Alphabetical (40 page)

What I didn't foresee was that the internet and mobile phones would demand both old and new literacies. Side by side on the internet and other digital media, the alphabet carries on doing exactly what it's done for thousands of years: conveying philosophy, science, fiction, poetry, jokes, current information, opinion, instructions, memories, devotion, worship and much more. New systems of referencing have made access both easier and more widespread. Interchange between the users of different alphabets has never been greater. Alongside these traditional usages, there has grown up an unimaginably huge written conversation. Trillions of people write to each other. To do this they have incorporated aspects of their speech, aspects of older forms of humorous and jargon-like means of written language. When an earlier form of these instant written conversations was around
(telegrams), it was too infrequent and expensive to affect us all. Children, students, cleaners and footballers didn't send telegrams every day. Today they do the equivalent.

The media have different ways of presenting this: it's awful because we are all becoming ‘sloppy' writers; it's wonderful because it is democratic, no one tells you how to write, no one can tick you off if you make mistakes or invent new things, it's like an oral writing, a written speech. No, it's awful because it means people spread ‘news' without corroborating it, so conspiracy theories, witch-hunting, bullying and abuse proliferate. No, it's wonderful because our machines have eyes which means that we can safeguard ourselves. No, it's awful because Big Brother has alphabet-reading machines which means that he knows where we are, what we're doing and, because we keep writing down what we want, love and hate, he knows what we're thinking too. The alphabet has become a means by which our identities are read, logged and stored. But that's wonderful, because there is so much of it, Big Brother doesn't know what to do with it. No, that's awful because ultimately it doesn't matter what Big Brother does with it. All that he cares about is that we buy the whole shebang off him; the digitization of mass alphabet-use has been a means by which Big Brother has become a trillionaire.

In the midst of this, I have to remind myself that there were times when the alphabet wasn't used for much more than inscriptions and sacred texts, legible to a tiny minority and written by even fewer.

THE STORY OF

•
THE STORY OF
‘U', ‘V', ‘W' and ‘Y' is quite complicated, if not absurd. We might suspect this is the case given that we are quite happy to call ‘W' ‘double-u' when it's clearly a ‘double-v'.

Roman or mock-Roman inscriptions use the ‘V' shape to indicate what we would think of as the ‘U' sound: ‘SEPTIMVS' and the like.

The Phoenicians had a letter that looked like our modern ‘Y' in around 1000
BCE
. They called this ‘waw' meaning a ‘peg' and it indicated a ‘w' sound. The ancient Greeks took this in around 700
BCE
and called it ‘upsilon'. The Etruscans took the bottom stroke off the ‘Y' to make a ‘V' shape and it was this ‘V' that the Romans adopted, shifting the pronunciation to an ‘oo' sound before consonants but keeping the ‘w' sound before vowels. So ‘V' was doing service as ‘w' and ‘u' sounds.

u

People writing by hand as early as the fourth century started to round off the ‘v' turning it into a ‘u'. In the Renaissance, the printers adopted the rounded ‘u' as the lower case for ‘v'. Some writers by hand also made their ‘capital' into a ‘u' shape.

It took till the seventeenth century for printers to make a distinction between ‘u' and ‘v' depending on the sound. Early printers used the two signs interchangeably, with ‘v' words sometimes typeset with a ‘u' as in ‘knaue' for ‘knave', or, in Roman style, ‘vnder' for ‘under'.

When the sound of ‘w' began to develop in northern
Europe, including Britain, it was decided that this needed a ‘double-u', which I'll look at in its own place!

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

In hindsight this could have been a sound like ‘oo', or the ‘u' sound in ‘put', or even a ‘woo'. Somehow it acquired a ‘y' sound on the front. I haven't read a convincing explanation of how or why that came about.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

As with all vowels, this depends on which part of the English-speaking world you come from, the historical origins of the word, the position in the word where the letter falls, and in what combination of letters it appears.

So, as a Londoner, I say the word ‘sun' very differently from the local way of saying it in Yorkshire. However, when I say ‘put', that rhymes with the way a northerner would say ‘hut'. My ‘hut' rhymes with my ‘putt'! Some Scots speakers pronounce ‘put' as I would pronounce ‘poot'.

We can use it to make a ‘yoo' sound as in ‘use' and ‘situation'.

‘U' hardly ever doubles but when it does, it's most commonly in ‘vacuum'.

We can combine it with other vowels and the letter ‘r' (if you're an unvoiced ‘r' speaker) to make the same or different vowel sounds, as in ‘cue', ‘sue', ‘sour', ‘ruin', ‘course', ‘fur', ‘pure', ‘tour', ‘fleur de lys', ‘wounded', ‘wound up', ‘through', ‘thorough', ‘though', ‘enough', ‘bough', ‘brougham', ‘conscious', ‘radium', ‘dinosaur', ‘Guam' and ‘duet' (which, for some speakers, has the virtue of asking the ‘u' to make a ‘you-w' sound!).

We have the sound ‘uh-uh' which can mean ‘watch out!' or ‘something's not right'. A word for a ‘fool' has appeared in the last twenty years which I think could be written ‘wuss' to rhyme (in my speech) with ‘puss', not ‘fuss'. Rugby players kick an ‘up and under'.

U
IS FOR UMLAUTS

T
WO LITTLE DOTS
and quite a kerfuffle.

One kind of two little dots is called an umlaut. An umlaut does the job of changing the sound of a vowel. There are two similar-looking words in German, one with an umlaut and the other without: ‘schon' and ‘schön'. One means ‘already' and the other ‘beautiful': ‘schon' is pronounced ‘shown'; ‘schön' is pronounced (in my southern English speech) ‘shern'.

Another kind of two little dots is called a dieresis. A dieresis does the job of separating vowels that look as if they are combining: ‘Laocoön' doesn't rhyme with ‘moon'. It rhymes with ‘show on'.

A third kind of two little dots doesn't change the way things sound in any way at all, but it seems to have made brand-name execs think they're doing something cool: Häagen-Dazs (1961 – ice cream), Blue Öyster Cult (1970 – band), Motörhead (1975 – band), Mötley Crüe (1980 – band), Spinal Tap (with an umlaut over the ‘n' which my computer won't let me do! – 1984 – satirical band name). Since then, the umlaut has crept into the names of products, cafés, shops and magazines: Füd, YogaMöm,
Seäsonal, Gü, hibü, däv, AÄRK, LÄRABAR, Bük – and thousands möre – apologies about the ‘möre', I got stuck on it.

As it isn't doing what umlauts or diereses do, then it probably needs another name: the adlaut, perhaps. So what does the adlaut do? Does it lend a stylish European-ness to the product or business? Or is there a knowing irony: that they know and we know that the dots aren't doing anything but winking at us? Above a ‘u' or an ‘o' there is a hint of a smiley-face going on there, a kind of ad hoc emoticon. Mötorhead were flirting with something Teutonic as the name was written in gothic lettering. Given the success of Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Siemens and Miele, perhaps the umlaut brings with it a sense of Germans getting it right with metal machines.

It was Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm who first gave the umlaut its name, a word meaning literally ‘around-sound' or ‘the other way around-sound'. So, in German the umlaut marks a change. The German name Hans is usually pronounced in English to sound like ‘hands'. Germans pronounce ‘Hans' sounding something like the way someone in the South of England would pronounce ‘hunts'. When it becomes ‘Hänsel' (‘little Hans'), Germans say, ‘Henzel'. The umlaut is busy. When Germans see it, it makes them want to pick up on it, so when they see the adlaut, doing nothing at all, they are likely to feel a bit irritated. It's like looking at an empty bottle of your favourite drink.

In the English-speaking world, people used to be quite fond of the dieresis. It was on ‘naïve', ‘Noël', ‘coöperate', ‘zoölogical', ‘spermatozoön', Odysseus' father ‘Laërtes', Perseus' mother, ‘Danaë', along with some other Greek deities and heroes, but we're mostly trusted with managing to pronounce these words without it. Even Emily Brontë and her talented family are losing it. Most common sightings today are with Zoë and Chloë.

What seems to have happened is that at the very moment that branding has discovered the adlaut, orthodox printing has tired of the dieresis. The move away from the two dots in newspapers, magazines and books might be part of a general dislike of these over- or under-the-letter signs or ‘diacritics'. For centuries, the English-speaking world has shunned the ‘tilde' that the Portuguese place on São Paolo. We'd much rather write ‘cafe' than ‘café' (with its acute accent), we've stopped writing ‘hôtel' (with a circumflex), and ‘façade' (with a cedilla). The acute accent survives, if people are worried that you'll muddle ‘lame' with ‘lamé', ‘expose' with ‘exposé' or ‘resume' with ‘resumé' (or even ‘résumé' if you're feeling français). It flourishes in food with ‘glacé cherries', ‘flambé', ‘purée' (and a host of others), and in ballet with ‘plié', ‘allongé', ‘jeté' (and a host of others). If anyone produces a cooking ballet (
Swan Cake
?), you wouldn't be able to move for acute accents.

The accent pointing the other way (grave accent) is a rarer species in the English-speaking world. Would you rather have a ‘derriere' or a ‘derrière'? It survives in an antique way for when pre-twentieth-century poets wanted to make sure that their past tenses were pronounced in the right way to fit the metre: ‘Till in her blurrèd sight the hills went round . . .' The name Róisín, whom you might well meet in English-speaking parts of the world, has two accents but neither of them are acute. It's the ‘fada' from Irish writing, which also employs the ‘overdot', a single dot placed over some letters.

Occasionally, a false diacritic crops up. The drink ‘maté' is written in Spanish and Portuguese as ‘mate' but some marketeers worried that ‘having a drink of mate' didn't look right.

By the way, the ‘ø' and ‘å' used in Scandinavian writing are not diacritics. They are not signs ‘over' or ‘across' a letter, they are each part of a letter. If you want to avoid irritating someone
from that part of the world, don't start asking ‘Which way does the line go?' or ‘Why's the degree sign on the top?' In fact, what we're talking about here is so non-diacritical that they are letters in their own right coming after the ‘z' and the ‘æ' in Scandinavian alphabets. The correct spelling of ‘smörgåsbord' is ‘smörgåsbord'.

Diacritics are a way of trying to make the sounding of letters more precise, though the circumflex in French mostly marks an ‘s' that disappeared. Generally they are consistent across languages, and you could argue that if they make ‘sounding' more precise, then they also make reading and understanding more precise too. Given that vowels (and combinations of vowels) in English are not consistent, you could see ways in which signs over or under letters would be very good at guiding us on which sound to make. You could have different squiggles over the different ‘-ea-'s in ‘meat', ‘threat' and ‘great', and the different ‘-ie-'s in ‘wield', ‘lies', ‘sienna' and ‘easiest'. But then you would have to learn the squiggles. Maybe not such a good plan, then.

Cities like London have become world cities and plenty of people want to continue speaking the language of their family's place of origin. English starts to look positively naked alongside, say, Turkish, Vietnamese, Czech and Welsh shop-signs, public notices and places of worship. By the way, jocular French teachers taught us that the circumflex was a ‘tin hat'; in Welsh, it's called a ‘bach' which means ‘little roof'. No need for a little figurative jest there then.