Words and Stuff
Would English benefit from another letter? Ian Fleming thought so, and now a magazine he launched, The Book Collector, is seeking suggestions for a 27th letter for the alphabet.
Fleming, who collected books as well as writing them, and who took a bibliophile’s interest in typography, himself ran a competition to find a new letter that would serve a ‘distinct purpose’ in English. That was in 1947. The joint winners produced characters for the sounds ‘-sion’, ‘th’ and ‘st’. Entrants this time may want to avoid those. They don’t seem to have caught on.
The letters of the English alphabet come from Latin, though several were little used by the Romans. They sometimes treated j as interchangeable with i when j was used to start words, and medieval Latinists used it more widely as a consonant. But it was not common.
The letter k was also a rarity. So was y, which was brought into the later Roman alphabet to represent the Greek upsilon, but only for foreign words. The letter z was there at the start, but then fell into disuse, though it was revived in Cicero’s day for words borrowed from the Greek (representing zeta). The Romans had no w, but sometimes used v as a consonantal version of u, probably pronouncing it much as we pronounce w. The corresponding letter for the Greeks was, for a time, the digamma, written like our capital F. It disappeared.
Modern Italian is similarly sparing with j,k, w, x and y, keeping them almost entirely for foreign words or borrowings. Russian, with 33 letters these days, has lost and acquired letters – often by edict – over the centuries. French has only 25 letters, with w kept for foreign words, but is fortified by a plethora of diacritical marks, most of which affect pronunciation. Sanskrit, an IndoEuropean language similar to Latin and Greek, has 34 consonants and 14 vowels or diphthongs. Hawaiian has just seven consonants and five vowels.
In general, European languages seem to lose letters more often than they gain them. English used to have an eth, used for ‘th’. It slipped away in the 13th century. Thorn, a rune that knocked around for several centuries, did much the same job as eth (not to be confused with Eth of Ron and Eth from The Glums in Take It From Here). It was represented at first by a letter that looked like a b superimposed on a p. That evolved to become a y, which, when followed by an e, was used for ‘the’, most often in conjunction in the popular imagination with ‘olde’. It is widely believed that, in 1992, the inglenook-fanciers’ gazette, Ye Olde, became The Oldie.
You might think there’s still room for a ‘th’ letter. It could help all the visitors who arrive in Britain for the first time at Heathrow, a difficult name to pronounce for many foreigners. You might also think yogh would come in handy, at least in Scotland. It represented the ‘ch’ sound in words like ‘loch’ and ‘pibroch’. Ash, still used in some Scandinavian languages for the sound ‘ae’ in ‘archaeology’, could also be revived. So could the long s, the elegant flourish that popped up arbitrarily in the middle of words well into the 19th century.
More useful, in my view, would be replacements for i and o. As capitals, these are almost indistinguishable from the numerals 1 and 0. Put them together in a password made up of letters, numbers and punctuation marks, as is demanded for every online activity, and confusion ensues. Add a lower-case l, and confusion turns to despair – deepened only by meeting the ‘on’ and ‘off’ symbols that adorn every modern electrical appliance.
New symbols actually seem more welcome than new letters. The @ and # signs are everywhere. More popular still are hieroglyphs. Emojis are now reckoned in thousands, with more being created every day. Forget words and letters – so yesterday. Emojis are already considered a new language.