Alphabetical Read Free

We’re able to do that mostly because we write and read in order to pass messages or ‘texts’ between us – messages that we want to be full of meaning, full of stuff that matters to us. As we read and write these messages, we learn the shape and look of words including the ones that grammarians call ‘irregular’. We learn that the word ‘debt’ sounds like ‘dett’ but is written ‘debt’. After all, we see it often enough.
    Though it’s possible to describe all this as a ‘system of symbols and sounds’, it’s not only that. Our forebears devised alphabets so that they could store and retrieve meaning. ‘Meaning’ can be the meaning of names, directions, reports, feelings, ideas, dreams, experiments or investigations . . . We store meanings when writing with the alphabet, so that these meanings can survive over time and/or space: a graffito on the side of a train does both, as does an instruction on how to build a flatpack wardrobe. An inscription on a gravestone is usually intended to last over time but we want it to stay put. A tattoo is usually intended to last a lifetime, stay put on a person but move with that person. A birthday card travels from sender to receiver, lasts for the length of the birthday celebration and more often than not is destroyed. Some books have survived long beyond their authors’ wildest dreams, sometimes by staying in the same place for hundreds of years.
    In the case of the alphabet I’m using, people have used someof the letters in a constant way over thousands of years. Someone in what is now Italy, whose name began with an ‘s’ sound two thousand years ago, may have had someone carve an ‘S’ on a stone after he died just as someone might do that for ‘Sam’ in England today. This continuity has enabled us to access meanings going back hundreds or thousands of years.
    Some aspects of how we use letters change. Film-makers invented subtitles so that we can hear words in one language, whilst reading it in another; people with impaired hearing can read what people on a screen are saying. When the Norman French took over the ruling class in England from 1066, they brought some sounds (like ‘j’) that the Germanic peoples living in England did not use. Over time, the ‘j’ in ‘jam’ came to be used by everyone in England. Meanwhile, most people in England stopped using the ‘ch’ sound that most Scots people make today when saying the word ‘loch’. These changes show up in the letters of the alphabet. This is part of why and how the alphab
+et is such a clever invention. We get it to do what we want it to do.
    At any given moment, people in a locality or a country speaking the same language do not use the alphabet in the same way. For thousands of years, most people hardly used it at all. The storage of meaning in letters was something that only a very few people knew how to do. The origins of the alphabet lie within those castes of people who had the right to write: priests, the makers and executors of laws and punishments, and accountants, mostly. With TV available on smartphones, voice recognition, automated translation and the digitizing of image and sound, the use of the alphabet is changing rapidly. Another kind of code – based on the serial variations of two numbers – is storing meaning. Though using the technology to store and read meaningful symbols (e.g. pictures, music, speech and writing) is very simple, very few people know how to do thecoding. It is quite possible that the use of the alphabet of letters will decline in the next hundred years. We could ask whether a new clerisy has already emerged who have become the tiny minority who know how to write this digital code.
    The ultimate reason why the use of the alphabet changes is because we change, whether that’s through war, migration, new technology, new kinds of work