Alphabetical (41 page)

I can't resist returning to the adlaut with the story of Häagen-Dazs.

The founder of the business was Reuben Mattus who was born in Poland in 1912 to Jewish parents. He arrived with his mother in New York in 1921. They met up with an uncle who
was in the Italian lemon-ice business in Brooklyn. By the late 1920s, the family began making ice lollies and chocolate-covered ice-cream bars in the south Bronx under the name Senator Frozen Products. Mattus met Rose Vesel, who had also arrived in New York as a child aged five. In 1934 she got a job as a bookkeeper at the Senator plant, and Reuben and Rose married in 1936.

The business was going OK (see ‘
O is for OK
') but by the 1950s they found that they couldn't compete with the big guys (in Yiddish: the ‘gantse machers') of the ice-cream world so Mattus decided to go for quality not quantity. He started up a new ice-cream company with what he thought was a Danish-sounding name, Häagen-Dazs. Why Danish? As a tribute, Mattus thought, to Denmark's treatment of the Jews during the Second World War. On the labels in the early days, there was even an outline map of Denmark. Now comes a problem: the name isn't Danish, there is no umlaut in Danish, and you never come across a ‘z' and an ‘s' together in Danish; ‘zs' just doesn't happen. As a matter of fact, Häagen-Dazs doesn't mean anything to anyone anywhere in any language. According to his daughter Doris, Mattus had sat at the kitchen table for hours coming up with all kinds of ‘meshugas' (nonsense) until he hit upon a ‘meshugas' he liked.

But it's not all sweetness and vanilla scoops. In 1980, Häagen-Dazs sued the ice-cream company, Frusen Glädjé, on the grounds that it was using similar foreign-branding strategies. Can you imagine the scene? Mattus and Rose are at home. On TV comes someone eating Frusen Glädjé. ‘Hmm, Frusen Glädjé, I love Frusen Glädjé.' Mattus leaps up out of his chair. ‘Look what they're doing there! These Frusen Glädjé people have stolen our umlaut. We did the umlaut. We were first with the umlaut and along come these people thinking they can do the umlaut thing too? No, no, no . . .'

Frusen Glädjé – without the acute accent – is Swedish for ‘frozen delight'. It did actually mean something. Anyway Häagen-Dazs lost the case – huh! like you could patent the use of an umlaut? An umlaut that wasn't even a real umlaut anyway? Perhaps if Mattus had sued on the grounds that Frusen Glädjé had stolen his adlaut, he might have done better. All that ‘foreign-branding strategies' stuff. It was too general, too high-falutin. But that's just me. What do I know? I'm not a lawyer. I went into poetry and never got out of it, so maybe don't ask me what Mattus should have done. He shouldn't have sued anyway. He'd already done ridiculously well with that silly little umlaut. He should have just let the matter rest.

THE STORY OF

•
AS WE'VE SEEN
with ‘U', the letter ‘V' grew up in order to make ‘w' and ‘u' sounds. For ‘v' to become a letter that had a distinctly different ‘value' from ‘u', people had to acknowledge that they were making a sound like our modern ‘v'. The Romans didn't. The words that begin with ‘v' in Latin, like ‘Venus', were pronounced with a ‘w' – so ‘Weenus' not ‘Venus'. The speakers of Old English had a ‘v' sound as did the Normans who scored a ‘victory' and burned a few ‘villages'. However, even as late as the early seventeenth century the printers of Shakespeare's plays represented Vs in the middle of words as ‘u'. Initial Vs, either as a capital ‘V' or as in, say, ‘vain', started to appear as ‘v' in the 1400s.

In other words, there was what we would think of as chaos: Us and Vs being used interchangeably yet with obscure rules. What was needed was for printers and lexicographers to agree that there were two letters and each should be assigned a different job, rather than both doing the same job – sometimes! By about 1700, this seems to have happened.

v

A smaller ‘v' starts to appear in Latin manuscripts in the middle medieval period but of course this represents both the ‘u' and ‘v' sounds. It's only when there is a separation of duties that the lower-case ‘v' settles to represent the ‘v' sound.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

This derives from the French ‘vé' and neatly rhymes with ‘B' and the ‘ee' gang.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

‘V' almost always sounds the same, though ‘of' and the ‘w' of German loan words poach on its territory with ‘Weltanschauung' and ‘wanderlust'.

At the ends of words, we like to put an ‘e' to finish: ‘curve' ‘swerve', though the shortened form of the name ‘Mervyn' is ‘Merv' and the nickname for a ‘pervert' is a ‘perv'. Doubling appears in joke words like ‘bovver' (a representation of the cockney pronunciation of ‘bother') and in the verb made from an abbreviation: ‘rev, revving, revved'. ‘Rev.' also exists as a legit abbreviation for ‘Reverend'. A ‘bevvy' is slang for ‘a drink'.

The usual rule for ‘e' verbs applies: ‘move, moving, moved'. An ‘o' in front of the ‘v' can be pronounced as in ‘move', ‘love' and ‘grove'.

We don't much like combining ‘v' with other consonants: ‘halves', ‘swerve' (if you voice your ‘r'), ‘envy', ‘advertise' and ‘invert'. Loan names give us ‘Vladimir' and Tolstoy's ‘Vronsky'.

Sound-play with ‘v' can involve speed: ‘vroom' and ‘va va voom'. ‘Vive' meaning ‘long live' is a loan word that's usually used jokily; ‘vamp' is the sound you hear when you make dampened chords on a guitar. A ‘V' sign can mean ‘up yours' (or what my children call ‘swearing'), or again, on the hand of Winston Churchill and reversed with palm out, ‘V for Victory'. When one of my children was learning to speak, she adopted a Germanic (or Indian) pronunciation for ‘wee-wee', calling it ‘vee-vee'. Of course this was adopted by the rest of the family.

‘Lovey-dovey' plays with the ‘-vy' sound too.

V
IS FOR VIKINGS

I
N
1898,
IN
the rural township of Solem, Douglas County, Minnesota, USA, a farmer found a stone slab. The farmer was Olof Ohman, a Swedish-American who had just taken over an 80-acre stretch of land and was clearing it, ready for ploughing. The stone was lying face down and tangled up in the root system of a poplar tree. Ohman's ten-year-old son, Edward, noticed some markings on the stone which Ohman thought were an ‘Indian almanac'.

Before I go any further with this story, I should say that pretty nearly everything I've written so far has been disputed. The stone may have been found in August or November, right after lunch or at the end of work in the evening. Olof and Edward may have found the stone on their own; they may have been with two workmen; they may have been with neighbour Nils Flaten.

The stone was taken to the nearby town of Kensington and transcriptions of the carvings were sent to a regional Scandinavian-language newspaper. Soon after it was found, the stone was displayed at a local bank. Within months it had caused a
worldwide stir, the reason being that the carvings on the stones were runes, the alphabet used by the Vikings.

The inscription, when translated reads:

    
8 Götalanders [people from what is now southern Sweden] and 22 Northmen [Norwegians] on an exploration journey from Vinland westward. We had one camp by 2 rocky islets one day's journey north of this stone. We were out fishing one day. When we came home we found 10 men red with blood and dead. AVM save us from evil. We have 10 men by the sea to look after our ships, 14 days journey from this island. Year 1362.

Here seemed to be proof positive that the Vikings had not only made it to the fringes of the North American continent (Vinland), they had ventured hundreds of miles inland. And it was written in the alphabet associated with the ancient peoples of Scandinavia. The stone is on display at the Runestone Museum, located in downtown Alexandria, Minnesota. Near by at Fort Alexandria you can see a forty-foot Viking ship, the
Snorri
, and you can have your picture taken next to the ‘country's biggest Viking'. Many local businesses use the ‘Kensington Runestone' or the Vikings as part of their branding, and the National Football League's Minnesota Vikings owe their name to the Runestone. The only problem with this scenario is that most academic ‘runologists' think it's a hoax.

The runic alphabets are made up of beautiful, angular letters, each of which has a name, referring to an object, and a sound based on the initial letter of that name. If you were reciting, by name of object, one of the oldest forms of the runic alphabet, you would start off by saying: ‘fehu, uruz, thurisaz, ansuz, raidof, cen' (meaning, in order: ‘money' (or ‘cattle'), ‘ox', ‘giant' (or ‘monster'), ‘god', ‘riding' and ‘torch'). If you were reciting
it by letter sound, you would say, ‘f', ‘u', ‘th', ‘a', ‘r', ‘k' – and those letters give the name to the oldest runic alphabet, ‘Elderfuthark'.

Purely in terms of the history of the Roman alphabet used by people living in Britain, one reason why runes get mentioned is that the earliest manuscripts written in the Anglo-Saxon or Old English version of the Roman alphabet contained two letters derived directly from the runic letters ‘thorn' and ‘wynn', and two ‘ligatures' (letters tied together), ‘ash' and ‘ethel', which used Roman letters but were the equivalent of runes (see ‘
D is for Disappeared Letters
'). However, these four letters did not get into the Anglo-Saxon version of the Roman alphabet via the Vikings. To get a picture of what happened, I'll attempt a quick rundown of who went where and when.

In spite of many modifications and caveats, the sequence of the settlement of the British Isles just about hangs together: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans. That's how we drew it at school: a map of the British Isles with big arrows pointing towards it from different parts of Europe, each arrow filled with the name of the invaders and the dates they arrived – and, in the case of the Romans, the date they left.

The many complications to this nice map include the following (not in order of importance):

a)
    
the Celts not being one people – they arrived in many waves from different places;

b)
    
the Romans not being all Roman – it was Roman policy to station people as far away from their original home as possible as it cut down on rebellions, but some ‘Romans' who came as part of their Empire's settlement may have stayed;

c)
    
the Germanic peoples who arrived, usually called the ‘Anglo-Saxons', were, yes, Angles (from Schleswig-Holstein)
and Saxons (from Lower Saxony), but they were also Jutes (from Jutland), Franks (from the Rhine) and Frisians (from coastal north Holland);

d)
    
they may well have started arriving
before
the Romans packed their bags and left in
AD
410;

e)
    
some peoples who arrived in England, like the Belgae, may well be better described as Celto-Germanic;

f)
    
the Scandinavian Vikings did indeed set out from what is now Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway but they may well have started arriving while the Anglo-Saxons and their pals were arriving too;

g)
    
the Normans came from Normandy, speaking a form of Old French, but as a people they originated from a Viking settlement;

h)
    
either under duress or willingly, any or all of these peoples, to a greater or lesser degree, intermarried;

i)
    
any or all of these peoples shared, borrowed and merged their ways of speaking and writing;

j)
    
as a rough guide we can say that literate pre-Christian ‘Anglo-Saxons' used runes. They encountered Latin through Christianity and thereafter amalgamated a few adapted runes into the Latin/Roman alphabet.

Two further examples of sharing: the runic inscriptions found on the Isle of Man show that people with Celtic names and people with Scandinavian names (Vikings) were intermarrying from the tenth century onwards. The modern English word ‘wicket' probably came from a Norman-French word, which had originally come from a Norse word. This is not evidence that cricket was invented by the Vikings.