Pod Insights Gone Medieval Medieval Roots of The Modern Alphabet About this episode How did the alphabet we use today take shape?
Matt Lewis welcomes Danny Bate to explore how the medieval period shaped the alphabet we use today. They discuss the transformation of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the significant impact of the Norman Conquest of 1066, and the eventual disappearance of medieval letters like thorn (þ) and ash (æ). This is a journey across millennia from the adaptability of letters during the fall of Rome to innovations in medieval script and chaotic English rules.
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Medieval Writers, Extraordinary Women
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The Origins of English
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Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3IInOYoEv1YBN0383KSk66
Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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0:01 Matt Lewis? From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:42 Speaker 01 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.O.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.O.gle/workspacewithGemini.
1:15 Speaker 02 In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.
1:30 Speaker 03 It's one of the first times, really, that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers. If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.
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1:49 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
2:27 Matt Lewis? Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Some things are really easy to take for granted. How often do you think about the collection of symbols we call the alphabet? And how we use and interact with them on a daily basis? But Danny Bates' new book, YQ Needs You, is a treasure trove of information with 26 chapters, one for each letter, telling its history and importance. It's a great read, so I couldn't wait to get Danny on the podcast to uncover the impact of the medieval period on the letters that we know today. How alphabets have diverged but maintain connections? And to find out why two medieval staples have disappeared altogether from the English alphabet.
3:18 Matt Lewis? A very warm welcome to Gone Medieval, Danny. It's great to have you with us.
3:21 Speaker 04 Matt, thank you so much. As a long time listener of Gone Medieval, this is totally surreal and a real pleasure. So thank you very much.
3:28 Matt Lewis? No, it's great to have you here. I probably should have counted how many letters I've used in that introduction and saying hello, just so that we can do some weird stats about alphabets. So we're here to talk a bit about the medieval history of the alphabet, the letters that we're all so familiar with today, and the ways that they've been used. And I wondered if you could start us off with a bit of ancient history, for us at least, and give us a brief kind of overview, a brief timeline of how the alphabet as we know it first emerged.
3:58 Speaker 04 Absolutely. The first thing I have to say first and foremost is when I talk about the alphabet, I am not talking about all writing throughout human history. I'm talking about one particular tradition that, over the centuries, over the millennia, has branched out into this ginormous tree of writing. And English is just a little twig on a branch of that tree. So by the time the alphabet reaches medieval Europe, whenever you want to say that begins, it's already very old. It's about two millennia old. And as I say, it's this expanding blossoming tree that has one root and that is... In Egypt, it emerges not straightforwardly but through a kind of new redesign from Egyptian
4:41 Speaker 04 hieroglyphs and from Egypt it then leaves the Egypto sphere in the second millennium BCE, passes its way up the coast of the Levant through what is now Lebanon is extremely important because that's where we find the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians passed it on to the Greeks, the Greeks passed it on to early Italian people living in Bronze Age and Iron Age Italy. Among those is the Romans and that puts the alphabet nicely in the hands of the Romans.
5:09 Matt Lewis? And then it's a very good position to be spread far and wide when the Roman Empire takes itself out on a mission across Europe. Are there kind of key milestones and do we get any sense of why hieroglyphs are transformed into something closer to the alphabet that we would recognise today?
5:28 Speaker 04 Yes, and in a word, and I want to stress that the story of the early alphabet is piecemeal. You know, we're basically trying to construct a narrative out of literal fragments that people have found in beside the Nile, they found in Sinai, that bit of land in the north west of what is today, in the north east of what is today Egypt. So it's a hesitant story that we need to piece together, but what it seems to be in a word is due to immigration. We have this people who are not Egyptians themselves, they seem to be extremely well integrated into Egyptian society, but they are at least linguistically outsiders. They speak a Semitic
6:12 Speaker 04 language, so that's related to modern day languages like Arabic and Hebrew. And because of this status as sort of not fully Egyptian, they decide to take hieroglyphs, which are already very old and extremely sophisticated, but repurpose hieroglyphs, streamline this ancient system according to their own needs and the needs of their West Semitic language. And what they do basically is they say, we'll take hieroglyphs, we'll take some symbols, specifically the written symbol on the papyrus page or the, you know, temple wall, but we will radically streamline it so that now it's one symbol for one consonant.
6:54 Speaker 04 And when that is born, when that is up and running, that system, and it seems to take off quite quickly and leave Egypt, we can now say that we have an alphabet.
7:04 Matt Lewis? And without wishing to be rude to Egyptian hieroglyphs, is this partly because hieroglyphs are an incredibly complex way of writing thing that requires so much knowledge about the context in which it's being written and things can mean so many different things depending on what they're next to or the context in which they're placed? Is this an effort to kind of simplify all of that so that you can interact but not have to learn all of the things that go along with it?
7:29 Speaker 04 Yes, I mean, I'm not sure the Egyptians would be particularly offended by that. They'd probably be quite proud. It's an enormously sophisticated system. Hieroglyphs are complicated, I think that's fair to say, but at the same time, there's enormous diversity. So you have on maybe one end of the scale, you have learned scribes who have literally nothing else to do than write hieroglyphs and be very creative and push hieroglyphs to really strange and very, you know, creative uses that it's somewhere on the border between writing and art. And then, of course, somewhere lower down, maybe everyday usage, there is hieroglyphs that, there is hieroglyphic writing that is a little bit simpler.
8:11 Speaker 04 The strange thing is that hieroglyphs can be used already to stand for one particular sound. And it's odd that these, let's just say Semitic speakers, these people from what is now the Middle East, don't take the ones that are already used for specific sounds. And that says to me that they just weren't plugged in to Egyptian literacy. There was a barrier. They didn't have the time to even learn the basics of standard hieroglyphic writing. And so they, you know, reinvented it according to their own purposes. But yeah, Egyptian hieroglyphs, massive thing. And it's like a kind of, our alphabet is like an offshoot of that tree that grows underneath its shadow.
8:53 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah. And it's been on such a fascinating journey before we even get to the medieval world. But I wondered as well, before we dig into the depths of the medieval alphabet, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about why you wanted to write this book? Why a history of the alphabet? Why is it important?
9:09 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, if I'm being absolutely ruthless, it's that I wanted to write a book because I love writing and I love telling people about my field, which is linguistics, specifically historical linguistics, as you can probably hear, I love it very much. But there were big questions that I felt that this book could answer, and they are questions that maybe are accessible to people, they grab people's attention. My background is actually in the field of syntax, which is word order, and try as I might, it's quite hard to make that a sexy, tempting subject for a book, and I really have tried. But with writing, we learn writing later in life, we, English speakers and English writers, tend to remember as well the process of writing, and we may have been frustrated
9:54 Speaker 04 by it over the years with like spelling mistakes. We tend not to speak of speech mistakes so much, but we do talk about spelling mistakes. This is kind of, you know, this is the way that you write English. And I did want to say to people, well, there is a reason for this thing that you're told to do and told to write, something called standard English spelling. It hasn't been around forever, it's extremely flexible over the course of its history, and if you, really, if you're looking ahead to the future, this is not just a book about the past, if you want to make changes, you can, because the alphabet has been passed through the hands of so many people who have made changes. There's nothing about the alphabet that can be taken for granted in that way.
10:37 Speaker 04 So it's an accessible subject and something that's with, it's a subject with messages that I really wanted to communicate to people.
10:45 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I think that idea that you mentioned of, of taking it for granted is important as well, isn't it? We, we tend to just assume these letters have pretty much always been there, pretty much always been the same, done the same jobs, and it's easy, whether you, whether you consider yourself to be good at spelling or, or bad at spelling and enjoy writing or don't enjoy writing, it's still really easy to take the alphabet as a thing for granted, isn't it? And, and assume It doesn't have this kind of complex history behind it, that it hasn't evolved, that it isn't always changing, that it's just a constant that's always been there. But that's not the case at all, is it?
11:19 Speaker 04 Not at all, no. I mean, you can really go quite late in the day into the early modern era, not to step on the toes of not just the Tudors, but it's, you know, there are aspects of the alphabet that, you know, have remained flexible, unfinished. They haven't reached their modern form by something like the 18th century, for example. Take Dr. Johnson's dictionary, this landmark, 1755, this incredible event, very accessible, very successful dictionary. If you get a hold of a copy of it, if you turn to I,
11:57 Speaker 04 for the letter I, is the word jabber, because for Dr. Johnson, I and J haven't yet fully completed their separation into two letters. So that's quite, you know, early on in the alphabet, that's towards the start, and we've got two letters that haven't yet fully emerged from one another. Arguably, I is the older of the two. So if you were to go back to, say, the 18th century with Dr. Johnson's dictionary, published in 1755, this absolute landmark dictionary, very accessible, very successful, and if you turn to chapter I in your copy, as I assume you have one, you'll find that after I, the next word is jabber,
12:39 Speaker 04 J A, because in the minds of dictionary writers, I and J haven't yet finished their separation as two distinct letters. And, you know, there you go. That's a bit of a case of how the alphabet, go back 250 years, and the alphabet looks a bit different. It may even sound a bit different, too. People were calling J jai until about two centuries ago.
13:03 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. Well, I feel like we should get something firmly medieval in now before Tristan sends the armies of Carthage after me and Susie sends the witch unto her general to shut me down for treading on people's toes. So if we were to think, kind of, in the early medieval period, if someone is writing about the fall of Rome, when that has fairly recently happened, how familiar would the alphabet that they would use to write that down be to us today?
13:30 Speaker 04 Wow, I love that. I love that framing. It would be recognizably our own alphabet, but a sort of parental version of it. There would be letters that are just straightforwardly missing. So we've got things like a W. W. I describe in my book as a child of the fall of Rome, because the letter W is necessitated by members of, basically, royalty, the elite people participating in what are traditionally called the barbarian invasions. And their names have like a sound W. And the Latin alphabet at this particular point in time is actually not equipped to spell that sound. So W slowly
14:10 Speaker 04 emerges. There would be differences, and definitely there would be ways of using individual letters that are not fully formed yet. Distinctions like, for example, a soft and hard C that you have in English spelling, in words like, I don't know, kernel and centre. So that's hard and soft. You also have that in French as well. That distinction is very much underway around the time of the fall of Rome. But people really would have thought of these as, still as a single letter with one use that's varying slightly according to the word it's being used in. So that's, in a nutshell, it's familiar yet unfamiliar at
14:52 Speaker 04 the same time. If you go back to, say, the 5th century.
14:56 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's fascinating. And what drives the development of those letters across the medieval millennium? Is this, are we watching language trying to keep up with writing? Or is language driving the changes in writing?
15:12 Speaker 04 The latter, I would say it's the second scenario, absolutely. There is something about speech that changes very naturally in a way that actually does not come naturally to writing. Take, for example, your great grandparents. If you knew your great grandparents, you may have sounded a bit different to them. They may have had a sort of old fashioned accent. Whereas you're a young man or you're a young woman, you sound very modern in the way that you speak. What's going on there is essentially tiny incremental sound changes. And if you add those up across a medieval millennium, then languages at one end, languages at either end of that spectrum are going to sound pretty different. Writing, meanwhile, can sit still.
15:57 Speaker 04 It can sort of weather the storms and carry on until, you know, speech is really stretching it to breaking point. You know, take for, I don't know, take for example, something like the letter R in modern day English that has, it's still there in words where it's actually not pronounced in certain accents like my own, but it still needs to be there, strangely enough. I mean, I don't pronounce an audible R sound in a word like cart or heart. But if you take it out, they become cat and heat. So the R contributes something and it deserves to be there because sound changes and it is able to spell what sounds then settle.
16:38 Speaker 04 It's definitely sounds changing in the languages that already use the alphabet. So these are things like the emerging French language, Italian language, Portuguese, and indeed the new peoples who then adopt it over the course of the Middle Ages. So that's people like the English or Angles and Saxons, if you will. So, you know, they are, they're not used to using the alphabet. Theirs is a very different, so it gets a new spin when it gets put into the hands of the English.
17:08 Matt Lewis? Is it possible at all to talk about the ways in which language develops over the millennium, or is that just an impossible thing to do because it isn't linear, because it has much more of a reactive nature to it? So you can't say that, well, over the 1000 years, it changes in this way, in this way, in this way.
17:27 Speaker 04 Wow. Okay, so that's the sort of question that could occupy a PhD thesis in linguistics. That's a very good question. It's, we can say it's linear only from the perspective of the present, looking back, essentially. I wouldn't say that from the perspective of the present, you can predict the way that language specifically sounds, or, I don't know, vocabulary, or word order, my beloved word order, could develop. That's very, very hard to predict. But certainly, very often, the seeds of future change are present in the speech of the present, to put it very grandly. So you could maybe predict that
18:09 Speaker 04 something like soft and hard C, soft and hard G, might end up being a kind of a defined practice of spelling, of using the alphabet, from the perspective of, say, the first, second century CE. Because you can listen to people, you can hear that the sounds behind those letters are starting to diverge. Like a C doesn't sound like a C in all words. But language change, other than progressing down vaguely sensible pathways, is fairly unpredictable because human society is unpredictable.
18:44 Matt Lewis? Yeah. And are there key ways that different languages use the alphabet differently? You know, do different languages make different sounds with letters and letter combinations?
18:56 Speaker 04 Absolutely, absolutely. And this is a point of divergence between languages over the course of the Middle Ages. So my, it's the easiest parallel for me, my kind of daily language, the one that I'm confronted with on a daily basis, is Czech. And Czech spelling looks extremely different. It's, all the letters are adorned with little additional marks on the top of it. And you think, what does this do? Why does this little upside down hat, what is it doing for a Z or a C or something like that? And that would be a case of languages going down a different path to English. English generally has avoided these additional marks, which we call diacritics, often called accents, but I think diacritics is a more precise term.
19:40 Speaker 04 And we add these marks to basically create new versions of letters to spell more sounds. English, with a handful of exceptions that have come over recently from French, words like fiance, facade, generally avoids this. English has preferred to go down a very ancient route, which is combining letters together into what we call digraphs. H in particular is extremely useful in to create more sounds. These tend to be sounds that the Romans didn't say. They were absent from Roman speech, so they were absent from their alphabet. A sound like ch or sh, we don't really know how Romans shushed each other. But to spell those sounds for languages that later needed them,
20:23 Speaker 04 we've gone with CH and SH in English. But a language like Czech, over the course of the Middle Ages, really accelerating, to be honest, in the late Middle Ages, people like Jan Hoss and getting more normal towards the early modern period. They've gone down a different route, which is to augment individual letters by adding little dots across them. So these are just the different responses that languages have had to the fact that the Latin alphabet in its basic form is just not ready to spell their language very phonetically.
20:56 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and it feels a little bit like the the the lead's been taken off, the leash has been taken off. Once the Roman Empire is gone and there's not this central body telling you that this is the alphabet and this is how you use it. Once it gets out into the world on its own, it's off doing wonderful things in different places.
21:12 Speaker 04 Absolutely, absolutely, and people do have that power. I stress in the book that there have been incredible innovations across Europe, across the world now, by individual languages that are using the Latin letters as their template. A language like, I don't know, Vietnamese, for example, does incredible things to make these letters work for Vietnamese speech. I would only add the caveat that this is not the same story across the board. Some languages are, dare I say, more on the leash than others. I would point the, I would point the finger at English and French in this particular case, with a sort of reluctance not to move too far from Latin standards.
21:55 Speaker 04 And, but then again, all of these languages are united in the fact that they don't tend to invent letters from nothing, from scratch, which is something that people in the ancient world wouldn't really have had a problem with. The Greeks had no problem just inventing letters from thin air. And the Romans and the Etruscans in ancient Italy, I'm sorry, we've gone back into, into the ancients territory, but they had no problem with that. So that's a case, even though it's very kind of abstract, of really languages not straying too far from classical Roman standards.
22:30 Matt Lewis? And then I guess they're using the combinations or the diacritics, am I saying that right? As a way to make all of those letters, say, produce more sounds without adding to the letters, so you don't end up with a, you know, fifty, sixty, a hundred letter alphabet. You combine them or you use the diacritics to make each letter capable of making several sounds depending on its context.
22:54 Speaker 04 Exactly so, yeah. And you can see this process in action over the course of the Middle Ages. If you were to have a look at some early examples of Czech, I'm sorry, it's the language I always reach for, it just provides me with so many good examples, it doesn't work very well.
23:10 Matt Lewis? You'll be getting gold stars from Eleanor for mentioning Czech so much.
23:12 Speaker 04 I will, I will. So that's nice, at the end of the day. I slipped Jan Hoss into an episode about the alphabet, which feels good. But it just doesn't work very well in the earliest Attestations, witnesses to the Czech language. It's just clear that it can't tell the difference between a s and a š, as in a word like, I don't know, su and šu in English. And that's an important difference in Czech speech, too. So something had to be done, and something is done. It just, you know, takes a few centuries.
23:43 Matt Lewis? Yeah, but it almost feels like a conscious effort not to to go back to the earlier world of hieroglyphs where you've suddenly got hundreds of different letters or ways of writing words. It feels like this is a medieval effort, maybe, to keep the alphabet to a very restricted number and find ways to use what you have to perform what you need, rather than keep adding to it all the time.
24:09 Speaker 04 Yes, I think that's a fair description. And at the end of the day, it's much, you'll have more success, I think, if you modify what's already in existence than if you were to invent letters outright. It does happen. You know, German, for example, has the bee-shaped thing, the sset, for example, which stands for a s. So it can happen over the course of the centuries. But, but yeah, if you were to invent a totally new letter and add it to the English alphabet, well, you'd need, you'd need to wield some serious respect for people to actually adopt it themselves.
24:45 Matt Lewis? Yeah, maybe we'll have a go at it one day. You and I will invent a letter and we'll try and convince people that it's real and it's been around for ages.
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26:44 Speaker 07 After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.
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27:29 Matt Lewis? There are, in English in particular, there are a couple of letters that have vanished. So medieval people would recognize that we simply don't use anymore today. Most notably, I guess, the ash, which is that combined A and E almost that you see at the beginning of a lot of Anglo-Saxon names, and thorn. So it always looks like a Y shape. So Ye Oldie Shop is not Ye Oldie Shop, it's The Oldie Shop because it's a Y shape that makes a TH sound. So is there any reason that those things have managed to disappear from English? If they're doing a job, if they're performing a role and making a sound, how have they disappeared?
28:09 Speaker 04 It's a, it's a great question and it's, uh, the short answer is society. That's the word in a nutshell. So for, for context, uh, you're absolutely right. These sounds or these letters, uh, work really well for the sounds of English. Um, to have thorn especially would save a little bit of ink because with thorn you can spell T H, which is, you know, two letters. But these words have their heyday in the Old English period. The Old English period, we, uh, date from round about, let's say, four fifty C E to the eleven hundred. And this is a time when English scribes, English writers have the means and the motive to write down English in manuscripts and to really make letters work for them.
28:53 Speaker 04 They have a, they have a sort of nice status. Um, even though they may like to think that they are prestigious and like the Romans and they had the Romans religion and, and all that, they are slightly removed from the post-Roman world. They, they understand that. They are migrants to, uh, to Britain and they were never part of the Roman Empire. And I think that self-identity carries over into Old English writing, which really, as I say, has a free hand to use letters like thorn, which is actually taken from the world of runes, so a sort of separate tradition of writing, and apply it to their needs. But within that timeframe of Old English that I just gave you, we have ten sixty-six.
29:37 Speaker 04 This is, it's as big for historical linguistics as it is for historians and for, uh, well, for what you do maths, uh, because this changes society so fundamentally. It's a, you know, within a few years, almost entirely replaces the elite. So that's entirely changing the linguistic landscape. The sort of nature of prestige within England has changed, uh, in that now it's not Old English that people are speaking at the top of society in the cathedrals and castles. It's actually Old Norman or Old Northern French. And that's going to have an effect on every aspect of language in England. It's, it's really, it's really quite.
30:19 Speaker 04 A unique thing within the historical linguistics of Europe for this to happen. And this means that things like Thorne, things like the English language in general are not prestigious. And Thorne especially is a weird letter. It does survive past ten sixty six. But as English again raises itself up to basically a prestigious language, a language worthy of a king like Henry the fourth. It's clearly a beast of a different nature and it's been suffused with all kinds of continental ideas. And something like Thorne is just this weird relic of a strange era before, you know, ten sixty six, before the proper birth of England.
31:00 Speaker 04 If you're a Norman and that it really goes downhill and the death knell is then the printing press. The printing press comes in, Caxton, fifteenth century. We've got continental biases because it's coming from Gutenberg and Germany and the Low Countries. And the Thorne's not making an appearance there. So that's really the death knell for the letter Thorne. And well, for the moment at least, as I said, the future is unknown.
31:26 Matt Lewis? Yeah, we'll start a campaign to bring back Thorne. Maybe that can be the letter that we reintroduce and we convince people that it never went away. And I think, you know, Ash seems to disappear quite quickly, doesn't it? And it's interesting that you hang that on ten sixty six because I guess that shows the impact that an incoming elite, who are the ones who are writing and commissioning manuscripts and want to see things written down. They want it written in a way that's familiar to them. And the way that is familiar to the Norman minority elite is not the same as what is familiar to the wider English population. And it's clear to see who wins out. Those who are commissioning writing are determining the direction of the language.
32:04 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Very nicely put. That is exactly the linguistic consequences of something as big as ten sixty six. I would, I would only add that there is a very concrete reason for basically the way that Middle English is then written down. Which is Old English, sort of the language of Beowulf and the Wanderer and a very, not quite so interesting, legal charters and things like that. Um. It's it actually finds a standard way of writing. So a lot of old English that we have that comes down to us is specifically the way of writing of the Court of Wessex, so where Alfred the Great has his base. Uh. The Court of Wessex is strong, it's influential, it's uh has a, you know, a powerful Christian king at its centre.
32:48 Speaker 04 So it's tick, tick, tick for this becoming the prestigious way of writing English. With ten sixty six, that courtly tradition, which by ten sixty six has shifted, you know, down river or eastwards towards London, is obliterated. The scribes, the people patronising, uh, uh, the writing of charters, the people who want those charters to be written in the first place, they're basically gone. So there is a very kind of concrete event of the shifting of power that leads to a shift in spelling.
33:19 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fascinating. I wanted to talk about the letter T for a moment. Your chapter T in the book is really interesting. Not least because I, it was brand new news to me that T used to be the last letter of the alphabet. I mean, I, I think that might surprise a lot of people.
33:33 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah. But this, this is the funny thing. I wonder if people maybe have an intuitive sense of this extremely old fact. Um. Because, uh, as I includes in, uh, the book, uh, as you say, is divided up into twenty six chapters from A through to Z, or Z if you prefer. And T, uh, every chapter basically starts with a little kind of funny quote, just to lighten the mood a little bit. And I think the one for T is something like, T is the last great letter before the alphabet goes off the rails. Uh, which is a tweet that I took from somebody. I do give them credit, of course. And it's just, it, I, I, I was joyous
34:11 Speaker 04 to find that tweet because it recognises that T is a proper letter, it's fairly stable in English. I mean, it's silent occasionally in medieval words like castle, um, but nonetheless, it's a well behaved letter. And then afterwards, things get a bit weird. I've, um, online, on social media, I've seen the letters post T referred to like the, the Goth letters and the freak letters, which is just delightful because people are tapping into the fact that these are later additions. Maybe don't have the um regularity of the pre T letters all the way up to that final letter. So yeah, um T was the last letter of the alphabet. It remains so in certain branches of this family tree like Hebrew.
34:54 Speaker 04 Tav is the first, is the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And uh and then we have these ones tacked on afterwards. And yeah, if uh if, you know, for example, I don't know. The writers of the gospels had been writing in a different linguistic context, then the book of revelations might have the line, I am the alpha and the tau. I am the A and the T, rather than the alpha and the omega, because it's omega that comes last for the Greeks.
35:17 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fascinating. And you also write in the T chapter as well a little bit about how T can can change a bit and make different sounds. So the the one interesting um example that you give is space spelt with a C, but spatial spelt with a T. And there's there's sort of a weird Latin hook to that, isn't there? But it's just the sound and the use of the letter has changed over time.
35:40 Speaker 04 Exactly. So, yeah. So this is just a great case of people bringing back some of our spelling to Latin standards, to kind of the way that the Romans did it, because the Romans were just so prestigious. So a word like space is spelt with a C. It comes from Latin spartium, which is written with a T. And this will, you know, evolve basically in speech. And the the kind of outcome of that evolution is reflected in our spelling of space with a C. Whereas the adjective spatial reminds us of the original spelling, shall we say, spatialis in Latin with a T.
36:18 Speaker 04 So again, you know, we've got these kind of conflicting tensions. Do we work with the language as it used, as it is now? Do we try to represent things or do we keep them back? Do we stick to their etymology? Do we stick to how they used to be in in history? Because we like history. We want to show that we are as good as the Romans and that we Renaissance men, usually men, are writing in a way that is, you know, is in tune with the Romans. So these are these competing tensions within spelling. And I don't want to say that either is less valid than the other. Writing, it's okay for spelling and writing to reflect something of yourself.
36:58 Speaker 04 People who might criticize the, the men of the late medieval, early modern period for, who put things like the B back into debt and doubt. We may criticize them because that's just silly. We don't care about Latin. We don't care that, you know, doubt comes from dubitum. That's not our priority, but at the same time, I'm a speller of British English and I might feel a twinge of pride when I spell realize with a S instead of a Z. You know, because that makes me, that reflects who I am. It reflects that I'm British, not American. So it's not totally unreasonable, these alternative priorities that we still find in our spelling today.
37:54 Speaker 01 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.
38:28 Speaker 07 After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.
38:38 Speaker 07 I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsum and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.
39:11 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I think the book is so good at picking out these odd things. You know, I hadn't particularly thought about space and spatial before. And it's something that you use all of the time without being conscious that you are playing into, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of years of linguistic development and changes. And yet you can still pinpoint the the origin of that somewhere back in in Latin. And there is a reason that we say space and it's like, you know, spatiomota becomes spasum, spasum, space. And the sound changes, the letter changes, but we can still see the root. And I think the book is really good at making you kind of think about the the stuff that you use every day and take for granted and just give it a little bit of thought.
39:53 Speaker 04 Well, that's really nice to hear. If that's how it came across to you, then then the book's doing its job. So thank you very much. I just wanted to show people it's not random. It's not chaos. It's it's very, very human.
40:06 Matt Lewis? No, fantastic. Have you got a favourite letter? I realise this is a bit like asking you for a favourite child, having written a book about all of them. But do you have one that you either found particularly interesting or surprising?
40:19 Speaker 04 That is a really good question. I probably should have anticipated this question, but I wasn't thinking too far ahead when I was writing the book. Frankly, it's easier for me to say which letters I don't like so much. You know, I I I may I may mock the letter Q a little bit in chapter Q, but I do have some that interest me because they were opportunities for me to learn as well, for me to understand something. I would choose two, and quite by coincidence, they are next to each other in the alphabet. I have a particular fondness for R and S. I love R, as I mentioned earlier, because it's this stick of dynamite within spelling.
41:00 Speaker 04 It's the sound behind R is so resonant that it causes chaos in speech that the letter R has to come to represent. I mentioned the example earlier of words like cart and heart. That's an example of like non-rotic speech which develops in England and becomes standard, but hasn't become standard in the United States, for example. So that's R. I think that was just so enjoyable to see this letter misbehaving, specifically the sound behind it misbehaving, where the letter is almost like a parent just trying to hold its hand and be like, all right, you know, do what you've got to do, but I'll be here for you in spelling. So that was fun.
41:41 Speaker 04 S, on the other hand, S is just like the workhorse of the English language. Nobody would have expected this from the perspective of Old English, but S is like invaluable, not just for spelling individual words in modern English today, but for stringing those words together. So it's how we express possession, you know, I don't know, Matt's interview, Danny's microphone. It's how we express present tense if it's he, she, or it doing the thing. So like he plays, she eats, it goes. And it's also, what's the third, oh, plurals, how can I forget? It's this kind of a default way of expressing that we have more of a certain thing.
42:22 Speaker 04 And I don't, I think I could safely say that not a single one of these uses was to be expected from the perspective of Old English, from, you know, the language, what is that, 1,500 years ago? Sorry, my maths isn't great. But it's, all of these things have very naturally occurred and you can, you could sort of tell a potted history of the English language with just the letter S.
42:49 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fascinating. If we think more widely about European languages for a moment, how is it that the majority of European languages have ended up using the same alphabet? Is this just the influence of Latin and Rome? Or is something else driving this and affecting it too?
43:09 Speaker 04 Well, it's partly because of the Romans. You know, what have the Romans ever done for us? Like, it's very successful. They were very powerful and they were very prestigious in the post-Roman world. I have no doubt that this topic has cropped up over and over again on God medieval. People are in many ways trying to emulate the Romans. Perhaps, though, to maybe not give the Romans all the credits, there is an element that just the alphabet is extremely successful as this piece of technology. It is technology at the end of the day. There is something very user-friendly about it, that it works for many, many languages. And it's not the only way of doing writing. It's not the only tradition.
43:52 Speaker 04 I mean, there are independent traditions like Chinese writing, which has a phonetic quality, but sort of the underlying basis is different to the, to our alphabet, whatever that means, our. But there is this idea that the alphabet is just enormously successful, of pairing up the key sounds of your language and representing them in the medium of writing. And that's, as I say, it works well. Perhaps as well, there's an additional factor, and I'm slipping in my beloved topic here, that a lot of the languages of Europe are also related. So a lot of the languages are Indo-European. They belong to one language family, with exceptions, of course. Shout out to Hungarians and Finns and Estonians.
44:37 Speaker 04 But it's, there's a length, the Latin letters by sheer coincidence are being spread from one Indo-European language to a bunch of other Indo-European languages. And maybe that has a, maybe that's an element in the alphabet's success.
44:52 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I guess there's a case to be made there that the alphabet is something that just works. However, humans stumbled onto this system, there is a core of it that just does the job it needs to do and it doesn't need to be messed with and you can adapt it to fit different languages and kind of if it ain't broke, don't try and fix it.
45:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, you could say that. There is an element of passivity in the history of the alphabet as well. We've received it. My parents write like this, my grandparents write like this, or in the case of the Middle Ages, maybe my local priest writes like this. So it's not necessary to go too far. So definitely, there's tremendous innovation in the medieval history of the alphabet. And yet, at the same time, there is an element of passivity, but just letting things be because it works.
45:40 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah. And if we think about English more specifically, it's fairly notoriously packed with grammatical rules that make some of the ways that we spell and we pronounce words seem or feel, and as I would imagine certainly for anyone trying to learn English as a foreign language, seem or feel completely random and almost lawless, like there is no rules around the ways that English behaves a lot of time. How has that come about out of the kind of medieval uses of letters? Is this the absence of rules or is this a kind of overregulation of the alphabet?
46:16 Speaker 04 Wow. It's, I can see two themes, two big drifts within the history of English that might, that I could offer to answer this incredible question. One is, as I say, simple sound change. Sounds change between the generations and that can leave writing behind if the gap between the two is not too bad. It's manageable. You know, I talk about things like soft and hard C. I talk in the book about things like magic E that changes actually a vowel that the magic E doesn't stand next to. So that changes like, I don't know, a kit into a kite or a cut into cute. My own surname, Bait, benefits from magic E.
47:01 Speaker 04 Otherwise, um, and yet, you know, that is a result of natural sound change that these rules have come about. And they're complications to the original way of doing writing and spelling with the alphabet, but they're not too bad. We nonetheless manage to learn them because our brains are incredible at this stuff. We compute the rules. Uh, often subconsciously, most of the time, so, uh, that allow us to understand, okay, I need to pronounce this letter C like a sir here. I need to pronounce it like a K here. So there's natural sound change, but at the same time, there is the history of England. And the history of England is as distinctive as the history of its spelling.
47:47 Speaker 04 Because they're bound up in each other. So we have things like ten sixty six. We have things like the fact that there's not a massive central authority, like what goes on with the Academy Francais in France, for example, that has the power and the means and frankly, the interest to determine it shall be so. You must write like this, that an equivalent organisation has just not existed. People have wielded tremendous influence. But very often, these people have been historians, people classicists who love the past and frankly, don't want to take it too far away from Roman and Greek standards. Uh, Dr Johnson is one of them. So we have also these more, more recent factors that the spelling.
48:32 Speaker 04 It it it arises from the history of England and of English speaking nations, nations essentially. That spelling is this hodgepodge of uh, different rules, different influences. We've got the massive French components. We've got incoming Greek and Latin components coming in towards the end of the Middle Ages. Uh, we've also got different dialects of England. England was disunited in its speech. Uh, for most of the middle, uh, for all of the Middle Ages, it continues to be, even though standard English wields enormous effect. And you can find traces of these, uh, of these dialects, these divisions within England in modern day spelling, in, I don't know, the difference between a fox
49:14 Speaker 04 and its female version, a vixen, which comes from the southwest, which undergone its, it underwent its kind of own changes in speech. Add all of these things together and English spelling, it's not going to look any other way.
49:28 Matt Lewis? It looks like chaos, but it probably isn't really. And it occurs to me as well, I did ask you what your favourite letter was without asking you what your least favourite letter was. If you could eject one from the alphabet, is there one you'd get rid of?
49:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's Q.
49:41 Matt Lewis? Okay.
49:42 Speaker 04 Come on. Like, I know, I know it's the title of the book, but it is Q at the end of the day. It's, it's an incredible letter. I mean, I'm sorry, but the ancients would have to have me on. That is a thoroughly ancient, pre-Roman story. But it's, it's survived because of the prestige of the Roman way of doing things. And it doesn't, not only does it not earn its keep, not only does it not represent a specific sound, which is fine, you know, we have X, for example, which is in the same boat. We could just spell words with X with a K and an S instead. But Q, it can't even stand on its own. It needs a U, which is this thing, I mean, frankly, it's another post 1066 thing.
50:27 Speaker 04 It's not there in Old English. We were once liberated from this useless gift from the Romans. We once had this pre 1066 period where we spelt words like queen and quick with a C, because C stands for C in these words. And perhaps we could be free of it again.
50:46 Matt Lewis? Yeah, I mean, the book is called Why Does Q Need U? And I guess half of the answer there is because Q is useless. Is there a specific reason why it has a U after it?
50:56 Speaker 04 Because of the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Romans. Because it was a letter that eventually, the sound that it represented was basically made redundant or superfluous at least, because other letters could spell the same sound, C. So a C and a K could do the same thing in ancient Greek and Roman writing. And it only survived the Romans' pretty ruthless cull of the alphabet, where they got rid of things like K, because the Romans thought of Q as in a word like queen and quick, they actually thought of that as one sound.
51:38 Speaker 04 And because of that, because of that simple phonemic status, where in the minds of the Romans, this is a individual sound of Latin speech, Q U, representing qua, could stay. And I would have much more respect for Q if it had been allowed to represent that qua on its own. If we could spell a word like quick, queen and question with just a Q, no U. But the Romans didn't take that step and neither have we.
52:09 Matt Lewis? It's like a, a, a letter that needs a helping hand to do its job. It's not quite capable of performing the role that it was originally designed for.
52:17 Speaker 04 Exactly, exactly.
52:18 Matt Lewis? Fascinating. So we'll, we'll dump Q from the alphabet. We'll maybe bring back thorn and we'll, we'll invent a letter and try to convince everyone that it was always there. That sounds like the next project for me and you, Danny.
52:29 Speaker 04 Brilliant, brilliant. And then if I'm still around in a hundred years, I can write a sequel.
52:34 Matt Lewis? Absolutely. And it's fascinating to think, you know, we might not have recognised the ways in which people use the alphabet 500 and 1000 years ago, and to think that in 500 and 1000 years more, people might not recognise the way that we use the alphabet today. Because we can fall into that trap of thinking that the way we do it is, I don't know, like the right way, the way it should be, the way it will always be. But if anything, the history of the alphabet has proven that we're, we're somewhere on the timeline of its development.
53:01 Speaker 04 I'm afraid so. We in the present are nonetheless living in history. So the way that we write may be, who knows, it may be respected. It may prove to be extremely prestigious for the next century, for the next millennium. It may alternatively be mocked and seen as old fashioned and weird in the same way that we look at Middle English and think this is bizarre. This is, you know, we, we still do this today when we talk about like ye olde, for example. We emphasise it because it's funny and weird and old fashioned, but that could happen to our spelling too. All we can do is guess from the perspective of the present. Yeah.
53:38 Matt Lewis? Fascinating. Well, I mean, if people want to get up to date on the history of the alphabet, then I would thoroughly recommend diving into the book. As you say, 26 chapters, one for each letter. Even Q has got its own chapter. Even, you know, even Q, the worst letter of the alphabet, is in there with its own story to tell. It's been absolutely fascinating to talk to you a bit about the, the history and the medieval influences on the alphabet. Danny, thank you very much for joining us.
54:02 Speaker 04 Thank you so, so much for having me. It's a, it's a real privilege.
54:05 Matt Lewis? I hope you enjoyed finding out more about the history of the alphabet. Danny's book, Why Q Needs You, is out now if you'd like to explore it in even more depth. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe. Go on, you know you want to. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hits.
55:08 Speaker 01 Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini. In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week.
55:44 Speaker 02 Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.
55:56 Speaker 03 It's one of the first times really that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers. If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.
56:05 Speaker 02 In our time. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.
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