Alphabetical (36 page)

An observant Martian looking at the passage I've just written might detect quite quickly that I don't ever seem to use any given letters more than two times immediately next to each other. It would notice that I've doubled some letters but not others and would therefore make a note to see if that selection of letters being doubled applied to all writing in English or just mine. The doubling of letters could then be described as one part of the sign system of letter-use. Having worked out that letters are put alongside each other in clusters called ‘words', the Martian could try to see if there were any sign systems at work here too. For example, some combinations keep cropping up at the ends of words, like ‘-ed' and ‘-ing' and ‘-ion'. At the level of groups of words, a little dot clearly has some kind of function which would be quite hard to determine purely in terms of a sign system, other than that it seems to appear fairly regularly after a minimum and maximum number of words.

Once the Martian had been told that words can refer to things, actions and feelings, it might also wonder about the other words that seem not to do this so clearly, like ‘the' or ‘would'. This would take the Martian into the world of what systems are used to stick words together in these chunks between full stops, called ‘sentences'.

Back with the alphabet, as a fixed sequence of twenty-six letters. When, say, we put it on friezes round children's bedroom walls, we are showing children that it is complete and finite. This is ‘the alphabet', we say. It's not something that ‘could be' the alphabet. It's not even ‘an' alphabet. We are so certain and finite about this – and we learned it that way – that it's hard to accept that we have many alternative and additional signs and sign
systems within the thing that we treat with such certainty. Some have faded from view.

Perhaps the oddest of the alternatives are lower-case ‘a' and ‘g'. We carefully teach children how to draw them, how to recognize them, what sounds we should say when we see them. There are As, we say, in ‘cat', ‘hare', ‘was', ‘water' and ‘father'. There are the Gs in ‘garage'. The ‘a' and ‘g' used in initial literacy teaching are known as ‘single-storey'. Very carefully, educational publishers produce booklets and schemes where the only lower-case ‘a' and ‘g' in sight are the single-storey ‘a' and ‘g'. Meanwhile, the publishers of picture books carry on doing what they've always done, which is produce their books with the ‘double-storey' ‘a' and ‘g'.

If you trace the story (!) of the letters back you can find the single-storey versions in most handwriting of the modern era such as ‘cursive' or ‘round hand'. You find them in one form of the ‘Uncial' script which we may think of today as ‘Irish writing'. In Roman ‘minuscule' lettering (i.e. ‘lower case' or ‘little') we find a little ‘a' looking dangerously like the ‘u', not quite closed off at the top, co-existing with a double-storey version.

The story of ‘g' is slightly different. There seems to have been general agreement that it had an umbrella-handle shape on its lower part and various kinds of hooks or loops for the top part. So it is for Gutenberg, the first printer to use a movable typeface, and so it is with Caxton, the first English printer. The divergence seems to originate in Venice with the da Spira brothers (who were German) in the 1460s. Their typeface has the double-storey ‘g'.

So, we live with two signs for ‘a' and two signs for ‘g', with most print up until the 1920s showing us the double storey while most handwriting has been single storey.

Single storey in print turns up in Germany in its full finished form in 1927 with Paul Renner's ‘Futura' typeface. He had been working on it for three years and it was a modernist reaction
against the gothic or ‘black-letter' script which dominated most German writing of the time. The Nazis recognized it as such and arrested Renner: nominally, for the crime of opposing Nazism; in reality for hanging out with lefties, being friends with the highly suspect novelist Thomas Mann, creator of the homoerotically obsessed hero in the novel
Death in Venice
, and protesting against the imprisonment of his colleague Jan Tschichold. Renner was dismissed from his position as an adviser to the German publishing association on the grounds of his ‘national untrustworthiness'. According to Simon Garfield, the Nazis judged a lecture he gave on the history of letterforms as ‘too sympathetic towards roman types' – meaning typefaces rather than guys from Rome. Futura was labelled as anti-German, though not anti-fascist. Mussolini loved it.

Ironically, in 1941 the Third Reich discovered that gothic lettering was anti-German too and banned it, though the real reason was probably the fact that the people in occupied Europe couldn't read the invaders' writing. Renner himself was able to keep out of jail, either by hopping across the border into Switzerland or by appealing to the father of his daughter's fiancé, a certain Rudolf Hess, who at that point had not yet fled Germany in a little plane. Futura survived and it's one of the ways you'll see the single-storey ‘a' outside of your children's writing and early reading. At the moment, advertisers use it. Whenever they want to say that their product or company is nice, they say it with a single-storey ‘a'. The single-storey ‘g' goes beyond niceness; it's now in quite formal typefaces.

An older example of having two signs for the same letter was the long ‘ſ', snaky ‘s' question. As with most ‘rules' to do with English, the eighteenth century was when people tried to turn custom and use into commands. Thomas Dyche's
A Guide to the
English Tongue
(first published in 1707, and reprinted many times) said that: ‘The long ſ muſt never be uſed at the End of a Word, nor immediately after the short s.' This seems like a negative rule telling you how you must not use the ‘ſ' without telling you exactly when you
should
use it, leaving open the possibility that you could begin a word with ‘s' and that you could – if you really wanted to – write ‘s' in the middle of a word; in which case a second ‘s' would require you to write ‘ss'. Others elaborated and refined this, determining rules on what to write before apostrophes and – a giveaway as to why the long ‘ſ' dropped out – the rule that the long ‘ſ' should not be used adjacent to an ‘f'. I find this kind of pernickety stuff fairly tiresome, particularly when it concerns features of writing which people dispense with anyway.

In pre-print days, the long ‘ſ' (always minuscule) seems to derive from one of the roman scripts. Gutenberg and the Venetian printers used both the long and the short ‘s', plus the double ‘ſſ' in the middle of words. The King James Bible of 1611 is written in ‘black-letter' or ‘gothic' type with the long ‘ſ'.

By the mid-nineteenth century in Britain, the long ‘ſ' had pretty well dropped out and you can mark its demise by looking at the sequences of editions of the same book. In the case of the
Encylopaedia Britannica
, ‘ſ' dropped out between the fifth edition in 1817 and the sixth edition in 1823. It survives for mathematicians as the symbol to indicate that they should ‘integrate' in calculus. One possible reason for the death of ‘ſ' is the printing of Ariel's song from Shakespeare's
The Tempest
, ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I'. I've heard that there are still people who enjoy reading pre-nineteenth-century editions of
The Tempest
and books of Shakespeare's songs for this very reason.

The tales of ‘a', ‘g', and ‘ſ' remind me that the rules we tell children and which we repeat to ourselves weren't fashioned in
an academy after long analysis. Quite the contrary: they emerged from custom and use as forms of tacit agreements between writers, printers and readers.

Lower-case ‘a', ‘g' and ‘s' are examples of variant signs from within the alphabet. Surrounding the alphabet, in its hinterland, we have created other symbols, which we have slotted into typefaces, often signifying whole words. Quite apart from mathematical symbols, a glance at the qwerty keyboard gives us ‘@' and ‘&', and at various times I've used symbols for ‘therefore', ‘because' and ‘leading to'. Many of us in the Twittersphere borrow from maths for our tweets, with ‘+' to mean ‘and', ‘=' to mean ‘the same as' or ‘is', ‘<' meaning ‘less than', ‘>' meaning ‘greater than'. The asterisk tells us that there's a footnote; the bullet point tells you that I'm someone who likes using bullet points. And of course there is the glorious hashtag which can signify ‘this is the topic' or ‘here is my ironic aside'.

The Twitter hashtag owes its origins to people in chatrooms marking the topics of their conversations. The first time it escaped from the chat world was when one Nate Ritter from San Diego, California, reported online on the fires in California, in October 2007. However, crediting Mr Ritter with the invention of the hashtag, as when he used it to say #sandiegoforest-fire, would get up the nose of the many chatroomers who had been using it for at least the previous five years. It reached Twitter two years later, in particular in the hands of Iranian people protesting over the elections. Twitter started to hyperlink hashtags to search results on 1 July 2009, followed up by ‘trending topics' (linked by the hashtag) in 2010. I'm not sure how I was able to function in life prior to the invention of the Twitter hashtag: #ironyalert.

The sign itself used to be called the ‘number sign' because from at least 1900, people would use it to separate off a number
in a piece of script – #5. It was also used to signify a pound in weight in the US; as the ‘sharp' sign in music; and by proofreaders to mean ‘insert a space'. It still sits on my phone's keypad: ‘To return the call, press the hash key.' A sign with multiple meanings, then.

No one is quite sure why it's a ‘hash', though cross-hatching in drawing may have something to do with it. Someone called it an ‘octothorp' or ‘octothorpe' or ‘octotherp' – ‘octo' because it has eight points while the ‘thorp', ‘thorpe' and ‘therp' suffixes are shrouded in etymological jokes, one possibility being that it was invented by someone who was interested in the 1912 Olympic gold medallist Jim Thorpe; another that it was a joke coinage by telephone engineers in the 1980s; while others maintain that it owes its origins to map-making as a sign to show that a village (‘thorpe' in Old Norse) was surrounded by eight fields. Or it's a joke.

The ‘@' can be called in English the ‘at sign', the ‘at symbol' or ‘ampersat'. Because it is universal, it needs names in all languages, so in Dutch it's a ‘monkey's tail'; in Danish it's the same word as an ‘elephant's trunk'. Finns see it as a ‘cat's tail'; Germans as a ‘spider-monkey'. In Greek, it's a ‘little duck'; in Hungarian, it's a ‘worm'; in Korean, it's a ‘snail'; in Norwegian, it's a ‘pig's tail'; in Russian, it's a ‘little dog'; in Czech and Slovak, it's a ‘rollmop', which endears itself to me.

It is one of the most important symbols of our times, contributing to the identity of millions of us through our email addresses, Twitter IDs and logins. It's the axis between our digital name and the company that stores and sends our messages. When we want to leave some part of ourselves that is contactable, we find ourselves saying, somewhere in the mix, the word ‘at' and we all now know that this is ‘@'. ‘Rosieface
at server.co,' I might say – and that's a shorthand way for me to say who I am and for others to know me. It's a new piece of grammar, derived from centuries of accounting and abbreviated writing.

As you might expect, no one knows for certain where it comes from. I remember it some fifty years ago, sitting in the little blue accounting notebooks with its sheet of carbon tucked inside, where it meant ‘each at' as in ‘100 bricks each at 4d'. Medieval monks saved time, vellum and ink by abbreviating words. In ancient manuscripts, it's been spotted as a substitute for ‘ad', the Latin word meaning ‘to' and ‘at'. Bulgarian monks of the eleventh century used it to mean ‘amen'. Spanish and Portuguese writing have long used it to signify a unit of weight – the ‘arroba' which itself is derived from an Arabic expression meaning ‘a quarter'. The sign has been spotted in a merchant's document which travelled from Seville in Spain to Rome on 4 May 1536. In Italy, it could signify the unit of weight of one ‘anfora' (‘amphora'). I know the first time I came across it: it was on my mother's typewriter, which was made in the 1930s, and it appears on at least one model of typewriter as early as 1889.

The ‘&' is the ampersand, meaning ‘and'. In children's recitations of the alphabet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it used to be stuck on the end of the twenty-six letters – or twenty-seven if it included the long ‘ſ', and you can see it alongside the letters on all the early means of teaching the alphabet (see ‘
B is for Battledore
'). The word ‘ampersand' may sound like direct borrowing from Greek or French but it's a squeezed-up form of the phrase ‘and per se “and”'. Imagine thousands of children over hundreds of years reciting the alphabet and when they got to the end they said, ‘. . . X, Y, Z and per se “and”'. Apparently, the Latin ‘per se' bit could be added when
saying any letter or sign which ‘on its own' was also a word – like ‘A', ‘I' and ‘O'. The ‘and' sign was ‘per se', on its own. So, ‘and per se “and”' ended up as ampersand. I have to say, I rather like it that such a technical and precise word owes its origins to children chanting and squashing a mixture of English and Latin words.