Four clever letters

If there is not an extraordinary coincidence here, for the sounds which are said through the nose, M and N, there are points at the top and downward facing openings at the bottom, two where the mouth is closed by the lips and one where it is closed by the tongue tip. For the sounds with a complete closure, B and D, there are rightwards facing arcs and a bar closure on the left, again two arcs where the closure is by the lips, and one where the closure is by the tongue tip. The points and the arcs face in appropriately contrasting directions.

If this thinking is on the right lines, about 2,600 years ago, someone in what is now Greece or Italy, possibly an Etruscan, had the clever and reasonable idea of making the shapes of letters fit the sounds they represented. The system is figurative in the sense that the two lips are represented by two points, openings, arcs, and the tongue is represented by a single point, opening and arc. The articulator or place of articulation is shown by the number of arcs and openings. And the complete closure is represented by a vertical bar on the left in D and B.

By this elegantly simple idea, speech sounds, or what are now known as ‘phonemes’, have internal constituents, or what are now known as ‘distinctive features’.

Rather than assuming that there was an extraordinary coincidence here, I prefer to think that there was an ancient designer who had an extraordinary insight which nobody else had for another two thousand years.

This ancient designer would seem to have adopted and adapted slightly different ways of writing D and B from different Greek cities to bring out the modern contrast. I show the idea in the matrix above, using ‘sans serif’ forms to bring out what I take to be the original idea, rather than the extreme serif forms which were quickly adopted for Latin inscriptions.

2,600 years later we still use this design principle for these four capital letters. The idea is graphical, easily-understood, and fully in line with current research. But for some unknown reason, it was only applied to the four letters. Possibly that ancient scholar was Etruscan, and the cleverness was not appreciated by the conquering Romans. Or the scholar may have died before being able to explain the idea to contemporaries. Or the process of discovery, invention, and design was never completed. It is not obvious what a complete system would look like.

This cleverness was 2,000 years ahead of its time. It was not developed any further until the work of William Holder and Alexander Melville Bell, in the 17th and 19th centuries, and Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in 1968, with progressively increasing detail and sophistication. But M, N, B and D are a natural point of departure – where the fundamental principle of speech sounds having these and other features is most easily detectable – with the tongue and lips – not that the detection was ever easy.

But the cleverness of the idea here notwithstanding, it may be that the success of the alphabet is due, at least in part, to its general arbitrariness, abandoning the elegant phonology by M, N, B and D.