|
As complex as
ABC |
||
| By Simon Baynes | ||
Waiving the point that our pronunciation of the vowels is arbitrary anyway, because each represents more than one sound – it would be just as logical to call them ad, ed, id, od and ud – why should there be three different ways of pronouncing our consonants: the suffix -ay (jay, kay); the suffix -ee (bee, cee, dee, gee, tee, vee and American zee); and the prefix e- (eff, ell, emm, enn, ess and ex)? Why not bay, cay, day, fay, gay, etc, throughout? Or ebb, ecc, edd, eff, egg? One might then achieve some regularity.
What determined the delightfully euphonic names of the Greek letters, the ancestors of our own? Any child of four might enjoy intoning “Alpha, beta, gamma, delta . . .” – as musical, and as meaningful, as many a nursery rhyme. Useful too; future lessons will teach him that Christ is the alpha and omega, than an average mark is designated beta, that the sun emits gamma rays and that rivers have deltas. Our own alphabet will supply him with A boards, G clamps, H blocks, L-shaped rooms, M folds, S bends, T shirts, T squares, U turns, V signs, Y fronts and Z beds.
H is a splendid rebel. Why aitch? The name, says the Oxford Dictionary, “goes back through ME ache to OF ache, pointing to a late L. *acha, *ahha, or *aha, exemplifying the sound.” Quite so. As Piglet said to Kanga (not very confidently), Aha!
Q is another anomaly; we say queue, rather than qua, que or quay. R too is out of step: are, not ra, ree or ray. And why Y? Again we could more logically say ya, yee or yay. Yea verilie. And strangest of all, Zed.
W is unique – the only letter whose name is taken from its written shape rather than its sound; and why should it be double-u rather than double-v – which at least in modern scripts would seem more logical? And why don’t we call M “double-A”?
Our present alphabet has its own euphony and rhythm, and can even be made to scan, and sung to the tune of Mary had a little lamb:
Ay Bee Cee Dee Ee
Eff Gee
Aitch Eye Jay Kay Ell Emm
Enn O Pee Queue Are Ess Tee U
Vee Double-u Ex Why Zed.
A pity we can’t say Zem to make the rhyme; it would be no less odd than zed.
Although the alphabet is so unsystematic, the letters are not diverse enough in pronunciation for practical communication, so that war-time signallers had to invent the phonetically distinct code words Able Baker Charlie etc to avoid any ambiguity of sound.
So let the delightful irregularity of our alphabet, as zany as English spelling itself, as idiosyncratic as our weights and measures, remain; a reminder not so much of the antiquity of our language (English being one of the youngest in the family of languages), but of the diversity and complexity of our national history and culture – as also, it may be, of the eccentricity of our national character. Let it remain as one of those “things counter, original, spare, strange . . . fickle, freckled (who knows how?)” for which the poet exhorts us to praise him whose beauty is past change.
Return to Link Magazine