Alphabetical, page 3
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.
One note of caution: because to tell the story as an ‘evolution’ in a lone chapter called ‘A is for Alphabet’ might suggest some kind of speedy, easy-flowing passage, with one stage moving inexorably into the next. This would be a gross misrepresentation. All we can say is that at any given moment in time, a writing system is asked, by the people who know how to use it, to perform tasks. If any of these tasks break down because the symbols don’t work or are thought to be insufficient or redundant, then it will follow that people will invent new symbols and processes for writing and reading.
There can be no full, unabridged story of the alphabet. That can be found only in the total mass of everything that has ever been written. This book is twenty-six scenes – with digressions – taken from the drama.
THE STORY OF
• THE FIRST FORM of ‘B’ is an Egyptian hieroglyph from 4,000 years ago, meaning a ‘shelter’ and representing the sound ‘h’. If you can’t see a shelter in ‘B’ it will help if you first rotate the ‘B’ so that the vertical is horizontal and the loops sit below. Break open one of the loops and you have a door, a room and a roof over both.
The Semitic word for ‘house’ is ‘bayt’ (beginning with ‘b’ of course) and this explains the shift from ‘h’. The letter itself was rotated to a vertical position by the Phoenicians in around 1000 BCE though at this stage it was facing left or, as we would say, ‘backwards’. The Phoenicians wrote from right to left, so when the Greeks switched their own writing from left to right, they flipped the ‘B’ to face in what we would think of as the ‘right’ direction. They called it ‘beta’ and closed the open loop so that it was now one upright and two closed loops.
A further way the word ‘bayt’ (or ‘beth’) survives is in Hebrew: Bethlehem is the ‘house of bread’.
The Romans added the serifs.
b
The first creators of ‘b’ were the monks in their scriptoria, speed-writing ‘B’ in around AD 500. If you can get away with one loop, why bother with two? When the first typeface designers in around 1500 were creating their upper and lower cases (terms referring to the two boxes which held the two different kinds of metal letters for the printing machine), they liked the single-loop ‘b’ and it’s stuck ever since.
PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME
The Etruscans in around 700 BCE adopted the Greek ‘beta’ and reduced its name to something like ‘bah’ or ‘bay’. ‘Bay’ was how the Romans and the Norman French pronounced it. The Great Vowel Shift turned it in the mouths of most English speakers to ‘bee’ though ‘bay’ survives in, say, Irish speech.
PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER
Consonant sounds can be grouped according to how we make the particular sound. ‘B’ and ‘p’ are clearly linked because we do virtually the same thing with our lips. What makes the difference is whether we ‘voice’ the letter or not – in other words, whether we use our vocal cords or not. Then again, the movement of the lips is not all that different from making the ‘m’ sound, the difference being that with ‘b’ we ‘stop’ the sound coming out, but with the ‘m’ we carry it on.
In the evolution of languages, there seems to be a relation between ‘b’ and ‘v’. People who travel across Europe will be familiar with ‘tabernas’ and ‘taverns’. Down the centuries some peoples have chosen to change this consonant sound by moving their lower lips forwards or backwards.
We are fond of words beginning with ‘b’ in English; it combines well with vowels and the consonants ‘l’ and ‘r’ to make ‘blade’ and ‘brave’. In loan words it combines with ‘h’ for ‘bhaji’ and ‘y’ in ‘Byelorussia’.
It doubles in verbs: ‘rub, rubbing, rubbed’ and in words like ‘bubble’, but not when it’s in ‘-e words’ as with ‘tube, tubing’. Putting a consonant sound in front of the ‘b’ gives us ‘asbo’, ‘albatross’, ‘amber’ and, if you say it quick enough, ‘Anne Boleyn’.
Sound-play with ‘b’ gives us ‘babble’, ‘baby’, ‘bubby’, ‘bib’, ‘Bob’, ‘bibble’, ‘B. B. King’, ‘boo!’, ‘bah!’ (meaning ‘you’re talking nonsense’), ‘blubber’, ‘to blab’, ‘a blabbermouth’, an old children’s song which began: ‘Bee bo babbity . . .’ and a group of words including ‘bang’, ‘bish, bash, bosh’ and ‘biff’.
Some ‘b’-heavy expressions include ‘the big bad wolf’ and ‘bye-bye blackbird’. ‘By hook or by crook’ is a double expression in which the two halves are linked both by the rhyme and the initial ‘b’ in ‘by’.
B-words are not as rude as the F-word but still too rude for me to say on the BBC, or the ‘Beeb’ as I’ve ended up saying it.
B IS FOR BATTLEDORE
THE WORLD OF teaching children to read is full of words like ‘drilling’, ‘forcing’ and ‘whipping’, and in the midst of it sits the ‘battledore’, an object and a word which together imply battling and beating. If you travelled in the French countryside a few decades ago, you would have seen women standing or sitting next to a square pond, with stone or concrete edges sloping down to the water’s edge. Women would soap up a piece of washing and then beat it with a wooden object in the shape of a bat or racket, known as ‘un battoir’. I have one from the Pyrenees.
In England this was called a washing ‘beetle’ or, in anticipation of John, Paul, George and Ringo, a ‘beatle’, a ‘beetle-do’ or a ‘battle-door’, eventually being standardized as ‘battledore’. Presumably, children, the great improvisers, would borrow these from their mothers in order to play a game which evolved into ‘battledore and shuttlecock’. The first toy manufacturers made ‘battledores’ so that children could play the game and not nick their mothers’ beatles.
None of this would have anything whatsoever to do with the teaching of reading, if it weren’t for enterprising folk from at least as early as 1660, who thought of putting letters, syllables and words on these toys. A few decades later they created fold-out cardboard booklets in the shape of battledores, and then from there produced teaching-to-read primers which were in effect plain book-shaped primers. Benjamin Collins, the man credited with inventing this cardboard battledore in 1746, is thought to have sold 100,000 of them between 1770 and 1780.
Battledores were at one point so common that they gave rise to an expression, ‘He doesn’t know B from a battledore’, meaning he doesn’t know very much, perhaps along the lines of an expression my father used, ‘He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow’. The battledore in its ‘beatle’ form might have little more than the letters of the alphabet on it, but as it evolved, it acquired such texts as how to ‘learn Plural and Singular: YOU to Many, and THOU to One’ (1660), or woodcuts of Jack the Giant Killer or Old Mother Hubbard, so that by the 1830s you had a complete package: upper- and lower-case alphabet, numbers, lists of syllables, like: ‘ab ac ad af ag’; lists of words, like: ‘add bad lad mad pad sad’; or rhymes, like:
Go now to bed,
For you are fed.
If Jem can run,
He has a bun.
Now my new pen
Is fit for Ben.
Tim put the fox
In to the box.
We had a cow,
Cat, cur, and sow.
You all may go
To see the doe.
We can see the Victorian ideal at work at the heart of teaching children to read: order in letters, syllables, words, the creation and the universe.
The first concerted and thought-through efforts at teaching the reading of English (as opposed to Latin, Greek and Hebrew) to people outside of the aristocracy had a similar end in mind: devotion. To paraphrase the famous story, we might say, ‘What big letters you have!’
‘All the better to read the Bible with.’
The first instrument for this purpose – and it was an instrument – was the ‘horn-book’: a board, usually made of oak, about 9 x 5 inches in size, with a handle at its base, making it look rather like a square table-tennis bat. On one side, was a piece of horn, to protect the piece of paper that the user would slide underneath it, on which was printed the alphabet and the vowels. Below these there was usually a series of syllables (the ‘syllabary’) in rows ‘ab eb ib ob ub’, ‘ac ec ic oc uc’, ‘ad ed id od ud’, ‘ba be bi bo bu’, ‘ca ce ci co cu’, ‘da de di do du’ and so on. Underneath this was often written: ‘In the Name of the Father, & of the Son, & of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’ Underneath this was the Lord’s Prayer in exactly the same wording that I was taught in school assemblies from the age of four.
It is thought that the simplest form of these began appearing some time in the mid-fifteenth century. There were more luxurious versions made of silver with bas-reliefs on the rear side. The lettering started off by being ‘black letter’ or gothic style and the syllabary became more complex. An alternative form of the horn-book was the ‘criss-cross row’ which was shaped more or less like a crucifix. This strand of teaching reading developed into the battledore.
Needless to say, these bats and bat-shaped objects were not the only means of teaching children to read through the period I’ve described, 1450–1800. From at least as early as 1538, printers started to produce books, calling them ‘primers’ or ‘ABCs’, usually including the catechism, the Litany and other religious texts.
Classes in ‘Charity’ schools could be as large as fifty or sixty, crammed into tiny rooms, with writing done in sandboxes or on slates with chalk or hardly at all. The main method of teaching, according to an account from 1654, seems to have involved the children reading out loud in a group, one syllable at a time, pointing at the syllables with their ‘feskews’ or pointers. The children had to take turns reading the syllables for seven pages, again and again, until they had learned these off by heart, and so on for twenty-one chapters. The chapters included such lines as: ‘Ah! wee see an ox dy by an ax’ and ‘Let the welch belch in a halch, if they filch’ (from An English Monosyllabary, 1651). Though I can figure out that the message here is that Welsh people burp and steal things, I’m not sure what a ‘halch’ is. A hutch?
Another method often used was to teach reading through spelling. First the alphabet was taught and then words were spelled out and learned as spelled. When writing on slates was the order of the day, this was sometimes done to order, in unison, letter by letter or word by word, with children teaching each other down the line with ‘the appearance of a machine’ as a report from 1815 puts it. Given that this was the precise moment in history when children were being drafted into the factory system, this metaphor seems to serve as evidence that the methods we use to teach reading match the era in which they are employed.
Being debated were such questions as:
i)whether it was best to learn to spell first in order to read
ii)which syllables were best learned first
iii)what constitutes a syllable and a correct division between syllables in a word
iv)whether it was best to learn the alphabet in chunks or the whole lot in one go
v)whether to learn the letters in orders other than alphabetical
vi)whether to ‘sound’ the letters as they were thought to appear in English phonology rather than simply using the letters’ names
vii)whether it was a good or a bad idea to spend a deal of time teaching the children to make the shapes of the letters with similes about half-moons or rakes for their configurations
viii)whether the similarity in shape between groups of letters should determine the order in which they were taught
ix)whether pictures should or should not be used in conjunction with letters or words
x)whether to teach reading through what we would call ‘morphology’ which includes how words can be changed by doing such things as adding plurals, prefixes, suffixes, verb endings such as ‘-ing’ and ‘-ed’, internal verb changes such as ‘drink-drank-drunk’
From the seventeenth century, some guides talked of rules for spelling:
E at the end of words no sound doth make,
Only in these which for Example take . . .
The words ‘Chloe’, ‘Jubilee’ and ‘Galilee’ are cited as the exceptions. Some books list as many as sixty-five rules which had to be learned.
Alongside these varying approaches which try to teach reading from what has been called the ‘bottom up’, others pondered on whether it could be taught in a top-down way, from learning whole words, titles, phrases or even whole passages. Origins of the ‘look-and-say’ method of teaching to read can be found as early as 1799, when it was suggested that children could learn to read ‘logographically’, learning whole words by their appearance. This was sometimes called ‘reading without spelling’. Yet another theory believed that dictation was the best method, whereby the teacher (or older pupil) read slowly while the children wrote what was being read. (This was a regular part of my learning French in the 1950s and 60s.) For each of these arguments, there were counter-blasts disproving the worth or efficacy of the method.
Alongside these school-based approaches, many other kinds of initiations into literacy were going on. Some small-time popular printers produced booklets like the phenomenally popular Reading Made Easy, a title that originated from at least as early as 1786 and which came to be known in the trade as ‘Reading Easies’. The alphabet rhyme begins:
