Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to series six of the Life of Letters, a podcast exploring the art, history and future of calligraphy, handwriting, signwriting and all things letter related.
I'm your host, Laura Edrilyn, a London based calligrapher with a curious mind.
Six seasons in, I'm still fascinated by the stories hidden within the letters and the people who dedicate their lives to preserving, studying and creating them.
This season we're exploring letters through the lens of books, a library of letters, if you will.
As we begin another season of conversations and discoveries. I'm delighted that the Life of Letters is once again kindly sponsored by Speedball art, champions of craftsmanship and creativity, helping keep the life of letters thriving across generations.
In today's episode, I'll be speaking with writer and linguist Danny Bateman. Danny holds a BA, an MPhil and a PhD all within one field, linguistics. During his years at university and later while working as a broadcaster, he pursued a passion for sharing that field with a general audience. This has most recently expressed itself through YQ needs you, a book about the Alphabet and the English language, named by the Economist as one of its books of 2025.
Firstly, welcome to the Life of Letters. Danny, it's so nice to meet you.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here and let's see what I can say about letters.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Yes, let's. There's quite a lot to get into, quite literally every letter of the Alphabet. But I wondered if you could ease us in a little bit and, and just tell us a bit about where your interest in language and letters came from.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Of course, seems like a natural way to start and to introduce myself.
I'm not that old at the end of the day, so this information should be fairly recent and fre.
But I do have to admit that my interest obsession would be a better word with all of human language in all of its forms, did start very gradually. While I was at high school in the uk, just a couple of particularly brilliant modern languages teachers recognized that this kids probably 14 or 15 who sat at the front of the class because I'm B for bait, alphabetically ordered, just loved it. Really got on with foreign languages. Not the cool stuff, not the, you know, French New Wave film or German history, but the grammar, the verb tables and things like that.
So eventually, really through a lot of luck and a lot of, through limited information, I firstly decided or realized that linguistics existed and that this was probably what I wanted to go on to study at university.
It was absolutely 100% the right move. I arrived at the University of York. Day one lecture, one linguistics department, Hoyas, this is for me.
And then ba an MPhil elsewhere, and then a break working as a language teacher for a while. And then in 2020, when the world was on fire, I got the green light and the possibility to do a PhD with the University of Edinburgh. And I mention all this because that's personal background. But weirdly enough, linguistics as a field hasn't been around too long, and it can also vary from place to place. And I would say that within Brit linguistics, writing can take a little bit of a backseat. It's the sort of thing that you acknowledge in your very first lecture when you're doing as much unlearning as you are learning and trying to separate out things like speech from writing.
But after we've made that separation, writing can be tucked to one side and perhaps even overlooked by a lot of linguists.
So I mention that because I, I really sort of, towards the end of my PhD and after my PhD, massively got into writing as this other medium of language with the Alphabet as the star. And the whole reason was the book, simply that I knew I wanted to write a book. My linguistic specialism of historical syntax, not especially sexy, not going to grab people off the bookshelves of your local bookshop.
So I realized, what do I do know? I know about history, I know about the development of languages. So let's look at something that is accessible and grabbable, which is the Alphabet. And that's the story of why Q needs you.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Amazing.
Okay, so this, this moment where you're thinking, okay, I've got a lot of information, but how do I present that to an audience that doesn't necessarily have the same journey into this, or maybe access into this understanding?
Using the Alphabet as, I guess, as a. As a formula, as a structure to. To anchor the book around, gives you that ability to break down little chunks of time and explore each letter. Right. Is that sort of. Was that your motivation? This. I want to present this to the general audience and a general public who can absorb this in a maybe easier way. They don't need to go off and do a PhD like you did, but you could maybe give them something of that.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Absolutely, yes. That really mattered to me that this is a book that presents the complexities of an idea, the complexities of a field, in a way that is as accessible as possible. So that's accessible is not just in terms of the language and about the very precise use of technical terminology. It's also in things like humor and jokes and my talent, dare I say, for odd footnotes that maybe may amuse people at the end of a page, but just to keep. To basically acknowledge my reader as my. There is absolutely no earthly reason why my reader as an individual should not be able to. Is unable to understand these things. It's on me as the linguist to explain them properly and to maybe think about how I'm going to do this carefully.
And as I say, I do this through very. Through using technical language very precisely, cautiously, also in terms of humor, but also the structure of the book in that hopefully it doesn't feel like a big slog.
The book is divided up into 26 chapters from a to Z, and each one is hopefully digestible.
One person referred to it as sort of each chapter as being the length of a commute, which I quite liked that sort of, okay, fine, you know, you arrive into central London or central Manchester, wherever you are, and you think, okay, I've learned something and now I can continue with my day. So that really mattered to me that I would just get the reader on side because as a science communicator, public linguist, I like to say I need to meet my reader at their doorstep. And hopefully I've achieved that throughout the book.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I was saying to you just before that I've got the book and I'm on chapter H, and I can absolutely tell you some of the footnotes are my favorites. And.
And it is. It's a. It's an amazing ride. And we also talked to Richard Manning last series, who gave us some secrets of word origins. He's got this wonderful bl, which. Which kind of explores some of the. The origins of words, including things like the great vowel shift and how the English language in particular has sort of changed over time.
And he's a huge fan of your book and highly recommended it as well, which was. The synchronicities are endless. But can you also give us any examples of how our letters have evolved through their visual forms and symbols in particular?
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Absolutely, yes. And I do appreciate the sort of restriction or the limitation of.
Because there is just so much that you could talk about with these symbols that really. You'd need to separate out their. Their stories and their facets as symbols, because you can talk about what sound they stand for, you can talk about who's using them, who's passing them on to the human history behind these letters. But in terms of visual things, that's what we're all about. At the end of the day, it's all about Turning human language, which is primarily expressed through sound and speech. This is primary for people, you know, for hearing and speaking infants. There are, of course, there is, of course, signing, which is another one of these sort of prime modalities. And then later on in, not only in human history, but then also in our individual development, we have writing. And writing is all about the eyes and making things, you know, making language enter the brain in a different direction.
And they have changed. These symbols have changed drastically. There are very few elements of the Alphabet. The individual facets of the characters that have. Are eternal. Actually, that's not very few. There are none of them. None of them are eternal in that all of them.
Nothing can be taken for granted. Over the history of the Alphabet. There are things perhaps, that have endured a long time since the Alphabet's ultimate origins, but they've all gone through the motions. One of which I would say is that the letters over the centuries have been simplified.
That's not a bad thing. I don't mean that as, say, oh, they've been reduced in total complexity, but their design, the number of strokes or lines that it takes to write these characters has reduced. And that's not a sign of laziness. That's a sign of efficiency and of mass literacy. You know, if we take the Alphabet back to its earliest origins and we can maybe get into when and where that was, these symbols and characters are much more complicated. If I had to write the full thing, the full pictographic symbol when I'm making a shopping list today, it would take forever. So it's no wonder that we see a reduction in the number of lines, number of strokes, the number of details over time as we humans get just so literate down the millennia. So that's a general trend that we do see and that I can point out to you, a second being, of course, this. Concurrently, the medium and the materials of writing are changing as well. What you're writing with, who you're writing for, and what you're writing on, all of these have gone into our letters, regardless of context. You can. You can tease out all of these different historical circumstances.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Incredible. And as you were talking, I was thinking, it's hard to condense such an epic journey, the world of letters and how they've evolved in our language. Right. And then there's many other languages, many other scripts, many other alphabets. But then I guess there's situate. There's sort of milestones in history, whether it's trade or convenience or, you know, the number of people being able to understand it. And so the strokes have simplified. Rather than being this sort of slightly artistic form or highly artistic and detailed. Not to take anything away from the Alphabet, it's still, you know, got its beauty, but is becomes a much more functional way of communicating. Is that fair to say?
[00:11:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. Oh, completely. I think it is all about function and about the uses that you are putting it to. You can, you know this better than me, put detail and flair and art back into the letters? It's called calligraphy. It's all too familiar to you and your listeners, but there is a general trend towards stripping away certain details and making it as user friendly as possible. Absolutely.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: And can I ask as well, there's a point, right, where we start with uppercase letters that's kind of the bones of our Alphabet. And then at what point did we go, oh, well, actually we also maybe want some lowercase letters.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: This is the perfect example, absolutely perfect example, because this illustrates the themes and the motivations that I just hoped to outline there. As you correctly say, uppercase letters, the capital letters, they're the older ones and maybe people may have a kind of intuitive sense about this. They're not the most common letters today, but they are more complex than the, more differentiated from each other in the way that they look, how it takes to draw them. And that's because they're older and they go back to that time when these characters look like things. They were more pictographic. They look like objects, body parts, animals, animals that you could find in the world millennia ago.
But what happens is that these uppercase letters make their way through the ancient world through the hands of the Phoenicians, then the Greeks and then the Romans and the ancient world is pretty literate. Writing is increasingly not restricted to an elite. I would dispute the fact that it was ever a completely elite activity. We do have plenty of examples of quite humble people writing. But nonetheless, in what you might call the class classical era of ancient Rome, the days of Cicero and Caesar and all that stuff, there is nonetheless mass literacy. All sorts of people of all sections of society are writing and they're writing on different media as well. So you're not only writing on papyrus, you're also writing on stone. And the way that you'll form your letters in those two contexts and with those two media will differ. If you're writing a grand public inscription that's meant to be impressive and fancy and take time and to be legible from a clear distance, then you're going to write the capital letters that, that you've received from the Greeks. But if you are, I don't know, writing a letter to your friend and it's like an invitation to a birthday party, and it's only meant for her and your. For her and your eyes, you don't need to do all of that. You can write the letters in a more fluid, more joined up, a narrower way, a way that also works with the material of papyrus or wood or wax. Whatever it is, you're writing it. And this is not just speculation. We have these documents from ancient Rome, which is very cool. Some of the best informal documents that we have come from Britain, from Hadrian's Wall, because of the climate, slightly wet and damp climate of Northumberland has preserved these documents for us. And that's just fantastic. And consequently, in the second context, the informal context, we see the development of cursive writing that's much more fluid, much more joined up. The letters lose a lot of their complexity because writing is speeding up as a process, and it's eventually.
The key fact is the old capital letters, they never go anywhere. We never lose memory of them. And so through the Middle Ages, capital letters and the new cursive letters, or what we call minuscule letters, lowercase, basically keep. They keep, they carry on. They're. They're side by side in medieval writing until our modern distribution of these letters is more or less established. That happens towards the end and Middle Ages about using a capital letter for titles or for emphasis or the beginning of a sentence, gradually the distribution that we would recognize emerges.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Amazing.
God, what a journey. What a journey. And it's lovely that there was this recognition that actually both need to exist, because I think it would be a real shame if we didn't have our uppercase and lowercase letters, partly from a artistic point of view, but also being able to craft and construct our letters, but also, I guess, identify things like the start of a sentence or somebody's name and all these other additional benefits that come our way with we're using these uppercase and lowercase, which may not have been considered. I don't know.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: Well, absolutely. And I would turn the question over to you. I mean, what would calligraphy lose if we suddenly got rid of the capital letters? If you were only stuck with the minuscule versions of them? I mean, would that make calligraphy less fun?
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Perhaps.
Good question, good question.
I think. I think it would remove the ability to really play with the larger letters and give that staple, give that extra flourish and. And I think looking even back into manuscripts and stuff where they have these really beautiful, ornate letters, you know, really signifying the start of a new chapter page, whatever it might be, and all these little kind of indicators.
So there's a functional element, but also I think from an artistic side, you can really go to town on a. On a capital letter and then allow the. The rest of the world's words sort of unfold. And I guess this also ties into the sort of readability, the integrity of the letters and things like that. But, yeah, you can, you can really enjoy a capital letter in, in other ways than when you're creating it. So, yeah, it's quite special.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: I mean, if you were limited to lowercase as a calligraphy, you think, oh, yay, another lowercase, another loop. Brilliant.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
The history of our language is pretty vast, to say the least. But am I right in understanding that the way we use words and how we've adopted accents and dialects has emerged and evolved from both a kind of spoken use of the sound and a visual use of the alphabets? Do they kind of tie in hand? In hand? Can you explain a little bit more about how kind of humans have processed language over time?
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Of course. And I like in particular the phrase or the metaphor of hand in hand, because really we're talking about two individual things here that are firmly united and firm friends, but nonetheless fundamentally separate from one another.
And this is actually when I was referring back to my university days. The process of unlearning a key bit of alphabetic history that I really need to get across to my readers or my listeners or whoever has kindly given me the time of day is that these are two. It's too fundamentally. We need to talk about speech and writing as two separate things. Speech is much older than writing, and writing is not necessarily completely dependent on speech. It is an option. It's one way of writing, but there are other ways of doing it. And writing can take on its own life, especially as it kind of progresses, but they are fundamentally separate things. And we could say that the English language meets the Alphabet at a certain point in time, prior to which English doesn't use the Alphabet to be written down. You do get older written English. It's written in runes, it's written in an older writing system. But there's this, this huge pre. History of the English language stretching back for millennia deep, deep into prehistory. That is purely speech. It's a spoken language and it has no associated writing system. So with that little bit of academic pedantry out of the way, it's kind of the foundations of the subject it does need to be said. We can make progress and see that the relationship between the two is an intense relationship. But nonetheless, some they can go in different directions. So sometimes speech and writing can be firmly united.
This, I think, is true of, say, the Old English period.
This is the period of the language from, say, 450-1100 A.D.
it's really a foreign language. You do need instruction in it to read Old English. But one of the things I like about Old English is that the Alphabet works pretty well for the language. They clearly have a kind of free hand at the court of Alfred the Great to make these letters work for their language. A similar event happens in, say, the. What is this, the 15th century? So the. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, after the Black Death and after, English really returns to the scene as a prestigious language worthy of being written down. And basically, standard English spelling is still more or less the kind of reflecting the speech of the 1400s in that what we write down, our silent letters, the way that we are, what we're trying to write down in terms of vowels and consonants, and that sort of thing is really reflecting Southern British English in the 15th century. But then the relationship gets a bit strained. And since that point in time, speech has continued to develop down the generations in a very subtle way. It's all made up of kind of micro differences, a lot like all of human history itself. You don't realize why you're living through history, but things are constantly changing. And this is absolutely true of speech. You know, think of somebody. You'll listen to a recording from, say, 100 years ago. People sound different back then as they do today. So speech is changing in a way that writing struggles to. Writing likes to stand still, especially once you have a standard way of spelling.
And this is a classic case of how they're two fundamentally things. And now the relationship is a little strained when spoken and written English.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: Fascinating.
Wow. Yeah.
And. And I guess also with the movement of people in the world and. And different influences and different people bringing their own languages, accents, dialogues all into different spaces and sharing those with each other. It's.
Everybody's sort of slightly adopting different ways of saying things, and it's. It's a continuous argument. I remember growing up, you know, how you say things and. And that's only with, you know, parents who are not living very far away from each other and haven't grown up in very different.
In very different places. So, yeah, I think it's. It's a really fascinating sort of journey to explore when you start going down rabbit holes of how spoken words have changed.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: I mean, it is the ultimate rabbit hole. And I mean, I've devoted my, a large chunk of my life to it.
And I would say that it has by, by exploring speech, it has made me a somewhat reluctant defender of English spelling, which does get a lot of stick. It gets a lot of criticism for the way that it works, and I am happy to explore and maybe even reforms. I'm keen to tell people, if you want to make changes, you can. That's absolutely fine. But nonetheless, the system as a whole more or less manages to keep a huge array of speech somewhat written down and satisfied. Like, I cannot stress how diverse English speech is today. It's diverse because of time, simply because it's been around for a long time and because of geography that English speakers have, have covered the globe. And they are, you know, whenever you move a population of speakers, you're going to end up eventually with two languages because, you know, the differences are going to creep in, especially when there's an ocean between you and, you know, a wooden sailing boat is the only way of getting between the two. Differences are going to creep in. So that, that's inevitable.
And you don't even need to go as far as national languages. Within regions, families, and individual. You find variation in speech. I don't speak the same in all contexts. There are words that I might change my pronunciation of. There are certain sounds that I may drop according to register and formal occasion and things like that. And spelling just about manages to spell all of this. So I'm a sort of begrudging defender of it.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, you're so right, actually, and how, how forgiving it is that people do use its, its kind of structure in, in so many different ways. And there's also loads of fascinating insights as well in the, in the book, obviously, you're looking at the origins of each letter, and I wondered if you could just pick out perhaps two or three of your favorite maybe facts or discoveries. I don't know. I mean, that's a really tough challenge. But any particular letters that have sort of stayed with, you know, that the listeners would, would love to hear about?
[00:24:43] Speaker B: I mean, I'd be lying if I said I didn't. I do have favorites. I think I'm not supposed to. And I have to admit it is a pretty basic or vanilla answer to say that I am a huge fan of the letter A, the Alphabet's initial character, because I remain just profoundly grateful and a little bit spooked by how well the Alphabet's prime letter serves as an introduction to all of alphabetic history.
By this, I mean that the letter A is one of the original members of the gang. There's a kind of core of our 26 letters that goes all the way back to the Alphabet's earliest years. And the letter A is one of that gang and also looks like its original prototype or design. So when it first set started out. So for context, the Alphabet, we can say, is born round about the year 1900 to 1800 BC give or take a century. Okay, it's very complex, not in a bad way. It's a delicious debate to get stuck into, but we're working from fragments and scraps of evidence that just happened to have survived for millennia since then.
As for the where, it's probably happening in ancient Egypt. And ancient Egypt is not famous for the Alphabet. It's famous for hieroglyphs. So the hieroglyphic writing that people may be much more familiar with, from mummies and tombs and things like that, hieroglyphs, very old by this point in history, Very sophisticated and perfectly attuned to write down the speech of the Egyptians, the Egyptian spoken language.
What we seem to have in ancient Egypt is an instance of migration. We have a second population. I mean, Egypt is an empire. It's no surprise that it has many different languages and many different peoples within its borders.
And one of these groups, it seems to be a large group of people speaking a different language, a member of the Semitic family of languages, distantly actually related to Egyptian, but not obviously similar if you're, you know, one person speaking to another.
Semitic languages today include Arabic and Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, all great stuff that you can find in the Middle east and Africa, well across the world, it's a big family.
But because they're speaking a different language and because they like how well hieroglyphs work for the Egyptians, they say, we're going to take your hieroglyphs, your very pictographic symbols that look like things, but we're going to radically repurpose them according to a new principle, which is one hieroglyph for one sound. No variation, no confusion about whether it's representing an idea or a thing or two sounds or three sounds, just a single sound, a single consonant of our Semitic language.
When this is in place, we can talk about having an Alphabet, our Alphabet, or the root of the English Alphabet being born. But basically everything else is not fixed. Everything else is in flux. So what the original hieroglyphic templates look like, what sounds they stand for the direction of writing, how they're ordered in the Alphabet. Not a single one of these qualities can we take for granted. The letter A originally stands for an sound, a consonant sound in the throat known as the glottal stop. Super common in modern English today. I've been saying it a lot over the course of our conversation, and it looks. What the symbol looks like is the head of a head of cattle, an ox's head, and a capital letter A. Remember, which is older than lowercase, kind of still looks like this. Perhaps best out of all the letters, if you turn a capital letter upside down, the pointy bit is the ox's mouth, mouth and the legs, the ox's horns. And even though the direction of the letter, the design of the letter, even, you know, the sound of the letter has changed over the centuries, there's still a little bit of that remaining in our capital letter A. And for that reason, it does remain my favorite.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: It is. It is a. It is a beauty. It holds so much and it really, yeah, kind of anchors the. The rest of the Alphabet, as you say.
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Now, let's get back to the episode.
Have there been points in history where people have tried to change things and it hasn't worked? I kind of may have read a little bit it in one of the chapters where someone's tried to introduce a new system and it hasn't worked.
Does that happen? Quite a bit?
[00:29:34] Speaker B: Yes. It can happen throughout the centuries. We do have scripts that don't last, that just don't take off.
We have scripts that endure, scripts that are huge successes and eventually fade. We could say that that is the inevitable history of our Alphabet. It will have an end at some point. So let's not think that we've cracked it. There are Alphabet for English and is the be all and end all. It's not. But we do have examples of. Of times when something's not taken off and it is all to do. I cannot stress this enough. It's all to do with social circumstance. Yes. With the Alphabet, there's linguistic brilliance. There's examples of linguistic thinking where people are saying, well, what does my speech need to be written down? What sounds do I have? What vowels do I have? And consonants, etcetera. And. And working accordingly. But if the social situation is not in your favour, if people aren't going to listen to you, or if the writing system is too well established, or if you don't have a school of thought behind you, it's just not going to take off. So I'll give a perfect example of this.
In the early years of ancient Rome, in the period known as the Roman Republic, before the emperors take on, you have the Alphabet still kind of being pruned and sorted out to suit Latin, the language of the Romans, right? And it works. Eventually the system that they settle on works extremely well for Latin, give or take a few sounds. And this is the basis for so many alphabets today. It's the basis for English and French and Czech, Polish, Swedish, Vietnamese, what have you.
And around about, let's say, the year 200 BC, we have examples of an enslaved or formerly enslaved individual, so not the lowest in society. He's clearly prestigious, but he is nonetheless owned by somebody else, which is a pretty awful social situation. Very common in ancient Rome. This individual called Spurius Cavilius Ruger is a teacher. He's a teacher of language. We don't know his original name. That's the name of his owner, right? And he can be credited with inventing the letter G. So letter G is still with us. He realizes that our Latin speech needs two letters for K as in cat, and G as in got.
And the people that we've inherited the Alphabet from, the Etruscans and the Greeks and the Phoenicians, they haven't given us symbols that would allow us to spell these two sounds. So how am I going to write my own name? People are going to think that I'm Mr. Ruger rather than Ruga. And he creates the letter G. He simply adds an upward swish to C and creates a capital G. And he also gives its position in the Alphabet to. He gives it the position of Z. Z has been purged from the Alphabet temporarily. It makes a comeback later on, but it's been taken. It gets its position early on in the alphabetical order. So even G is not fixed, but you wind forward the. The history of Rome, would it be two and a bit centuries, maybe three centuries. And you get to the time of the emperors and you have Emperor Claudius, so the guy who leads the permanent invasion of Britain, an emperor, top dog in the Roman Empire. He is a learned man, a scholar, and he tries to introduce more letters. We have Claudian letters and nobody listens to him.
This is a serious prestige because by this point in time, Latin writing has taken off. Literacy is now extremely common. The Alphabet works. Yes. He's identified some, maybe some gaps that could be filled with some extra letters, but nonetheless it works really well. And his letters with a handful of. A couple of inscriptions. We basically don't have any evidence for them. So this is example. It's all about, basically. Is history and society in your favour when you're trying to make changes to writing?
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Wow. There's hope for all of us if we want to make an impact.
I obviously introduced that question mid flow and I wondered whether you wanted to give any other sort of favorite facts, discoveries and come back to that sort of pot of gold that you might have bubbling away.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Of course, I mean, so every single letter has a story to tell and they are all interesting without exception.
I mean, of course, I am sort of a detective at heart or an archaeologist at heart. I love the letters that help us to uncover earlier stages of the Alphabet. So I do love the ones that like A, somewhat resemble where they come from. So take for example, the letter O. O is, at least in most contexts and most dialect of English is. It stands for rounded vowels. So vowels that have lips, O or things like that. That's changing in North American English. It's often a. But that's a separate thing. Speech just continuing to change.
But you might, on that basis think that maybe the pictogram, the thing that O originally looked like was lips. But no, it's actually an I to begin with. It's an I, which in the ancient Semitic language of the Alphabet's inventors was pronounced. The word for I was kind of pronounced with like a pharyngeal sound right at the back of the mouth, in the space where the mouth meets your esophagus.
And this is kind of. It's hard for me to do, but it's super common in some of the world's languages. It's kind of like a sound. And the word for an eye was an hein.
And this is the. Basically where this. That sound is what the symbol of an eye stood for in the original system.
And basically this, the Alphabet to begin with, makes its way over to Greece and the Greeks say, thanks very much. But because our language is so different to yours, we don't have this pharyngeal sound, but we do have lots of vowels, more vowels than you do in your speech. And our vowels are important because they can change the meaning of a word and they can come at the beginning of the word. So basically we need vowel Letters. And it's the Greeks that first put vowel letters into the Alphabet. And we would still recognize them today as the origins of A, E, I, O and U or Y. It's complicated, but the thing I love is that O is a perfect window not only into the history, but also into the academic debate, in that the letter O, because it comes from an I, the representation of an I in its earliest forms. It has a central dot, it has a pupil, and that pupil is there to begin with.
It's not there in the Phoenician standard version of the Alphabet. The Phoenicians, based in the Middle east, super important for the history of the Alphabet. They're kind of like the big nexus points for a lot of writing today.
But the dot is there in earliest Greek writing, alphabetic Greek writing, so round about the year 800 onwards, so the Phoenicians gave the Greeks the letter O. And the earliest versions of it in Greek have this dot, which is odd because the Phoenicians don't have the dot. What I'm getting at here is basically maybe the Greeks got the Alphabet earlier than we thought. They got an archaic version of it, not directly from the Phoenicians, when the Phoenicians are at their most prestigious and top dogs of the Mediterranean, but maybe earlier on, and we just don't have surviving texts from Greece, maybe because they've perished, because they were written on papyrus and things like that.
That would point to actually an earlier arrival of the Alphabet into, into Greece earlier than say, 800 BC. This is an active debate. I cannot stress how this is like there's a whole academic project ongoing at the moment related to this. And the letter O is one of these scholars star pieces of evidence in, in their case.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: Wow. If I only own you.
Wow. And. And what I love about this is that, you know, you've studied a very, very large history and very complex journey of the letters to where it is today.
And there is such an incredible amount of information and knowledge out there and evidence, but it continues to get people questioning how did this happen, where did this. And I guess there's sort of history is still being uncovered and there's still, you know, there's sort of cryptic mysteries kind of unfolding. And I think that's a lovely place.
Like you say, we haven't reached this point where it has stopped. It is all continuously moving. But even on that journey, you are still making discoveries and I guess new things impacting what maybe we once believed.
And that continues throughout all the work that you do and all the work that lots of others are doing.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: Thank you. I mean, thank you so much. I mean, I do appreciate that if you get that sense from my writing, because that matters to me. I am an academic at heart.
I don't have an academic job.
I couldn't get one because academia is somewhat on fire at the moment as a. As a way of doing things. Although I always tell people, you should never say I didn't get the funding. You should always say, they couldn't afford me. Darling, that's something a bit nicer. It's nicer to yourself. But I do write like this, and I wanted to invite the reader into this debate so that the reader feels like a sleuth themselves, a scholar, somebody who could take this information forward. I would hate for my books to be the final word. I want it to be the first word, and that really does matter to me. And a single find threatens to upend our understanding of alphabetic history. Indeed, it has threatened. I'll give the perfect example of how the most difficult chapter of the book for me to write was actually chapter A. Because I had to dive into the field, try and summarize it, and try and reconcile a lot of competing points of view, a lot of facts where scholars just don't agree about the interpretation of the evidence, and cases where, you know, there's genuinely whole debates that I somehow have to summarize. And I was working with a scholar within the field, a great friend of mine, who finally approved a draft of it. He said, yep, this is good to go. And I think, oh, phew, I can move on to chapter B. And I kid you not, two months later, I'm on the bus every day, normal thing. And you get one of those Google Notifications news items, and it's a. There's something like Scientific American, and it says, find discovered. That threatens to upend whole alphabetic story.
And it's a gut punch. It's an absolute gut punch. So I run home, I get off the bus first, and then I make my way home, and I scourge these news articles, which are actually very light on information. They don't give much, which makes the pain even worse.
And essentially my fear subsided.
It's a possible piece of evidence that comes from an earlier point in time and outside of Egypt. And it's fascinating, but it's not something that could completely blow the story out of the water. And it ended up being a footnote. And I could see the book published. But that's a classic, a classic case of how this story is far from over.
[00:41:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
Gosh. And that segues beautifully into my next question, which is obviously that there's so much more that we can kind of COVID and delve into exploring this incredible book. But I also wanted to get your thoughts on the sort of future of language and our Alphabet as we know it today. You've kind of touched on the fact that it's not. Not. It's not over. We haven't kind of reached this point where, bam, we've done. We've done Alphabet. We've reached the end of it.
But, yeah, your. Your thoughts on. On where this might go and what. What might impact it.
[00:41:53] Speaker B: I mean, anything I say is then not going to come true. So, of course, you know, I've read no wishes here. No wishes, exactly. I've read enough Shakespeare or Greek tragedies to know that if you make a prediction, it will come true in some sort of bizarre way that you didn't expect.
So, I mean, to make a prediction or maybe talk about where the Alphabet is going, I would have to divide it up into the immediate future and maybe then the distant future. And of course, the latter is much harder to predict than the former.
I will say at least, though, that I really do believe that we are living through a specific era of writing in that. In the same way that your dear listeners who are experts in history and maybe paleography and things like that can look at a text and go, aha. I kind of know when this was written. I think our own, you know, output. Written output will also have that same sense, those same vibes of belonging to our own particular era, if indeed, of course, it survives because so much of it is now online that we are witnessing. There's a prospect of some sort of digital dark age where all the servers go down and everything is lost.
So write books, people.
Books don't last forever, but they are an alternative at least.
But crucially, the reason why your listeners may be able to get a kind of vibe or a sense of when a document is written is shaped by so many factors. It's shaped by the way that the letters look, what they're written with and what they're written on. And all of that can be broadly grouped together as technology. Technology continues to shape writing in can you be taught writing? Can you access writing?
Does society allow mass education and therefore mass proliferation of a particular standard way of writing? That's something that we decreasingly see as we go back in history. And our very standardized English spelling today will feel very contemporary in the future. We have not only mass education, whole states, nation states, telling people to write in a certain way. We also have things like spell checker, predictive text, AI that is solidifying a particular standard way of writing. And I can see this going in multiple directions or one particularly complicated direction, which is in one hand, our writing will continue to diverge and go further and further away from speech to the extent that maybe if we lost this standard writing, we'd maybe see an explosion of new languages where all of these dialects of English would finally be able to shake off the one thing that's holding us together now, which is standard English spelling. And finally we'd have to say, okay, there's no English anymore. There's just Anglian languages in the same way that happened to Latin, right? So Latin, the power of Latin diminishes and Romance languages like French, Italian sprout up in its shadow. That could happen with English.
But maybe in the nearer future, we might have to have a very honest conversation about how we learn this standard spelling, because clearly, as it moves further and further away from whatever your speech is, whatever accent of English you speak with, because everybody has an accent, just want to get that principle in there. There is no accentless English.
As it moves further, further away.
The fundamental principles of spelling are kind of shifting in a very organic way. We don't tend to write and indeed read words, written words as now simple sequences of letters and therefore sequences of sounds. We actually read words as like a single chunk of meaning. Our brain scans the page and we go, aha. That is, for example, the word to know. It may look like it's spelt knower, but we know it's know and we read it as such. People may have seen online that kind of shareable image where people mess around with spelling and they swap around all the letters within a word, except for the first and maybe the last. And you can still read it because you are just simply recognizing blocks of meaning and units at this point in time. And that's kind of the direction in which English is going. As increasingly we move further and further away from speech, firstly by accident, that's not a million miles away from Chinese writers writing, which, you know, the characters of Chinese writing take meaning as the principal thing, not the only thing, but the principal thing that their letters or their characters convey. But secondly, and perhaps more immediately, we may have to have lots more honest conversations about how do we teach the system to people, because it's still really useful. But increasingly further, new generations of learners, of children are being going to be Increasingly frustrated with this children. Does not not, you know, match up to the sounds that you and I are making.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: Something's coming that's exciting. Things will change. But yes, as you say, nothing overnight. But that's. That's really interesting that there's still so much to learn, so much more to go, so many opportunities for our language to. To change.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: Find out. Find out what happens next in why Q and you two. Written by my great grandchildren. At some point.
[00:47:18] Speaker A: Yes.
That would be amazing. Yeah. Just a legacy.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: At that point, it might need to be what were Q and you. I think that might want. It might be.
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Do you remember.
[00:47:27] Speaker B: Yeah, Granddad, what were letters?
So. Yeah, you can look forward to that.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Amazing. That is the future.
We like to end each episode a sort of on a. With a bit. Bit of a challenging question. And I realize that you've already kind of tackled this. So this is about what your favorite letter of the Alphabet is and why. So I want to give you an extra challenge and remove the letter A because the temptation I reckon, would be that's the one you'd go for. So if you couldn't choose A, what of the other letters is there a sort of real appeal about.
[00:48:08] Speaker B: That's quite hard.
[00:48:10] Speaker A: Isn't that mean? I'm so mean.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: It is quite. It is. It's not mean. Come on, fair's fair. You're making me work for it. I do really.
How can I put this? I have a lot of respect for the workhorses of the English Alphabet. The H's and E's.
So E and H allow us to spell more vowels and more consonants than the Alphabet is naturally ready for. So, you know, we partner H up with other consonants to spell more sounds, sounds that the Romans didn't have. So th for th and the sh for sh. These are all sounds that weren't part of Latin, so they didn't come as part of the Alphabet. We've had to innovate since then.
And E, consequently, magic E, that sort of thing. It's all very useful. Useful. But I wouldn't say they're my favorite.
I have a lot of love for R.
I do like R. I love that. It's a perfect. It's a great story. It's part of the original gang of the Alphabet. It's a head to begin with, a head and neck. And if you exclude the little sticky out leg of a capital R, that's a Roman addition.
If you remove that, you get back to something like Greek. Rho, the letter rho. The. That still has a little bit of that head and neck structure that you do find with the letter R. But it's a letter that illustrates everything that I hoped I've successfully communicated. It has that ancient history, it has the variation. It is one of the letters that I've used to connect to the world of runes, which is also very interesting. And its relationship to English or the Alphabet is complicated and also fascinating.
And I love that. The letter R is a classic case of the divided nature of English speech. So English now is divided up into accents that do or don't pronounce all the R's. So do you pronounce the R in a word like cart as a distinct sound? So loads of people, millions of people do. It's cart. I'm overemphasizing, but there's kind of like a R or something with the back of the tongue going on. Whereas for me, someone who comes from southern England and has non rhotic speech. So non R speech, it's just cut. It's a straightforward long vowel, but the R still needs to be there. The R has changed the vowel in pronunciation. The R sound has affected the vowel that comes before it. It's lengthened it or shifted it in so many words. And as such, it still needs to be there. Even in my English, if you take out the R from ka, you get cat.
[00:50:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Or if you take out the R from, I don't know, fern. Right. So fern is in the plant, you get fen. So it still needs to be there. So this perfectly illustrates for me not only the fragmented nature of English speech today, but also how the letters, weirdly, can stand still and spell whatever the heck has now happened with speech.
[00:51:10] Speaker A: Incredible, isn't it? They. They are, I think, workhorses.
Yeah. For many of them, they really, really paved the way for so many people to be able to explore this world, explore this history, but also be able to fundamentally communicate with each other in such a lovely way. And it is the ultimate rabbit hole, as you said earlier. And I think what you've presented here in the book is just epic, like how you've been able to distill all of that information into even just the first few chapters that I've read. And I can't wait to now get onto O as little highlights for me, little breadcrumbs for me to follow. How long did it take you?
[00:51:53] Speaker B: People are always surprised by this. Five months.
[00:51:57] Speaker A: You just had it all. It was just on the tip of your tongue. You just had to.
[00:52:01] Speaker B: I wouldn't say that a lot of research had to be done but it's. It's all I could afford. It's. Financially, I had to give it. I had a window of time before the money would run out that I had stored up from my PhD years. PhD students not famous for being well off, I would say that and I was no exception. But nonetheless I could be tided over to write this book. And yeah, and it was. I don't recommend doing that.
The next book will. I'm insisting on having a little bit more time.
[00:52:32] Speaker A: But thank you.
[00:52:33] Speaker B: Thank you very much for your sake.
[00:52:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I hope you're incredibly proud of what you've written here and it's amazing that it's out in the world world for everybody to. To discover.
[00:52:43] Speaker B: Thank you. Well, as an, as an Englishman, this, these compliments are excruciating but gratefully received. Thank you very much.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: That's what I'm here for. Add a little pain.
To find out more about Danny, please visit dannybate.com or he is also on Instagram, bluesky and x. And as always, we will put all the links and details in today's show notes. Danny also has his own podcast which you can should definitely go and listen to as well. A language I love is Danny. Do you want to say anything about what that's about?
[00:53:16] Speaker B: Sure. It's friendly chats with experts who love a particular language. So I get them to introduce what it is, where it's spoken, its history, that sort of thing. And every episode has a new guest and a new language and that's how I fulfill this obsession of getting the word out about linguistics and language.
[00:53:34] Speaker A: Amazing. So if you've completed English, then you can move on to some other languages through Danny.
Danny, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been such a pleasure. And yeah, thank you so much for sharing some of the wisdom within the book. And I hope everybody goes out and buys a copy because they need it on their bookshelves.
[00:53:57] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much, it's been an honor and keep up the great podcast.
[00:54:01] Speaker A: Thank you, Danny. Thanks for listening. Series 6 is made possible by my wonderful producer, Heidi Cullop and the support of Speedball Art, whose commitment to high quality tools and creative tradition continues to serve, partner and deliver to artists all over the world. If you've enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with a fellow letter lover. And until next time, keep listening, keep creating and keep celebrating the life of letters.
