Review: Vivien Horler

Why Q Needs U – A history of our letters and how we use them, by Danny Bate (Blink)

My three-year-old grandson Ned, who’s (obviously) very bright, picked up a book in a shop and read: “Santas’s beard is very …”

Then he turned to his father and said: “Tom, what’s this word?”

The word was “rough”. Maybe if it had been spelt “ruff” he’d have got it.

That’s just one indication of how spoken English has veered away from the acrophonic principle which held, back in the mists of time, that each sound should be represented by a written symbol.

All readers of English occasionally feel a bit sorry for people learning the language, because the spelling of newer written languages like Afrikaans, or Czech, which was revised during a revival movement in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, makes more sense.

Written British English (unlike American English) has never seen a serious effort to apply the acrophonic principle and has, in the words of author Danny Bate “simply had more time in which to become archaic”.

The problem is that speech changes, and writing lags behind. Or as Bate says, “When we set sounds as the basis for our writing system, we are destined to spend the following centuries trying to keep pace with them.”

Bate, who has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, is a linguist, writer, broadcaster and podcaster fascinated by the study of languages and etymology. And in this delightful read he has found lots to interest those of us fascinated by the study of language.

Bate traces the history of our letters from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Etruscans and of course the Romans, which gave us most of our squared Roman capitals. Many of our letters are very old – about 4 000 years old – while others, like W, once literally written as double U, are much younger (although the sound it represents is ancient).

English as we know it was of course fundamentally affected by 1066 and the Norman invasion of Britain, which introduced hundreds of new words into the language. Then came the Great Vowel Shift, which saw complex changes to the long vowels of Middle English, occurring roughly from 1400 to 1700.

Written English is much less random than you would think. There are complex rules, many of which we users of the language are formally unaware, but we grasp them.

All of which sounds very learned, but in fact this book is full of delightful facts and explanations which make our language sound more sensible. For instance, why do we say one thief, but many thieves (or one wife but many wives)? It’s because when a word ending in an unvoiced F becomes a plural, the letter finds itself between two vowels. And this forced the F to become voiced, and so it became a V.

There is some discussion of the differences between written British and American English, including a brief discursion of the way we say Z – zed – compared with the American zee. The great (British) dictionary writer Samuel Johnson came up with a third pronunciation: “Z: zed, more commonly izzard or uzzard.”

Bate says the likely explanation for this entirely different name for Z comes from the contraction of a phrase meaning “and Z (in French: et zede)”. Imagine you’re reciting the letters of the alphabet, and you get to “W, X, Y and Z”, or in French, “et zede”… or izzard. This is, says Bate, now very rare. Well yes.

I come from a Cornish background, where the letter R is pronounced in words like girl, word and bird, as it is in most American dialects. It’s called a rhotic R. But in the rest of British English it is pretty rare and disparaged. In writing, pirates are often depicted using it – “Arr, me harrties!” –  as do lowly agricultural workers.

(I once caught a train from London’s Paddington to Truro in Cornwall and was issued with two apparent tickets. When the very Cornish conductor came round, I produced the two tickets and said I didn’t know which was the right one. He replied: “Well that’s all right, my loverrr, cos I do!” They speak like that in Cornwall.)

But Brits do occasionally use a rhotic R, as do many South Africans. This tends to happen when R is the last letter of a word, and the next word begins with a vowel. Hence you get betterrr-off, my carrr-is red.

Saffers often do this too, but not always – I cringe when I hear a local broadcaster describing a mountain fire and talking about a “flê up”.

As many travelling Saffers have noticed, Brits will often insert an R that doesn’t exist: – lawr-and-order or drawring.

Then there’s ye, as in “Ye Olde Bookshoppe”. There is a letter, which I have no idea how to reproduce here, which looks a bit like a pregnant woman in profile, a long upright with a bulge in the middle. It was called a thorn and was pronounced TH.

Its English background was a rune – there’s a whole section on runes in this book – but in the 15^th century the thorn was not included in the boxes of typeface English printers were importing from the continent. So printers abandoned it, and substituted a letter they did have – Y. Bate describes its appearance in titles like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe as “the last whisper in English of its runic past”.

The book is divided into 26 chapters, one for each letter, and each has an interesting epigraph at the beginning. My favourite was above the letter B, from Spike Milligan: “Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I’ll draw a sketch of thee./ What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2 B?”

The book delves into each letter’s history, changing pronunciations, and various curiosities, such as the fact that the most commonly used vowel in English, the shwa, is not represented by any letter at all. A shwa is the unstressed vowel found in most words – think of the first and last A in the word banana. But even if ignored by our alphabet, it does have a place in the International Phonetic Alphabet, where it is represented by /ə/.

I could go on, but I think I should stop. I found Why Q Needs U fascinating (that particular explanation is a bit technical so you’ll have to read the book) and I’ve have been quoting it to friends all week.