Alphabetical, page 10
And that’s how it’s been ever since. Though now, those hours of thumbnail rubbing seem like the Stone Age. At the top of the screen, as I’m typing this, there is, as you almost certainly know, a small panel with a couple of arrows. I click on it and there are over a hundred fonts. Click on the panel next to it, and it can be regular, oblique, italic, bold. Click on the next panel and it can be tiny or huge. Yet, when I write in Twitter or Facebook or any other chatroom, the design of my alphabet is chosen for me. But when writing a poem, a diary, a blog, a powerpoint presentation, a report – I choose. I could, if I knew how, even design my own.
Before print, those who could write the letters could also appear as if they owned the law and religion. They could turn pages and, by looking at the signs, they could reveal the difference between good and bad, or what could guide you, entertain you, fine you, terrify you, lock you up, or even take your life. If you couldn’t read and write, you couldn’t own any of this. When print was invented, new kinds of people elbowed their way into taking possession of it: merchants, tradesmen, teachers, artisans. Lords, masters and leaders could create laws; writers could compose stories, plays and poems; master printers alone owned the secret skills to get the writing from hand-drawn script to printed page. Only they, really, knew the letteriness of each letter. That’s how it stayed for 500 years, from Gutenberg to Letraset. Of course, there were writers, painters, designers and masons who could design letters but, without a printer, they couldn’t distribute what they did.
Now, with our digitized, non-sticky Letraset, up on our computer screens, whiteboards, tablets and phones, the alphabet is a much more mutable, flexible tool. Even as teachers are asked to teach the correct way to write, the designers of machines are allowing people to choose what is the correct way to write. For a lot of the time, this may seem as if it’s about layout or design, but behind it all lies the fact that the choice of letter (albeit from a fixed range) doesn’t have to be made by someone other than you. The smallest building blocks of the shared written language (i.e. print) are more in your hands now than they have ever been. I suspect that this shift in the materials of how the written language reaches us is at the heart of why the language of writing is changing so fast. I explore this further in ‘T is for Txtspk’.
THE STORY OF
• THE LETTER-SHAPE of ‘G’ derives from the Greek letter ‘zeta’ – a letter looking like our capital ‘I’. It was pronounced ‘z’ which is how the Romans picked it up from the Etruscans. However, they didn’t need a continuous ‘zzz’ sound in Latin. Around 250 BCE the Romans altered its shape to look more like an ‘E’ without the middle horizontal stroke and it was at this point that they decided it wasn’t a ‘zzz’ but a ‘hard g’ as in our word ‘gap’ or in the Latin word ‘agricola’ (one of the first words that I learned in Latin which I have put in here for old times’ sake). The letter shape then curved to a crescent so that by the time it appears in classic Roman carved inscriptions in the second century AD it has the shape of our serif ‘G’.
There are two lower-case Gs: two storey and single storey. The two-storey ‘g’ comes from the French typeface of the 1500s, Garamond; the sans-serif, single-storey ‘g’ derives from the ‘Carolingian minuscule’ drawn up by Charlemagne’s scribes.
PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME
Because we can pronounce ‘g’ in three different ways – the ‘g’ of ‘gap’, the ‘g’ of ‘courage’, and the ‘g’ that some represent as ‘zh’, which is one of the pronunciations of the last ‘g’ of ‘garage’ – we have to speculate why we say the ‘g’ of the letter-name as ‘jee’. In Latin it was ‘gay’, early French made it ‘jay’. The Great Vowel Shift turned it into ‘jee’ – which is just as well given that ‘j’ is pronounced ‘jay’! (See ‘J’ for why ‘G’ and ‘J’ didn’t kill each other in a fratricidal quarrel.)
PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER
The three pronunciations depend on when and how any given word appears in the language and then what changes people work upon it. When I studied Chaucer, we were alerted to the cool way in which he slots into his English a stream of words of French origin. The experts seem to know that words like ‘courage’ were pronounced at that time as ‘coor-ah-zh-er’, rather than modern-day ‘curridge’. However, as you will have noticed, we don’t write it as ‘curridge’.
That ‘-dge’ ending is one of the ‘trigraphs’ we have in English – meaning three letters indicating one sound.
‘G’ combines at the beginning of words with all the vowels and vowel ‘y’ as in ‘gyre’, along with ‘r’ as in ‘grip’, and ‘l’ as in ‘glad’. It’s the closing letter of one of our most popular word endings, ‘-ing’, which is pronounced as ‘hard g’ in some parts of Britain, as a soft nasal combined sound in other parts, and not at all in London or in ‘old posh’ as in ‘huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’’. Other ways of putting consonant sounds before ‘g’ give us ‘bulge’ and ‘sponge’.
We also have several kinds of silent ‘g’: ‘gnat’, ‘sign’, ‘fight’, ‘delight’ and even Gs that look as if they should be silent but are not, as in ‘gnu’.
‘gnat’:
owes its ‘g’ to Old English ‘gnaett’.
‘sign’:
owes its ‘g’ to Old French ‘signe’ and before that, Latin ‘signum’.
‘fight’:
owes its ‘g’ to French scribes rendering the guttural ‘ch’ sound as ‘gh’.
‘delight’:
owes its ‘g’ to wise but foolish lexicographers demanding that ‘delite’ from Old French should look like ‘fight’.
‘gnu’:
owes its ‘g’ to German traveller Georg Forster (1754–1794) giving us ‘gnoo’ from Dutch ‘gnoe’, representing a native southern African word for a ‘wildebeast’, ‘i-gnu’.
However, the main reason for all this is to make children (and people for whom English is an additional language) cross, unhappy or both.
We play with the ‘g’ sounds by saying someone is ‘ga-ga’; people used to play with ‘gew-gaws’; Gigi was famous; you can bet on the ‘gee-gees’ and say ‘Golly, gee’ which is probably to do with ‘Jesus’. We talk of ‘go-getters’ who may or may not have ‘get-up-and-go’. Something can ‘get my goat’ and you can ‘give it a go’. Some people used to sing: ‘Ging-gang-goolie-goolie-goolie, ging gang goo . . .’ The best way to offend a ventriloquist is to say, ‘Gottle a geer’. Some people have ‘the gift of the gab’.
G IS FOR GREEK
AS IS OFTEN said, we owe the Greeks big-time.
First – vowels.
The words ‘facetious’ and ‘abstemious’ have something in common: they contain all the vowels in the order in which they appear in the alphabet.
We are taught to say, ‘a, e, i, o, u are the vowels’ as if this was something correct and significant. However, there are three problems:
1.If there really is something called a vowel sound, then the letter ‘y’ is an invitation to say at least two: the ‘y’ in ‘lovely’ and the ‘y’ in ‘fly’. ‘Y’ should get an invite to the party.
2.By far the most common vowel sound in spoken English is the ‘schwa’. Think how you say the ‘a’ in the word ‘about’ in the phrase, ‘I’m about six feet tall.’ It’s time we had a ‘schwa’ letter. On the basis of the rule that writing changes according to need, one day we will. The phonetic alphabet symbol for it is an upside-down ‘e’.
3.We make many more vowel sounds than there are ‘vowels’. We represent vowel sounds by using the ‘vowels’ singly, in twos, threes and using consonants as well.
The ‘schwa’ was given its name by one of the Brothers Grimm – Jacob. It’s everywhere. Most of the times we say the words ‘the’ and ‘a’ we do the ‘schwa’. We like the ‘schwa’. The ‘schwa’ is like a giant octopus that spreads over the whole of speech, sucking up thousands of words, replacing ‘ay’ and ‘ee’ and ‘eye’ sounds with the same short noise. It is also one of the reasons why trying to teach reading purely and only according to the sounds that children make is not easy and, some would say, wrong: the ‘schwa’ does uniformity where the letters do difference. To make the letters sound different, you end up ‘stressing’ the unstressed words like ‘to’, ‘the’ and ‘a’, enunciating them as ‘too’, ‘thee’ and ‘ay’. You start to sound stressed.
Vowel sounds are ‘open mouth’ sounds, where we open the mouth, often leaving the tongue sitting on the floor of the mouth. As we rattle along in speech, we alternate between ‘open’ sounds and ones where we ‘close’ the sound, using the back of the throat, tongue, lips or teeth or any of the three in combination with each other. We try to signify these closed sounds with consonant letters, used in ones, twos and threes (e.g. ‘f’, ‘sh’, and ‘str’) and occasionall y with a vowel letter to guide us, as with ‘occasionally’ where the ‘si’ invites us to make a ‘zh’ sound.
Similarly (to illustrate point 3 from above), a single vowel letter is not the only way we signify a vowel sound. We can do it with two vowel letters, as with ‘ee’, ‘ou’ and ‘oa’; with ‘split’ vowel letters as with the ‘i’ and ‘e’ of ‘site’; when guided by ‘silent’ consonant letters as with ‘fight’. We also put three vowel letters together in ‘beauty’ to make a sound very similar to ‘you’. If you come from London, as I do, we also make vowel sounds when we see ‘ar’ in ‘bar’. We don’t ‘stop’ the vowel with the consonant letter ‘r’. For me, the three letters in ‘oar’ signify a vowel sound. Again, the way I pronounce the word ‘deal’ could be represented as something like ‘dee-oo’ where the ‘al’ indicates to me when I’m reading out loud that I should say ‘oo’.
Vowel letters have quite a lot to do with the Greeks.
One story goes that the Phoenician alphabet was consonants only. Then came the Greeks. They invented vowel letters.
The problems with this story are:
a)the late Phoenicians had already started to invent vowel letters;
b)the Greeks adapted four already existing Phoenician consonant letters to signify the equivalents of ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’ and ‘o’: ‘aleph’ became ‘alpha’, ‘heth’ became ‘heta’ (‘epsilon’ was added later), ‘yodh’ became ‘iota’, ‘ayin’ became ‘o’ (later called ‘omicron’ and ‘omega’ – or ‘o little’ and ‘o big’); and
c)they invented one vowel letter, the ‘u’ (‘upsilon’).
The ancient Greeks get the credit for inventing everything from democracy to houmous, so maybe they can take this small downgrade in inventiveness.
Now to the Greeks, their letters and the other world of the scientific alphabet. Here’s the Greek one:
For hundreds of years, non-Greeks have used the individual letters. At university, my essays were marked with the first four, just as people themselves are categorized in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The Phi Beta Kappa Society has been celebrating excellence in liberal arts and sciences in the US since 1779. You can’t talk about the volume of circles without ‘pi’, we have ‘alpha males’, ‘gamma rays’, ‘river deltas’, ‘not one iota’, ‘omega-3 fatty acid’ and Omega watches. I learned that Jesus was ‘alpha and omega’.
Here are the uses of just one of the letters, ‘lambda’ (both forms). Please recite this at high speed:
a)the von Mangoldt function in number theory
b)the set of logical axioms in the axiomatic method of logical deduction in first-order logic
c)the cosmological constant
d)a type of baryon
e)a diagonal matrix of eigenvalues in linear algebra
f)the permeance of a material in electromagnetism
g)one wavelength of electromagnetic radiation
h)the decay constant in radioactivity
i)function expressions in the lambda calculus
j)a general eigenvalue in linear algebra
k)the expected number of occurrences in a Poisson distribution in probability
l)the arrival rate in queueing theory
m)the average lifetime or rate parameter in an exponential distribution (commonly used across statistics, physics, and engineering)
n)the failure rate in reliability engineering
o)the mean or average value (probability and statistics)
p)the latent heat of fusion
q)the Lagrange multiplier in the mathematical optimization method, known as the shadow price in economics
r)the Lebesgue measure denoting the volume or measure of a Lebesgue measurable set
s)longitude in geodesy
t)linear density
u)ecliptic longitude in astrometry
v)the Liouville function in number theory
w)the Carmichael function in number theory
x)a unit of measure of volume equal to one microlitre (1 μL) or one cubic millimetre (1 mm3)
y)the empty string in formal grammar
To get an idea of how mathematicians, physicists and engineers handle the Greek alphabet in their abstract thinking, here’s a line from Goldstone’s boson:
In 1964, I went to Middlesex Hospital Medical School. This came about as a consequence of a notion that had crossed my mind two years previously which went something like this: ‘I enjoyed doing Biology. What a shame I am now going into the sixth form to study English, French and History without doing any Biology.’ I shared this notion with my parents who fell on it like an eagle on a lamb. ‘We know what you would like to do. You would like to be a doctor. Come and talk to our old doctor friend.’ Any resemblance that this story has to stereotypes of Jewish parents longing for their offspring to be doctors, lawyers or accountants is purely coincidental. Or not.
The doctor friend explained that at the Middlesex Medical School, they welcomed people with little or no science background on a course called ‘First MB’ where they would take you from 0 to 60 mph in Biology, Physics and Chemistry in a year. I could carry on with my English, French and History and then embark on years of science and medical study. So it was, two years later, I came off A-level courses in such things as Chaucer, Conrad, the unification of Italy and Voltaire to be hit by hours of rat dissection, photons and mitochondria. In the Physics lab I met the Greeks. It seemed to me at the time that the Greeks had named or labelled anything of any importance. I don’t think I was fully aware at the time that it wasn’t the Greeks who did this but the pioneers of scientific discovery. Like Young. And his modulus. Incredibly, we have already met Young in ‘A for Alphabet’. It was his work that helped Champollion decipher the Rosetta Stone.
Thomas Young was born into a Quaker family in Somerset in 1773. He learned French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic. He studied medicine, then moved on to studying Physics in Germany. With the help of an inheritance, he set himself up as a physician in London and became a professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution. He established the wave theory of light; he gave his name to ‘Young’s modulus’ which enabled engineers to predict strain. He founded the study of the physiology of the eye and described the change of the curvature of the human lens, astigmatism and the eye’s reception of colour. He deduced capillary action (water rising up a capillary), and was the first to define ‘energy’ in its modern sense. He developed a system for determining children’s dosage of medicines and derived a formula for the wave speed of the pulse of blood through arteries. He proposed a universal phonetic language, and introduced the term ‘Indo-European languages’ by comparing the vocabulary of 400 languages. Shockingly, he wasn’t entirely successful in cracking the hieroglyphic code on the Rosetta Stone, though Champollion, as we’ve seen, credited him with having made great progress by correctly finding the sound value of six of the hieroglyphs. Oh yes, and he also developed ‘Young temperament’ – a method of tuning musical instruments.
Young was clearly tiresomely brilliant at everything. I discovered while I was studying science, including his modulus, that I wasn’t brilliant at science.
What I’m about to say is entirely from memory, so excuse me if I’ve got it wrong. I’m doing it as a way of testing to see if these important features of the known world have survived for fifty years in my head. We were given some springs. We attached one end to a hook and the other to a weight. The weight pulled on the spring so that it stretched. We measured how far. We attached heavier weights to springs. We drew a graph showing how the springs got longer if the weight was heavier.
Now the next bit gets hazy. Something was ‘sigma’. I think it was the relationship between the weight and the length of the spring. I think we were introduced to another variable: the thickness of the spring’s wire. As I write this I am desperately hoping that I’ve got this right and that feeling is reminding me of how I felt doing First MB. It’s a sense that there is a world of precision which reveals characteristics of the real world, but I live in a parallel world that is constantly beset with vagueness and indeterminacy. In an entirely illogical way, I have a sense that the precision world is precise because it uses Greek letters. Greek letters name precisely observed features. Calculations can be made using these Greek letters which, in the case of that experiment, will enable engineers to calculate how thick the hawsers need to be on a suspension bridge. The Greekness of the letters is an essential part of how I feel about all this. I can hear my scientific brother talking about ‘sigma’, ‘mu’, ‘theta’ and ‘lambda’ as entities. When he does Maths he can manipulate them in the precision world.
There’s an irony here. Non-Greeks have used Greek letters to be scientifically precise and specific, yet the reason why Greek was chosen – and is still being chosen – is cultural. In Roman times, Greek was the language of teachers, and in art the Romans looked to the Greeks as their progenitors. In the medieval period, the two foundation languages were seen to be Latin and Greek, with Greek being the older. Early scientists were assumed to have a level of education which would include knowing the Greek letters. For the writers of fiction and the namers of new substances or new products, the key issue is connotation – that cloud of associations that runs through and around every word we say and write. Using a Greek letter lends the object, being or character a scientific identity. Because so much modern science is beyond the uninitiated, the association is not only with science but also with mystery, something that only true boffin-heads really know and understand. This is ideal for sci-fi, which likes to bundle up science, mysterious power and uniqueness into a single entity.
