From A to Z: A Few Facts About the Alphabet
Wednesday November 4, 2009
"Writers spend years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet," novelist Richard Price once observed. "It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day." It's also a good enough reason to gather a few facts about one of the most significant inventions in human history.
- What is the etymology of the word alphabet?
The English word alphabet comes to us, by way of Latin, from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. These Greek words were in turn derived from the original Semitic names for the symbols: aleph ("ox") and beth ("house"). - Where did the English alphabet come from?
Here's the 30-second version of the rich history of the alphabet.
The original set of 30 signs, known as the Semitic alphabet, was used in ancient Phoenicia beginning around 1600 B.C. Most scholars believe that this alphabet, which consisted of signs for consonants only, is the ultimate ancestor of virtually all later alphabets. (The one significant exception appears to be Korea's han-gul script, created in the 15th century.)
Around 1,000 B.C., the Greeks adapted a shorter version of the Semitic alphabet, reassigning certain symbols to represent vowel sounds, and eventually the Romans developed their own version of the Greek (or Ionic) alphabet. It's generally accepted that the Roman alphabet reached England by way of the Irish sometime during the early period of Old English (5 c.- 12 c.).
Over the past millennium, the English alphabet has lost a few special letters and drawn fresh distinctions between others. But otherwise our modern English alphabet remains quite similar to the version of the Roman alphabet that we inherited from the Irish. - How many languages use the Roman alphabet?
About 100 languages rely on the Roman alphabet. Used by roughly two billion people, it's the world's most popular script. As David Sacks notes in Letter Perfect (2004), "There are variations of the Roman alphabet: For example, English employs 26 letters; Finnish, 21; Croatian, 30. But at the core are the 23 letters of ancient Rome. (The Romans lacked J, V, and W.)" - How many sounds are there in English?
There are more than 40 distinct sounds (or phonemes) in English. Because we have just 26 letters to represent those sounds, most letters stand for more than one sound. The consonant c, for example, is pronounced differently in the three words cook, city, and (combined with h) chop. - What are Majuscules and Minuscules?
Majuscules (from Latin majusculus, rather large) are CAPITAL LETTERS. Minuscules (from Latin minusculus, rather small) are lower-case letters. The combination of majuscules and minuscules in a single system (the so-called dual alphabet) first appeared in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814), Carolingian minuscule. - What's the name for a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the alphabet?
That would be a pangram. The best known example is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." A more efficient pangram is "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." - What's the name for a text that deliberately excludes a particular letter of the alphabet?
That's a lipogram. The best known example in English is Ernest Vincent Wright's novel Gadsby: Champion of Youth (1939)--a story of more than 50,000 words in which the letter e never appears. - Why is the last letter of the alphabet pronounced "zee" by Americans and "zed" by most British, Canadian, and Australian speakers?
The older pronunciation of "zed" was inherited from Old French. The American "zee," a dialect form heard in England during the 17th century (perhaps by analogy with bee, dee, etc.), was approved by Noah Webster in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).
The letter z, by the way, has not always been relegated to the end of the alphabet. In the Greek alphabet it came in at a quite respectable number seven. According to Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), "The Romans adopted Z later than the rest of the alphabet, since /z/ was not a native Latin sound, adding it at the end of their list of letters and using it rarely." The Irish and English simply imitated the Roman convention of placing z last.
To learn more about this wondrous invention, pick up one of these fine books: The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination, by Johanna Drucker (Thames and Hudson, 1995) and Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z, by David Sacks (Broadway, 2004).
More About the Alphabet:
Comments
Even though I certainly do not agree with Mr. Price’s observation, the comment actually has more to do with the current state of phonetics in English.
It could be down to my lack of understanding of how the English language works, but if words were to be taken just on the basis of the way they sound, it seems English actually could benefit from introduction of marks of accents, or diacritics, in case of some alphabets; for example, car and cat, jar and rat, but and put, and most probably many more.
It seems that an investment of time and money officially would just not be out of place in order to systematically incorporate all the sounds and make it easier to pronounce such words rather than having to rely on rote learning.
I agree with Irfan Mirza. Students of English as a second language would benefit greatly from what could be considered a diacritical rationalization of “phonics.” As it stands, corollary systems of pronunciation and the virtually unmentioned intonation are applied in parallel to mark and record variations. Americans tend not to believe me, but I continue to assert that learning Chinese is vastly easier than learning English (for non-native speakers). The Chinese characters in Mandarin possess one consistent pronunciations that accord with one phonetic symbol, and the system of tones is explicit.
I find Ernest Vincent Wright’s novel “Gadsby: Champion of Youth” (1939), a story of more than 50,000 words, in which the one of the most frequently used letters in English language, e, never appears, absolutely amazing.
I have difficult time writing a novel or even a short story with the all letters.
For years, the complaints about the language have rolled on and on. Just learn the language and live with it. Always looking for purity when the language evolved over time with many speakers from different backgrounds contributing to it. It’s beautiful when you study the history of its development. As they say, get over it and live with it. It has been beautifully used by a coterie of intelligent authors. All it needs, are intelligent speakers and readers. Jim
It is fairly well established that the Romans learned to write from the Etruscans, who learned from the Greeks, who learned from the Phoenicians, whose consonantal writing system ultimately derived from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs — just a small subset of them (Fischer, Steven Roger, 2001 & 2008, A History of Writing, London: Reaktion Books).
The Romans, by the way, tended not to use “K” either, since “C” had that sound. They used “I” for a vowel and for a consonant (where we would use Y); and “U” was also a vowel as well as a consonant (where we would use W). The English sound of “J” came a good deal later and thus the need for a new letter. But the Romans actually did have “V” — it was just a variant of “U.”
I’ve been advocating spelling reform for a while, not so much for non-native speakers of English, but for all those horrible spellers who speak the language as their mother tongue. Read any newspaper and tell me people know how to spell. I dare ya!