a date well known for other reasons, I'm guessing that it was just too late to have been known by Drake for dictating messages about how the day was going.

Bright's book was followed by a number of others, including the most famous and long-lasting from this period, Thomas Shelton's
Short Writing
in 1626 (later reissued as
Tachygraphy
). It's thought that Shelton was, as they say, one of the Sheltons of Norfolk, big-time landowners who fought on the side of Parliament in the English Civil War. If so, he would be neither the first nor the last person mentioned in this book who was much influenced by Puritanism in his zeal about the alphabet.

Shelton actually made a living out of shorthand and wrote several books and handbooks on the subject. His system ‘borrowed' some ideas from one of his predecessors in this field,
John Willis. Every consonant was an easily drawn symbol which sometimes resembled the corresponding alphabet letter. Vowels depended on where the following consonant was written. Think of ‘ball', ‘bull', ‘bell', ‘bill' and ‘boll'. Write your letter ‘b'. In order to make ‘ball' you write your letter ‘l' above the ‘b'. To write ‘bull' you write the ‘l' below your ‘b'. If you think of the ‘b' sitting in the middle of a clockface position, put your ‘l' at the ‘ten past the hour' position (i.e. top right) and you have ‘bell'. Position the ‘l' at a ‘quarter past' (i.e. at the mid-point), and it'll be ‘bill'. ‘Twenty past' will give you ‘boll'.

A range of other methods gave practitioners vowels at the ends and beginnings of words. Further symbols designated frequent prefixes and suffixes. You will know that the vowel letters do not by themselves designate all the vowel sounds. Still with ‘b–l' words, we have ‘bale', ‘Baal', ‘bile', ‘boil', ‘bowl' and even ‘boules'. Shelton wasn't much help here, if it was accurate transcription by sound you were after. You just had to guess from context. Even so, it was extremely popular which suggests that people found it easy to learn. It was used by Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and, most famously, by Samuel Pepys, though when things got particularly personal and potentially self-incriminating, he complicated matters by adopting a hodgepodge of non-English words. I don't suppose the Puritan Shelton had in mind his shorthand being used to aid the concealment of accounts of Pepys's encounters under the table with the family maid.

Other shorthanders muscled in on the scene, with some of their titles coupling the notion of improvement to a particular form of writing. Throughout the history of people discussing how to write, how to write quickly or how to write more neatly, it is virtually impossible to disentangle the teaching and the learning of these physical attributes from a quasi-religious and
egalitarian purpose and intended outcome. Indeed, one of these shorthanders, Jeremiah Rich, produced a tiny volume of the Psalms in metre, written in stenographic characters, which was published in 1659. He also worked with the great radical fighter for freedom and equality during the English Civil War, John Lilburne, who was hauled before the courts many times for defending the principle that we are born with rights and do not have to be given them by people deemed to be greater than us. During at least one of these trials, Jeremiah Rich was present using his shorthand to note proceedings. Lilburne was so impressed, he offered to give Rich a certificate for his labours.

Pitman had many such predecessors but he breaks with them when he introduces a purely phonetic shorthand – and one that corresponds to most of the phonemes for English. Unlike the work of any of his forebears, his shorthand survives, though others since him have developed shorthands which are not purely phonetic.

Perhaps the last word on shorthand should rest with Dickens. Though some would claim that Dickens' ear for dialogue and character can be traced back to the hours he spent in parliament and in court, writing down in shorthand the real speech of hundreds, if not thousands, of people, he shows himself in his semi-autobiographical novel,
David Copperfield
, a reluctant learner:

    
I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence); and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, which in such a position meant such a thing, and in such another position something else, entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from
marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in a wrong place; not only troubled my waking hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep.

The second stream that Pitman stands in is spelling reform. Essentially, these revolve around an idea we've already met: that the way English has evolved is that the alphabet does not represent phonemes in a consistent way. To recap: some sounds can be represented in several different ways, e.g. the ‘e' sound in the middle of ‘bed' can also be indicated with the ‘ea' of ‘threat', and, arguably, by the ‘eb' of ‘debt'. Meanwhile, the ‘ea' of ‘beat' is the same letter combination in the middle of ‘threat'. So we can say that some letters or letter combinations indicate sounds which differ from word to word.

The sixteenth century was a time of great debate about English spelling, which was still in flux. There were no national dictionaries, education departments or mass-media language police dictating how to spell. The modern linguist David Crystal gives the example of the word we now spell as ‘disparagement'. Should it have been ‘dispargement', ‘dispergement', ‘disparragement' or ‘disparadgment'? The comic writers Sellar and Yeatman parodied this in their book
No Bed for Bacon
by having Shakespeare debating with himself on how to spell his own name, something which in real life he doesn't seem to have fixed.

As early as 1582, the writer Richard Mulcaster said that all this was shaming: ‘Foreigners and strangers' were in a state of wonderment at the ‘inconstancy of our letters' – only he spelled ‘foreigners' as ‘forenners'. Mulcaster's reforms included getting rid of ‘ignorant superfluities' like the two Ds in ‘didd' (‘did'). However, he also thought that some words didn't have enough letters because the letters used weren't clear, unambiguous indicators of the sounds to make. That's why a ‘t' was put before
the ‘ch' of ‘fech' to make ‘fetch'. And it's Mulcaster who gave us what he called the ‘marvellous' letter ‘e' indicating the difference between ‘mad' and ‘made' or ‘fat' and ‘fate'.

Another kind of spelling reformer turned up in the seventeenth century who ‘improved' our words by showing how they owed their origins to Latin. David Crystal traces these back to
The Writing Scholar's Companion
of 1695, with ‘Infallible rules for Writing with Ease and Certainty'. (Not.) This anonymous person handed out rules for ‘silent consonants' which ‘must be written'. (Such writers are not only certain, they are also bossy.) ‘Anon.' figured that the word ‘det', ‘dett' or ‘dette' (as it had been written before 1549) should be spelled ‘debt' because it owed its ultimate origins to a Latin word ‘debitum'. ‘Doubt' had been ‘dute' and ‘doute' but earned a ‘b' on account of its Latin ‘root' ‘dubitare'. The same sort of pathways can be found for the ‘b' in ‘subtle', the ‘c' in ‘indict', the first ‘c' in ‘arctic', the ‘p' in ‘receipt', the ‘l' in ‘salmon', the ‘l' in ‘falcon', the ‘l' in ‘fault' and the ‘h' in ‘habit'.

All this was right but wrong. That's to say, it was etymologically right but didn't take heed of how the word reached the mouths of the people saying it. These words arrived as spoken or written French words in which these consonants didn't appear either in speech or in writing. Introducing these consonants is a good example of why language shouldn't be legislated on by real or imagined experts. David Crystal is too good a linguist himself to fall into this trap or indeed to knock his colleagues, but who can resist a giggle at the examples he has found of the scholars not simply being wrong in their pedantic method but just plain wrong?

It was decided that the word ‘scissors' should be spelled with a ‘sc' at the beginning because its origins lay with the Latin word ‘scindere', ‘to cut'. But they didn't. The word originates
with the Latin ‘cisorium' – a ‘cutting instrument'. ‘Scythe' had to have a ‘sc' too because it too supposedly came from ‘scindere'. But it didn't. It came from Old English ‘si
e' (pronounced ‘seethuh'). ‘Ptarmigan' was given a ‘pt' beginning because it supposedly needed the same Greek prefix you see in ‘pterodactyl' meaning ‘wing-shaped'. But it didn't. It came from a Gaelic word ‘tarmachan'.