Gone Medieval - Medieval Roots of The Modern Alphabet

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

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.MOREMedieval Writers, Extraordinary WomenListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Origins of EnglishListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone 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.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit to watch the new Medieval Rebels series plus hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss 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 forward slash subscribe. 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 aliens, 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. 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 treasured. 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. A very warm welcome to gone medieval, Danny. It's great to have you with us. Matt, thank you so much. As a long-time listener of medieval, this is totally surreal and a real pleasure. So thank you very much. No, 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 also familiar with today and the ways that they've been used. And I wonder 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? Absolutely. The first thing I have to say, first and foremost, is when I talk about the alphabet, I'm 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 hieroglyphs. And from Egypt, it then leaves the Egyptosphere in the second millennian 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 pass it on to the Greeks. The Greeks pass 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. And 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 recognize today? 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 beside the Nile, they found in Sinai, bit of land in the northwest of what is today, in the northeast 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 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, specific,

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. 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. 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? 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 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's hieroglyphic writing that is a little bit similar. simpler. 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 rights. And that's 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. 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?

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 high. hard to make that a sexy, tempting subject for a book, and I really have to write. 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 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. 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. Yeah, and I think that idea that you mention of taking it for granted is important as well, isn't it? We tend to just assume these letters of pretty much always been there, pretty much always been the same, done the same jobs, and it's easy whether you consider yourself to be good at spelling 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 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? 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 tutors.

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 and very successful dictionary. If you get a hold of a copy of it, if you turn to I, for the letter I, is the word jabber. Because for Dr. Johnson, I and J haven't yet 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 Jabba, 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 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. J. J. J. until about two centuries ago. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. 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 under 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? Wow. I love that framing. It would be recognisably 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 word. and the Latin alphabet at this particular point in time is actually not equipped to spell that sound. So W slowly 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 center, 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 the same time, if you go back to say the 5th century. Yeah, it's fascinating. And what kind of, what drives the development of those letters? across the sort of the medieval millennium. Is this, are we watching language trying to keep up with writing or is language driving the changes in writing? 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. 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, say, 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. 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 a 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 settled. 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. There's as a very different. So it gets a new spin when it gets put into the hands of the English. 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 thousand years, it changes in this way and this way and this way. Wow. Okay, so that's the sort of question that could occupy a PhD thesis in linguistics. It'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 something like soft and hard C, soft and hard G might end up being a kind of defined practice of spelling, of using the alphabet, from the perspective of, say, the first, second century C.E. 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. Yeah.

And are there key ways that different languages use the alphabet differently? you know, different languages make different sounds with letters and letter combinations. Absolutely, absolutely. And this is a point of divergence between languages over the course of the Middle Ages. So it's the easiest parallel for me. My kind of daily language, the one that I'm confronted with on a daily basis, is check. And check 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 language is 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. 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 recent, recently from French, words like fiancée, 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 shah. We don't really know how Romans shushed each other. But to spell those

sounds for languages that later needed them, we've gone with C-H and S-H 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 Hus, and getting more normal towards the early modern period, they've gone on 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. Yeah, and it feels a little bit like 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. 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 finger at English and French in this particular

case, was a sort of reluctance not to move too far from Latin standards. 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 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. And then I guess they're using the combinations or the diocritics, 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 50, 60, 100 letter alphabet, you combine them or you use the diacretics to make each letter capable of making several sounds depending on its context. 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. doesn't work very well. You'll be getting gold stars from Eleanor for mentioning Czech so much. I will. I will. So that's nice at the end of the day. I've slipped Jan horse 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 sh as in a word like, I don't know, Sue and Shu 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. Yeah, but it almost feels like a conscious effort not 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.

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 B-shaped thing, the S-Zet, for example, which stands for a Sir. So it can happen over the course of the centuries. But yeah, if you were to invent a totally new letter and add it to the English alphabet,

well, you'd need to wield some serious respect for people to actually adopt it themselves. Maybe we'll have a go at it one day. You and I will invent a letter and we'll try and commit people that it's real and it's been around for ages. There are in English in particular, there are a couple of letters that have kind of vanished. So the medieval people would recognize that we simply don't use anymore today, most notably, I guess, the ash, which is that kind of combined A&E, almost that you see at the beginning of a lot of Anglo-Saxon names and Thorn. So that kind of, it always looks like a Y shape. So Ye Oldie Shop is not Ye Oldy Shop, it's the Oldy Shop, because it's a kind of 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? It's a great question, and the short answer is society. That's the word in a nutshell. So for context, you're absolutely right. These sounds or these letters work really well for the sounds of English.

To have Thorne especially would save a little bit of ink because with Thorne you can spell TH, which is two letters. But these words have their heyday in the old English period. the old English period, we date from around about, let's say, 450 CE to the 1,100. 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. They have a sort of nice status, even though they may like to think that they are prestigious and like the Romans and they have the Romans religion and all that, they are slightly removed from the post-Roman world. They understand that. They are migrants 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 ruins, so a sort of separate tradition of writing, and apply it to their needs. But within that time, frame of Old English that I just gave you, we have 1066. This is, it's as big for historical linguistics as it is for historians and for, well, for what you do math, because this changes society so fundamentally, it's, 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, 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 really quite a unique thing within the historical linguistics of Europe for this to happen. And this means that things like Thorn, things like the English language in general, are not prestigious. And Thorn especially is a weird letter. It does survive past 1066, but as English again raises itself up to basically a prestigious language, a language worthy of a king like Henry IV, it's clearly a beast of a different nature and it's been suffused with all kinds of continental ideas. And something like Thorn is just this weird relic of a strange era before, you know, 1066 before the proper birth of England, if you're a Norman. And that really goes downhill. And the death knell is then the printing press. The printing press comes in, Caxton, 15th century. We've got continental biases, because it's coming from Gutenberg and Germany and the low countries. And the thorn's not making an appearance there. So that's really

the death now for the letter Thorne. And well, for the moment, at least. As I said, the future is unknown. Yeah. We'll start a campaign to bring back Thor. Maybe that can be the letter that we 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 1066, 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. Absolutely. Very nicely put. That is exactly the linguistic consequences of something as big as 1066. 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. 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. The court of Wessex is strong, it's influential, it has a powerful Christian king at its centre. So it's tick, tick, tick for this becoming the prestigious way of writing English. With 1066, that courtly tradition, which by 1066 has shifted downriver or eastwards towards London is obliterated. The scribes the people patronising 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. 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 it was brand new news. to me that T used to be the last letter of the alphabet. I mean, I think that might surprise a lot of people. Absolutely, yeah. But this is the funny thing. I wonder if people maybe have an intuitive sense of this extremely old fact, because as I include in the book, as you say, is divided up

into 26 chapters from A through to Z or Z, if you prefer. And T, 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, which is a tweet that I took from somebody. I do give them credit, of course. And it's just, I was joyous to find that tweak because it recognizes that T is a proper letter. It's fairly stable in English.

I mean, it's silent occasionally in medieval words like a castle. But nonetheless, it's a well-behaved letter. And then afterwards, things get a bit weird. I've, online, on social media, I've seen the letters post-T referred to like the goth letters and the freak letters, which is just delightful because people are tapping into the fact that these are later additions that maybe don't have the regularity of the pre-T letters all the way up to that final letter. So, yeah, T was the last letter of the alphabet. It remains so in certain branches of this family tree like Hebrew, Tav is the final letter of the Hebrew. alphabet and then we have these ones tacked on afterwards and yeah if if you know for example i don't know uh the writers of the gospels have 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 yeah fascinating and you also write in the t chapter as well a little bit about how tea can can change a bit and make different sound. So the one interesting example that you give is space, spelled with a C, but spatial, spelled 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. 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 spelled 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. So again, you know, we've got these kind of conflicting tensions. Do we work with the language 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 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 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.

People who might criticise the men of the late medieval early modern period for, who put things like the bee back into debt and doubt. We may criticise 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. 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 spatium might have become spashum spasium space and the sound changes the letter changes but we can still see the route 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 i just give it a bit of thought. Well, that's really nice to hear. If that's how it came across to you, 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 very, very human. No, fantastic. Have you got a favorite letter? I realize this is a bit like asking you for a favorite child, having written a book about all of them, but do you have one that you either found particularly interesting or surprising? 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. 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 to, and quite by coincidence, they are next to each other in the alphabet. I have a particular fondness for our and S. I love R, as I mentioned earlier, because it's this stick of dynamite within spelling. 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 a cart and heart. That's an example of non-wrotic 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, that was fun. 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, plural. So how can I forget? It's this kind of, default way of expressing that we have more of a certain thing. And I don't, I think I can 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. 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? Wow, 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. 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.

It's not the only way of doing writing. It's not the only tradition. 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's, 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. 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 success. 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 does. 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. 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 write 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. 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 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 over-regulation of the alphabet? 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 sea. 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, I'd be bat otherwise. 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, often subconsciously, most of the time, so that allow us to understand, okay, I need to pronounce this letter C like a sir here, I need to pronounce it like a C 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 because they're bound up in each other. So we have things like 1066. We have things like the fact that there's not a massive central authority like what goes on with the Academy Francaise 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, and frankly, you don't want to take it too far away from Roman and Greek standards. Dr. Johnson is one of them. So we have also these more recent factors that the spelling, it arises from the history of England and of English-speaking nations, nations, essentially, that spelling is this hodgepodge of 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. We've also got different dialects of England. England was disunited in its speech for most of the middle, for all of the middle ages. It continues to be, even though standard English wields enormous effect. And you can find traces of these dialects, these divisions within England in modern day spelling, in, I don't know, the difference between a fox and its female version a vixen, which comes from the southwest, which undergone its, it underwent its kind of own change. changes in speech. Add all of these things together and English spelling, it's not going to look any other way. 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 favorite letter was. If you could eject one from the alphabet, is there one you get rid of? Yeah, it's Q.

Okay. Come on. Like, I know it's the title of the book, but it is Q at the end of the day. 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 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 you, which is this thing. I mean, frankly, it's another post-1066 thing. 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 spell words like queen and quick with the sea, because sea stands for kuh in these words. And perhaps we could be free of it again. Yeah. I mean, the book is called Why Does Q Needs? 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? Because of the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Romans.

Because it was a letter that, the sound that it represented was basically made redundant or superfluous at least because other letters could spell the same sound, k. 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 quo, as in a word like queen and quick, they actually thought of that as one sound.

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, QU, representing quo, could stay. And I would have much more respect for Q if it had been allowed to represent that quo on its own. If we could spell a word like quick, queen and question with just a Q, no you. But the Romans didn't take that step, and neither have we. It's like 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. Exactly. Exactly. Fascinating. So we'll dump Q from the alphabet, we'll maybe bring back Thorn, and 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. Brilliant. Brilliant. And then if I'm still around in 100 years, I can write a sequel. Absolutely. And it's fascinating to think, you know, we might not have recognized the ways in which people use the alphabet 500 and 1,000 years ago. And to think that in 500 and 1,000 years more, people might not recognize the way that we use. 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 somewhere on the timeline of its development. 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. We still do this today when we talk about ye oldie, for example. We emphasize 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. 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 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 history and the medieval influences on the alphabet, Danny. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so, so much for having me. It's a real privilege. I hope you enjoyed finding out more about the history of the alphabet. Danny's book, YQ Needs You, is out now if you'd like to explore it in even more. depth. There are new installments 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 forward slash 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.