Alphabetical (5 page)

N, ‘nun', ‘water-based snake or fish';
sound
: ‘n'

For which there is no equivalent, ‘samek', ‘pillar';
sound
: ‘s'

O, ‘ayin', ‘eye';
sound
: a guttural sound at the back of the throat

P, ‘pe', ‘mouth'
sound
: ‘p'

For which there is no equivalent, ‘tsade', ‘papyrus' plant;
sound
: ‘ts'

Q, ‘qoph', ‘monkey' or ‘ball of wool';
sound
: ‘q'

R, ‘resh', ‘head';
sound
: ‘r'

S, ‘shin', ‘tooth';
sound
: ‘sh'

T, ‘taw', ‘mark';
sound
: ‘t'

This script took some thousand years to evolve from 1300
BCE
to 300
BCE
.

The next step in the evolution occurs when the ancient Greeks adopt the Phoenician alphabet and use it to express their language. The inscriptions showing this date from 800
BCE
so scholars tend to date the first borrowing from two hundred years earlier. Over several hundred years the Greeks were responsible for five major changes:

i)
         
they used some of the Phoenician symbols to express vowel sounds – ‘a' (from Phoenician ‘aleph'), ‘e' (from Phoenician ‘he'), ‘i' (from Phoenician ‘yod') and ‘o' (from Phoenician ‘ayin');

ii)
        
they introduced some new signs for the sounds ‘u'
(pronounced ‘oo' or German ‘ü') and ‘long o' (as in ‘phone');

iii)
       
they created three new signs which they used interchangeably for ‘ph', ‘kh', ‘ks' and ‘ps';

iv)
        
they fixed their writing to run from left to right;

v)
        
they fixed the Ionian alphabet as standard for use for all Greek dialects.

Because Greek culture and ideas had a major influence on Europe, the alphabet which expressed those ideas had a great chance for survival amongst the European elite and ultimately all Europeans.

It was this alphabet that the Etruscans in what is now Italy adopted for their language – a language that still hasn't been fully deciphered from the 13,000 or so inscriptions discovered so far. The script was written right to left and had twenty-six letters, some of which were separated by dots, indicating perhaps that they worked with syllables.

The Romans started adopting this alphabet from about the seventh and the sixth century
BCE
onwards. The oldest Roman alphabet had twenty-one letters as the Romans didn't need letters they didn't speak, like ‘th', ‘kh' and ‘ph'. The Romans adapted the letters they adopted from the Greeks, letters we now call ‘upper case', to produce them in the form we know them today.

The exceptions are the letters that were added in medieval times, a story you can follow in this book in the sections for each letter.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself. Part of the story of the English alphabet has to include an account of what happened to the writing of those who first spoke Germanic dialects in England. This happened in the time between the end of the Roman
occupation and the arrival in 1066 of the Norman French. Frisians, Jutes, Franks, Angles and Saxons settled in Britain, certainly from
AD
400 onwards and from possibly earlier. The specialized few who knew how to write could write, either in the old way with the letters of ‘runes' (see ‘
V is for Vikings
') or in the new way with the Roman alphabet. What happened to the Roman alphabet in their hands is a good example of people inventing ways of writing letters to suit their needs. The letters they incorporated appear more fully in ‘D is for Disappeared Letters'. They include ‘thorn', ‘ash', ‘eth' and ‘wynn'. The Roman letters that the Old English speakers hardly ever used were ‘k', ‘q' and ‘z'. (You may be able to find the symbols for ‘thorn', ‘eth' and ‘ash' on your keyboard using ‘alt' because they are used in the Icelandic alphabet.) Saying that ‘the Anglo-Saxons wrote using Roman letters' obscures something remarkable: people speaking one language adopted letters being used for another. Imagine writing English with Arabic script.

When the Norman French invaded England in 1066, two slightly different alphabets (and two different uses of the alphabet) met up, representing the two languages in contact: Norman French and Old English. The alphabet you're reading was made by the people who amalgamated these two languages. Some Old English letters disappeared – along with another, ‘yogh', which was invented and then retired in the ‘Middle English' period of the late twelfth to the late fifteenth centuries. These disappearances happened primarily because, to start off with, the Latin-influenced Normans controlled most activities involving writing (see ‘
D is for Disappeared Letters
').Two Old English letters, not recited as part of ‘the alphabet', survived: ‘ash' and ‘ethel'.

The story of the changes in the English alphabet carried on until as late as the end of the seventeenth century with the letters
‘i', ‘j', ‘u', ‘v' and ‘w', by which time their present-day use was fixed. Accounts of their individual histories can be found in the chapters for those letters.

A point about Latin. The Romans influenced a good deal of what is now Europe directly or indirectly through conquest, Imperial rule and religion. Their laws, histories and ideas were of course expressed using the Roman alphabet. The ruling, religious and intellectual elites of Europe went on using the Romans' language, Latin, as an international language for several hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire, a period that secured versions of that alphabet all across western Europe.