It's the last week of our season break, so I'll be talking with lots of new people soon.
But this bonus interview with Danny Bate that was originally for our supporters was especially interesting.
And only after the interview did I learn that Danny was joining us between his wedding and his honeymoon.
So this interview definitely deserves to be heard by everyone.
Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we're talking with Danny Bate about his new book, Why Q Needs You.
He is a linguist, a broadcaster, a writer.
He has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh.
He has a podcast of his own called A Language I Love Is where he talks about.
I mean everything from you know, the invented language Navi, to Old South Arabian.
So it's a different language every episode.
He's talking with us from Prague.
And in this bonus segment we're going to talk about the new letters of the alphabet, because it turns out that the letter T was the last letter for a long time.
So it's fascinating.
We have all these new letters.
Danny, welcome to the Grammarpalooza bonus segment.
Thank you so much for having me, and hi, everyone.
Hi to all your subscribers.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for being here.
So I think it's just amazing that we think of the alphabet as such a fixed thing, but it seems like over the ages people were just throwing letters onto the end of it as they made them up.
Exactly, exactly.
And there is this tweet, this post from, I think, a couple of years ago.
That just has.
I just want to contact the author and tell them like, how much they are correct in that, because basically the post goes something like T is the last great letter before the alphabet goes off the rails.
I think that's almost word for word.
And I want to just contact the original poster of that and say you are so accurate because it was.
It was the original letter of the alphabet.
If you have a sense that what follows T is a bit strange, like I've.
I've seen them referred to as like the goth letters, for example, or the bunk letters.
The ones that are a bit odd, they're kind of resembling each other.
They may stand for like two sounds rather than one in the case of X, which stands for X.
You know those two consonants.
There's a reason for that, a really good historical reason, which is that T is the end of the alphabet and remains so all the way through, let's say, the first millennium thousand years of the alphabet's existence, until it lands in the hands of the Greeks.
And that jump, that acquisition from the Phoenicians, the people who were using it in the Middle East before the Greeks and then the Greeks, is a jump in terms of culture and definitely in terms of speech.
And the Greeks need the letters for different sounds.
So they need to create more letters or they need to split letters, modify the alphabet and most of what they create gets put at the end.
Where else are you going to put it?
You don't want to upset the alphabetical order, so things get put at the end.
And the first of these to be created is U.
It's not U.
It's kind of been on a bit of a journey, it's kind of split and what have you.
But the order of those letters after T actually basically reflects their date of invention.
Amazing.
And U and V used to be the same letter, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, and it is.
I mean that is an incredible and frankly, quite complex story of letters splitting in what sound they represent, in the way that they are written down and lastly, in just their perception as two different letters.
And those things do not go hand in hand.
If you go back to say the days of Julius Caesar and you get Julius Caesar to finish the alphabet, recite the alphabet please.
I mean, he'd probably ask you, who on earth are you?
Why are you bothering me?
But let's say you get through to him and he would say write out the alphabet with something that looks like a T, He'd probably call it der.
He'd write out something that looks like a V.
Confusingly he'd probably call it uu and then an X, and that's the end of Julius Caesar's alphabet, essentially.
So we have a letter.
It looks like a V, It has that kind of pointed shape and it stands for.
For him probably one or two sounds.
It stands for the vowel OO as an English word like I don't know goose, even though we write that with double O, that's an English development.
And it stands for like a w, a w sound as in water.
So you might write a word like the Latin for wine.
You would write that.
Well, that's that word is weenum, in sort of reconstructed approximate pronunciation, how we think Julius Caesar said the word for wine.
And that will be written with two V-shaped letters.
The first one is at the beginning, stands for a W, and the second is the penultimate letter stands for an U sound W-E-N-U-M.
In that sort of double usage between those two somewhat similar sounds.
They have things in common.
We have kind of the seeds of future letters.
We have our split between V and U, and they now sort of stand beside each other in the alphabet.
Those two sounds would go down different paths.
Eventually, the letters would go down different paths as well, until people started to assign two shapes of the same letter to the two sounds.
That's happening.
Let's say Renaissance times, maybe like a thousand years after that shape, that shift is really, really happening and the letters are going down different journeys.
And then the recognition the third thing I mentioned of these two letters as actually two letters that's really only complete in kind of the 18th 19th centuries.
Wow.
You pick up like dr johnson's dictionary 1755 that's being published, the great dr johnson, hugely popular in the uk and also in the well, they're not quite, they're not yet the united states of america, but they're about to be.
Um, and you know, one of the chapters of his great dictionary is literally uv, Side by side.
It goes S-T-U-V, written as one.
Because for him, even though he acknowledges the different uses and different shapes, the split isn't finalized yet.
And then W came even later.
Were people just writing the two U's next to each other.
So often they said well, let's just make it a letter.
Basically that.
Basically that.
Again, it takes time for people to recognise W as its own thing.
And really quite late in the day.
I can show you things from the 17th century Shakespeare's day basically where people are writing a capital W.
It really looks like two Vs with a distinct space between them.
I want to hesitantly say that W is probably later, is younger, as you say, than U and V, But there's lots of different ingredients.
There's three stages to kind of a letter gaining full independent status.
And these are all kind of slowly developing.
And W really wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fall of Rome.
Why?
Because when we say the fall of Rome, that's a kind of shorthand for the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire.
It's all kind of happening in the fifth century, where the power of the emperors in the West is all fragmenting.
You've got these Germanic speaking peoples coming in, setting up their own kingdoms.
We generally refer to it as barbarian invasions, although I think they would have been pretty insulted by that term.
And You've got an incoming, you've got a kind of flood of languages, and lots of these have the sound W And it's in that kind of period of change where people are entering the old Western Empire.
They're entering Britain, for example, and setting up their new kingdoms.
We've got languages now that they need W And, because of changes that have happened within Latin, within kind of uh, safely latin speaking areas, there's no, no longer a letter that can write that down.
Uh, once upon a time that would have been like the v, the u letter, as i would have said, but that had changed.
That had changed in the sounds that it was representing.
So what are you going to do?
And if u is no longer, you know, capable of representing the sound were double it, then you've got a w basically, you've got a w.
That's it.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And then, okay.
And so, and then the next one, how do we get X?
X. Oh, wow.
I mean, the Greeks, again, like the short answer is the Greeks at the end of the day.
But I mean, if you know a little Greek, or if you indeed know the international phonetic alphabet, you'll know that both of those two things use that kind of X symbol, the crossed lines, for a completely different sound.
In Greek today, it's a X. sound.
It's a at the back of the tongue.
Likewise, the official symbol for that sound is a in the IPA.
What's going on there?
It doesn't stand for a as it does in English.
Essentially, that's a difference in the dialects of ancient Greek.
The Greeks received these letters and they invent a few more.
X is probably a Greek invention.
They probably didn't receive it from anybody else.
But they have a free hand.
I mean Greece, if you've ever been there, has all these islands and there's all these territories and kingdoms.
If your island wants to use this letter that you've gained for a particular sound, no one's going to come over the Aegean Sea and tell you you're doing it wrong.
So we have all this variation in ancient Greek and the way that people are writing it down.
Some dialects use it for x, a combination of two sounds.
And some use it for like a breathy K sound.
And that's the one that will later develop into as it is in modern Greek.
However, crucially...
The ones that used it for X.
They may not have won out in Greece, but those are the ones.
Those are the dialects that then travel to Italy and give the Romans their letters.
Hence, in this difference Romans, and hence people who tend to be in the West, in Western Europe, they're using X for X.
At the end of the day,
So that's why X has this...
Curious combination of two letters, the Greeks and Romans, and then we're still doing it.
Amazing.
Okay.
And then moving on to why, people often ask, you know, is A-E-I-O-U sometimes Y for the vowels?
And people say Y sometimes, like how can Y be a consonant?
And, I believe, your book.
It has to do with a letter we don't even have anymore called Yoch, that we like kicked out of the alphabet.
And somehow that gives us Y being a consonant.
Exactly.
That's it at the end of the day.
It's just the changing face of the language.
So you're quite right.
I mean, people are very right to wonder what on earth is this letter?
Is Y a vowel or a consonant?
And in the beginning of chapter Y in my book, I just say, I avoid the question entirely.
I just say, you know what?
It's neither.
It's a letter.
And allow me to kind of present the case for you to make up your own mind whether we should count it as one of the vowels or one of the consonants.
Essentially for so much of its history.
Like thousands and thousands of years, it's firmly in the vowel club.
Firmly there.
Again, you go back to Julius Caesar or before Caesar.
You go back to Plato Socrates.
In Greece.
They're going to say this letter
This is a vowel.
You know, it belongs to one of the vowels.
Even, you don't even need to go that far back.
You go back to old English, like time of Alfred the Great or something like that.
It's a vowel.
But did they have Y back then?
I thought Y was new.
They had it.
They really had it.
And they were using it for a vowel sound.
You could write a word.
Basically, you consult the IPA, consult your international phonetic alphabet.
If there is a kind of Y-shaped symbol, it's up there right in the top left corner of our vowel diagram.
It stands for the sound U, which is not normally an English kind of sound.
It's not a common sound in English.
That's the sound that it did stand for in Old English.
So you would write a word like king, which was kuning.
Alfred the Great was a kuning in old English times.
You'd write that C-Y rather than K-I.
Sounds have changed.
Spellings have changed with them.
However, this sound, over and over again, this U sound just keeps changing, disappearing from speech and merging with something else and shifting.
It's happened in english, it happened in ancient greek, over and over again.
Until honestly, there's a case to be made, there's an alternative history where, for most of the middle ages, y is essentially equivalent to an i, one and the same letters.
You read an old English text, that's how they're working side by side.
And there's an alternative history where, like so many other letters, we just binned it.
We got rid of it.
It's very possible.
However weirdly, its success in modern day English, where it stands for the sound yuh, not ee, but yuh, is all to do with the letter G at the top of the alphabet.
Like, All those letters away.
What is that?
Something like 20 letters away, 19 letters between the two.
The letter G had developed over the middle English, medieval English period and it had become this strange letter that didn't look much like a G and it stood for the sound Y.
It's known as a Joch.
If you ever read any English before Joch let's say something like 450 AD, so like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or something like that read a manuscript.
It's full of this strange letter.
And one of the sounds it's standing for is a yuh.
For whatever reason I mean.
I speculate about this.
I think printing presses and the fact that printing presses have a German origin, so they're coming from continental Europe.
They don't have this distinctive English letter, yuh just gets chucked out of English spelling.
It's gone.
But something needs to represent the y sound, no longer joch.
Something needs to step in.
And we have I, we have Y. Y is very much not pulling its weight at this time.
Let's repurpose it.
Let's use it for the y instead, the y sound.
Hence, Y kind of...
It enters this strange hybrid existence.
I mean, literally hybrid.
In the word hybrid, it's representing a vowel.
The I sound in hybrid because of Greek, basically.
That's another story.
But in a word like you and yellow, it steps in for Joch.
Joch is gone and Y is here.
So Y, it didn't deserve this at all, this current success in modern English spelling.
But for the foreseeable future, Y is here to stay.
I see.
Yeah.
So I'm a little confused because I thought all the letters at the end of the alphabet.
I thought they were all new, but why was there in Old English?
Is it one of those that went away and then came back?
Or am I wrong in thinking they're all new at the end?
They're new at the end from the perspective, from a much older perspective, I would say.
So they're new at the end for like the Phoenicians, as I mentioned.
So that's like 3000 years ago.
And they're new from the perspective of the Greeks.
Beyond that point into the history of English, which as a language only really starts to get written down in the year 450, 500 AD, millennia later.
Basically, the letters at the end of the alphabet haven't changed too much.
I mean, you have the split between U and V. That's a more recent thing.
But the Y has been around at the end of the alphabet since the Greeks and then later the Romans.
Basically the Romans.
It's the Romans who really put the letter Y back into the place where we know it to be.
Basically, the kind of the penultimate spot, second and last at the end of the alphabet.
That's a Roman thing.
And again, as I mentioned earlier, I mean it's all bound up in the history of the time when people are writing things down.
It's all very dependent on context.
The Romans received the letter V, which they call U, from the Greeks.
And then, a couple of centuries later, they then conquer Greece.
They conquer the Greeks.
Very slowly happens.
They absorb Greeks and their language into the Roman Empire.
But by this time, the sound of the letter U has changed back in Greece.
And they need something to represent this U sound.
They need to represent it.
So what are they going to do?
Well, they're going to borrow the letter Y all over again.
That's basically what happens.
Where they're going to put it, they're going to put it at the end of the alphabet.
It's this strange dance of letters that is really just so caught up in the circumstances of that time, where they get the letter V and U from the Greeks first.
Two centuries later, they need it again for a slightly different sound and they borrow Y Consequently.
Today, our alphabet ends T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z.
Well, before we talk about Zed, I want to briefly talk about the last letter in the Greek alphabet Omega, because I think this is my favorite tidbit from your book is learning that Omega just means big O, like Omega, like big.
And I actually called my husband over.
I'm like, you have to hear this.
It just means big O. Yes.
Brilliant.
Oh, it's working.
The book is working.
I mean, that means a lot to me.
So that's really, really nice.
I may have to quote you on that.
Because, you know, I don't want to, I want to keep the reader entertained.
So, while I have some big stories to tell, I have these kind of big themes, the themes that really daunted me as a writer, things like the difficult dance between speech and writing.
I also wanted to throw in some tidbits, the things that will keep the reader amused entertained hopefully, informed as well, and it seems to be working.
So that's just awesome.
Yeah.
Omega.
It's Omega.
And the original O, the one that has the shorter sound in its Greek form.
The one that is shorter in its duration when it's pronounced is the little O, O-micro or Omicron.
That's basically it.
Omega and Omicron.
So love that fact.
It had to be in there.
Yeah, that's amazing.
It's my favorite fact, definitely.
You know, it was very odd for me to say Zed, which is the British way of saying the letter that I call Z.
Why does it have these two names?
It has them because they both deserve to exist.
I think that's the thing.
I don't want to kind of beat around the bush or sit on the fence.
I want to give people my opinion, but they both have good reason to exist.
Basically Zed is one of those sounds that it's really only added to the language or re-added to the language by the Romans in the later centuries of the Roman Empire, when Again they conquered the Greeks.
The Greeks have lots of words that Zed can spell.
And also we have things like the rise of Christianity.
You know, these really big historical social shifts going on.
And not only you've got Greek, which is very much the language of Christianity to begin with.
You've also got things like Hebrew, which has got names like I don't know, Zachary and Zebediah, all of these great biblical names which
They need a Z to be written down with.
So that's one of the reasons why Z comes last.
And because of that kind of special status where, at least to begin with, it's really reserved for kind of exclusive letters I beg your pardon, exclusive words, not everyday words, but words that are coming from Greek and Hebrew.
It keeps this older name, which in Greek is Zeta Zeta in modern Greek pronunciation and that is the origin of Zed.
That's where we get Zed from, basically.
So history, history gives Brits like me and other people in the former empire, the Commonwealth, a good reason for saying Zed.
It's a Greek name, basically.
However...
You, dear American friends, are perfectly valid in saying Z because, whereas that might not be so historically backed up, it is however, harmonious with the alphabet.
It's perfectly harmonious with B, G, C, D, all these other consonant letters.
So why not say Z?
I totally get it.
And indeed, I do.
Like, I do say it.
I'm like...
I'm not immune to this.
The borders are extremely kind of porous.
I would never dream of saying something like I don't know you belong to generation Gen Z Or you know the rapper Jay Z.
That sounds awful and pedantic and weird.
I'm never going to stand on my little British hill and say no, it's Gen Z.
Of course I say Gen Z, So you know the barriers between these things that we rallied around are very.
It's very loose.
There are no kind of hard borders.
And indeed I mentioned in the book.
Both names are documented within British writing and within American writing.
I can find you texts.
I lay them out in the book, where American authors are saying it should be called Zed and British authors are saying it should be called Zee.
So, as fun as it is to rally around this division between our two ways of using English and writing English,
It's not that old as a split.
Wonderful.
Well, thank you so much for explaining.
Again, the book is Why Q Needs You.
I loved it.
You should all go buy it, read it.
And then now Danny's going to give us his book recommendations for books that he loves.
So, you know, get his book first.
But then after you're done with that, like, what do you recommend that we read, Danny?
Do you know what, of all the questions that I was prepared for, this is the one that daunts me the most, to be honest.
The question is, I mean, how, how nerdy can I go?
Like how, what scope?
You know, generally I'm looking for, you know, like I don't know like a novel I could get my best friend for Christmas or something like that.
Just books that you loved, that stick with, stuck with you.
You know, just good good, enjoyable read.
Great.
I mean, I've certainly had the pleasure of many, many great books.
It's just a few of them are like hardcore academic books as well.
There's one that inspired my own PhD that I thought.
I feel that might be a bit of a buzzkill if I were to mention it.
So, regardless of that, I think the books that I'd absolutely like to say one is linguistic and the other two are novels.
When I was first getting into linguistics, I adored David Crystal's How Language Works.
I just loved it.
You may have come across it.
I believe it's been pretty well distributed and printed.
It just really unpacks the field of linguistics, which I've been obsessed with for 10 plus years now.
And I mention this not only as a kind of advert for linguistics, but because I really enjoyed the reading of it as well.
So I would recommend that.
In terms of books and novels, I love The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
I do, too.
Love just it hooked me as a teenager.
And it's a book that I can easily return to and gain something new each time.
So that's it's just an enjoyable book that really spoke to me.
And I thought, OK, you know, medieval murder mystery.
Brilliant.
And I've read it several times, enjoyed it each one.
And finally, slightly less famous, but you know, a well-known, well-studied book, and also Italian, would be The Leopard by Tommaso di Lampedusa, which was turned into a film, I think with Burt Lancaster in the starring role.
And that was, again, a book where I loved the reading of it and it made me feel...
I just have extremely fond memories of reading it because it's a great read.
The characters are great.
And it's a book where it delights you with a story and yet, you know, impresses you with big themes, themes of change, themes of history slipping away from your fingers, of a change within a family, of a dying way of life.
All very grand themes, but wrapped up and beautifully presented in a lovely story about the Sicilian countryside.
So The Leopard, that would be, yeah.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much.
Well, Danny Bate, again, the book is Why Q Needs You.
Where can people find you, Danny? they can find me online.
It's not hard to uh, Danny Bates.
Uh into your type.
That into your search engine of choice will bring me up.
I have a website where I try to post accessible blog posts once a month for on various topics and make that engaging and entertaining.
Uh, social media uh, you know, blue sky x, twitter um, you can find me on there again, sharing the fields and the stuff that i love and uh, maybe in future, as i gain in confidence, some other platforms to um oh, my podcast.
Um, a language which you very kindly mentioned at the beginning.
A language i love is dot dot dot.
So i'm not hard to find and i hope to, i hope to see you all there.
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Thanks for listening.
