The alphabet

Apart from four capital letters, not conventionally taught first, the alphabet is almost entirely arbitrary, abstract, non-figurative.

It is possible in principle to represent the sounds of speech ‘featurally’, by the features of the sounds. It was done, I believe, two and half thousand years ago for those four capital letters. At the time of the Roman empire, people writing by hand in Latin started forming some letters in  in a style known as ‘minuscule’ or what we now know as ‘lowercase’, as opposed to ‘majuscule’, as used for public inscriptions, laboriously carved in stone. A featural principle was vaguely followed in the design of p, b, d, k, and with ascenders or descenders and opposite facing hooks and tails for q and g. These sounds, known as ‘stops’, all involve a complete blockage of the airstream in the mouth. Correspondingly more compact shapes were used for the five vowels in a, e, i, o, and u. The dot on the i and the cross on the t may have once represented a principle known as ‘minimal specification‘. By this (highly controversial) principle, i is the least specified vowel (in Southern British English and possibly in Latin) and t is the least specified consonant (in at least the overwhelming majority of languages).

But if there were once featural design principles here they were not followed consistently. And then the featural idea was dropped until Alexander Melville Bell resurrected it with his ‘Visible Speech’ in 1867 with the phonetic features of speech which define the sounds reflected consistently in every character. But Visible Speech never caught on. And the arbitrary, abstract, random, non-featural qualities of the alphabet we know may be the actual key to its success.

There may be a learnability hurdle in the randomness. Some children may expect to find at least some sort of representational system, as there are in the design of the icons on the control buttons of household devices. But a complete redesign of the alphabet is not on the cards for now.

A system in flux

Phonetic / phonological systems are not simple. In a little understood way, they are all in a state of constant flux. At least for speakers of those varieties of English where the R after the vowel in pour, part, first, is not pronounced, the relations between R, L, Y and W, may be changing from a system with R and L in one group and Y and W in another group to a system with R, Y and W in one group, only ocurring before the vowel, and L on its own, with quite different forms before and after the vowel. A logically, consistent system that will keep everyone happy may be a bridge too far. Designing an alphabet for a language which does not have one is no trivial task.

At least eight great minds

Gallileo said that the alphabet was the greatest invention in human history. Let us suppose that he was right, at least when he said what he did. The invention of the alphabet involved at least eight great minds over more than 3,000 years, possibly 4,000 years, starting somewhere in the Middle East. The length and complexity of the invention was unknown in Gallileo’s time. It was an even greater invention than Gallileo was in a position to know. It is hardly surprising that some children find the alphabet hard to master, especially when it is used as inconsistently as it is in English, with 500 or so relations between sounds and letters, known as graphemes. (This number is often under-counted, particularly by proponents of Systematic Synthetic Phonics).

It is often said that writing was separately and independently invented in China, in Egypt, and in Mexico. But that is true only of the first step – representing words by symbols, known as ‘hieroglyphs’ for familiar everyday items, particularly those of trade, obligation, and taxation, such as house, field, and the names of crops. Alphabetic letters are something else entirely.

Before the alphabet – figurative representation

Hieroglyphs are figurative. Some things are easily and clearly represented by simple figures, a human being standing up with the legs apart and the hands outstretched, a bull or a cow with its horns, a sheep with no horns, a house with a roof and chimneys, doors and windows, a glass of beer at least for the English and Germans with a rounded shape and a large handle, and a different shape with a smaller handle for tea, the hairs and the stalk for barley, corresponding symbols for the head and face and parts of the head and face, and so on. The ancient Egyptians developed a system with 700 or so hieroglyphs of this sort.

But 700 words is not enough for even the most casual of conversations about the family, the weather, how the animals are doing, how the work on the house is going. There are many different sorts of crop apart from barley. Everyday items have holes, edges, surfaces. There are universally recognised qualities such as pain, fear, honour, courage, humour, not easily shown clearly as expressions on the human face.

A 700 character system could be extended with the symbol for eye used for I, wood as would, knot as not, bee for be. And the difference could be told from the context. But there are about 100 such forms in English, and more in many other languages including Latin and ancient Greek. Only a small proportion of them could be represented by figurative symbols. Most, like the two commonest words in English, a and the, could not be represented in this way. Such forms, known as ‘functors’, approximately alternate with ‘content words’ in everyday speech.

The main utility of a 700 character system was for tax collectors, merchants, and for those whose job it was to honour the living gods who diverted most of the available wealth into the construction of pyramids to keep them happy in the after life.

The big idea was the alphabet. This did not come as one idea, but two ideas, hundreds of ideas apart.

Letters for consonants

The key step was to use single characters for consonants. Then as now, the languages spoken around the South East corner of the Mediterranean have the vowels ‘inserted’ on the fly by rules according to the position and role of the word in the structure of the sentence. The modern languages with this property include Arabic, Hebrew, Tigrinya, Amharic, and Maltese. Somehow this unusual property of what are known as the ‘Semitic’ languages may have facilitated the invention of letters for sounds. By the original system, only the root consonants were represented because then, as now, for native speakers of a Semitic language, that was all, or nearly all, that readers needed. We have something a bit like this in English with sink, sank and sunk, as in “This ship is about to sink” or “The ship sank” or “The ship was sunk .” But whereas in English, the root is clearly sink, and the vowel changes, in the Semitic languages, most or all of the roots consist only of consonants, and the vowel or vowels are added, rather than changed.

It is possible that the forms of these first letters represented words beginning with a particular sound, making the characters easier to learn, teach and remember. So if BETH meant house, what had been a picture sign for house became the letter B. It is possible that this genius invention was by an enslaved turquoise miner in the Sinai desert. As an index of the cleverness here, the idea of using a single character to represent speech sounds seems to have occurred only once in human history. The new letters were conceived as having an order, probably for the sake of easier teaching and learning.

Consonants and vowels

The new writing soon came to be used by traders to record their business all over the Mediterranean. But a system which showed only consonants did not work for non-Semitic languages in which words are built from syllables with both consonants and vowels. So between 2,700 and 2,800 years ago, a system for showing vowels was worked out for the Greek of the time with vowels, then as now, intrinsically part of the word structure. Letters for sounds which did not occur in Greek were used for Greek vowels, including what was now easily recognisable as modern A. This was now the first modern alphabet. Soon the highly cultured Etruscans adapted the new alphabet as a way of writing their language. It may have been an Etruscan who had the original insight that speech sounds can be broken down into more fundamental elements, now known as ‘distinctive features’, for the capital letters, M, N, B and D. Then the up and coming Romans, who would eventually obliterate Etruscan civilisation, adapted the alphabet for Latin with just 21 letters, later adding Y and Z for Greek words containing those sounds, which did not occur in Latin. And  a Roman teacher called Spurius Carvilius Ruga invented the letter G, correctly detecting that it is like the C in cat, differing only by what we now call ‘voicing’ and showing this with a hook underneath. Ruga was clearly aware of the featural idea.

The Greek ordering of the second, third, and fourth letters, pronounced in English as beta, gamma and delta, reflects an awareness of the fact that they represent the series of what are known by their features as voiced stops. The ordering in Greek and modern European languages of M and N reflects that these are both ‘nasals’ – with the airstream passing through the nose.

The look of text

As the Roman empire collapsed and Christianity grew with a devotion to ‘holy writ’, monasteries in Northern Europe started producing beautifully executed and decorated bibles. The Kells Bible is one spectacular example. But these bibles were meant to celebrate the wealth, power and dignity of their owners. In 781 Charles the Great or Charlemagne, then the most powerful ruler in Europe head-hunted Alcuin, a famous poet and scholar from York, to join his court, run his bureaucracy, and teach him and his sons to read and write. Alcuin brought a miniscule tradition with him. But he developed it to be (relatively!) easy to read and write by short lines, spaces between words, the equivalents of full stops, commas, and question marks, sentences beginning with capitals, and some letters like b, k and d having ascenders, and p, g and q having descenders, the lat two with a tail and a hook. Before Alcuin, now here and nowhere would have looked exactly the same. Alcuin laid down the basic look of modern text 600 years before this was made possible by the invention of printing,

Letters for other languages

Not long after Alcuin, two brothers Cyril and Methodius, were commissioned to adapt classical Latin and Greek scripts to the special needs of a Slavic language, which then, as now, had some vowels beginning with something like the I in it. So the first sound in the Russian name, Yury which Russians hear as a single vowel, is still written with a letter beginning with a recognisable I. Modern Russian uses an adapted form of what the brothers devised, with two major updates, one in 1648, another in 1918.

In 1524, another scholar-inventor, Gian Giorgio Trissino, came up with a string of ideas for updating Italian writing. But most of his suggestions were rejected. What was accepted was the letter J, though in Trissino’s system for a sound like English Y in yes.

The International Phonetic Alphabet incorporates most of Trissiono’s proposals directly.

Updates and reforms

For some languages, scholars have devised systems of single characters for the equivalents of London English key, cow, and car, pea, par, and paw, tea, tar and tore. One such language is Bengali. But this would be hard or impossible to implement for a language with as many possible syllables as English.

There would seem to be four basic ways of improving the system now in use in the English speaking world:

• Inventing new characters for any sounds which are not represented in a language and throwing away any unnecessary characters, as happened in England when the first efforts were made to write Old English with its sounds like modern TH which were not part of Latin;
• Adapting the alphabet to ensure that speech can be wertten down at the rate of everyday delivery. The Romans used a system with over 14,000 characters. In 1837 Sir Isaac Pitman had another featural idea of using thick strokes for consonants like B and D and thin strokes for consonants like P and T. In 1888, John Gregg improved on the Pitman system. In the 1960s various proposals were developed to write English without most of the vowels;
• Taking Pitman’s idea to its logical conclusion;
• Following Bell’s visible speech idea. Any experiment along such lines would have to run the gauntlet of the proponents of various competitive theories of how the sounds of speech are defined.

All of these improvements are possible, but only at the risk of making existing archives either unreadable or inaccessible. As Trissimo found, proposals for spelling reforms tend to be very stongly resisted. Some would say that spelling reform is now unnecessary with Chat GPT. It is not obvious whether s reformed alphabet would work better.

Bell put his idea to the government of the day, with the explicit aim of promoting international understanding. As a Scot, he was particularly aware of the suffering of wounded Scottish soldiers who had born the brunt of much of the fighting in the Crimean war. Visible Speech was the first step towards a phonetic alphabet. But unlike the phonetic alphabet, devised in the 1890s Visible Speech was deliberately based on what are now known as ‘distinctive  features’, rather than what Bell contemptuously dismissed as ‘Romic’ characters. Bell’s suggestion was ignored by the government of the day. But while Bell made some significant advances, like recognising the important contribution of the lips in the vowels in hoot, foot, paw, and pot, his feature system has not stood the test of time. And various features are still the topic of intense debate. While it is obvious and generally agreed that the positioning of the tongue is critical, much of the debate is about finding a system that works for every language. And Visible Speech is now just a footnote in the history of writing and the theoretical study of speech.

The alphabet is the way it is, as by an invention of ultimate genius, invented once.

But for as long as we use any sort of system to represent speech, learning to use it has to recapitulate to some degree the long process of inventing it.

Russians and Icelanders are used to keeping their writing system up to date. But the British protest about the slightest change to even the most illogical of features, like the apostrophe, denoting possession. after the noun and before the S in the kid’s clothes, but not in its, as in ‘the palace and its treasures’.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

One rare example of a writing system being successfully reformed from top to bottom was in Turkey in 1928. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, followed a suggestion which had been in the air for some time to replace the Arabic script from the time of the Ottomans with something more suitable. Turkish has eight vowels contrasting with one another, but only four in any one word, in contrast to Arabic with only three vowels. So Arabic script is not well suited to represent Turkish. Atatürk asked how long the task would take. He was told (not unreasonably) about five years. He said: Do it in three months. An astonishingly good job was made of the task to Atatürk’s time table.

Being in the right place at the right time

The only time it seems to be possible to carry out a successful root and branch reform of a spelling system seems to be in the course of a global transformation of society and with the support of those leading it, as by the Russian revolution and Atatürk.