The 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, handed down to us from Ancient Rome and fitted, albeit
imperfectly, to our English tongue. Wait, not so fast. That’s wrong. This was the
Latin alphabet. The rest of these were just crafted by some clever oldschool modders.
Yes, it’s true. Your G’s, J’s, U’s, W’s, and Y’s don’t have the ancient
pedigree of the rest of your alphabet. But what they lack in antiquity, they more than
make up for in scrappiness. This is their story.
G was the first to emerge. Long ago, Greek /g/ made its way to Italy and turned into
Latin C. But in early Latin, the C actually stood for the sound /g/ and the sound /k/.
Worse still, the one letter you might think could straighten things out here between /k/
and /g/ and let us differentiate them, that valiant K, well... that was going out of fashion.
But C was still hanging on, k-ing and g-ing along. To linguists, that’s sensible. They
can tell you all about how these two velar stops actually share most of their features,
and they just differ in one little thing: voicing. But to everyday Romans, that's little
consolation. The difference was confusing. And dangerous. I mean, does this say “he’s
milking it" or does it mean “let him beat it up”? Who knows! I mean it’s all C’s!
All C’s!!
Calm down. And open the door. Because here enters Spurius Carvilius Ruga, a former slave
that ran his own private school 2200 years ago. Frustrated with this two-faced C and
unable to even write his own name clearly, the story goes that he tacked on an extra
stroke, creating a new G, and forever setting C apart from G. An amazing stroke of genius!
Heh...
Well if C can have a companion, why can’t “U"? Well, the only U around was actually V, from
older Greek upsilon. More on that in a second. Greek words staged a fashionable Latin comeback
a little after the birth of G, and educated writers wanted a fancy way to write this strange
Greek “u”, with its very un-Roman /y/ sound. So they borrowed upsilon again, a new
upsilon, a second upsilon, a Greek Y. Even today in English, Greek words like "system"
have the new letter, a letter missing from plain old Latin words.
Tweaking Cs and borrowing Ys is lightweight compared to what comes next. The Middle Ages
saw the rise of a new letter: i with a tail below it. While it was originally a different
look, not a different letter, "tailed i" gave Medieval European languages a way to set j
apart from i.
And that’s important, because if we roll this story back to the Romans, we see an overburdened
letter “i" that had to play both roles. Take the Latin word for “young”. Just
take it.
That first “i" was a /j/ sound, but the last one’s the vowel /i/. Similar enough,
but, linguistically, that means "i" is trying its hardest to be both a vowel /i/ and a consonant
/j/. Add in our swishy tail, and this serifed “j" comes to the rescue as our consonant,
leaving “i” just as a vowel. So /juwenis/.
But that’s not good enough. There’s another confusing letter hiding in that word, and
it’s the next one on our change list. Like “i”, the Latin letter “V" covers two
sounds: a vowel /u/, and a consonant /w/, what we’d call “double-u”.
And that's why we like IVVENIS, because it has both of them in a row! Never fear, we
can sort this out. Just round out the bottom of that V, and, what do you know? It's the
vowel “u”. Hooray!
But this change actually took centuries. In older manuscripts, the “u" is still used
as a variant of “v” for both /v/ and /u/. Eventually, after a long sell, by the end
of the 1700’s the two were treated as two totally different letters. Finally, we've
arrived.
So we have a better way to write IVVENIS! But listen to Old Cicero’s pronunciation
of that “v” - /w/, he says, /w/! So I glossed over that change when I said that
V ended up standing for both /v/ and /u/, but, early on, that /w/ pronunciation shifted
to something pretty close to - but not exactly like - our “v”. So by the time little
Henry the VIII was studying his Latin, that V had long been a /v/. Seriously Henry? Fine,
yes, this book is yours. Have it! Huhh.
Well, speaking of Englishmen, when early Germanic languages like Old English dressed themselves
in the Latin alphabet, they asked about their newfound garb, “hey, where’s the letter
for my /w/ sound?” And it didn’t answer them back. Since it’s an inanimate metaphor.
Germanic speakers had already learned to get what they want when Rome was being withholding.
No exception here. They cobbled together a new letter of their own by taking that V and
putting it next to another V. Don’t forget though that “v” and “u" were still two
peas in a pod at the time, each one useful for making /v/ and /u/ sounds, meaning you
could write this new letter as a double-v or a double-u. But here’s where we should
jump off the hamster wheel of history, because eventually that German /w/ starts to turn
into /v/ on its own, just like the Latin V before it. Oh, history, you really like to
keep your fingers on that replay button, don't you?
I’d love to go on and compare other alphabets and talk about how or even if each individual
European language adopted these changes or didn't or made decisions of its own. Think
about how to this day the Irish alphabet makes none of these distinctions except c and g.
But this is a good place to wrap up. Between last time, with the uppercase/lowercase stuff
and these modded letters, I think you can see that while you might think your alphabet’s
been aging and evolving since time immemorial, in some very real ways, it’s not as old
as you think.