Alphabetical Read Free Page A

and leisure, new systems of government or new forms of education. It seems odd to think that the reason why I say a ‘j’ sound and that there is a letter for that sound is because, nearly a thousand years ago, in the wars between the tribal warlords of northern Europe, a French-speaking group got the upper hand in the part of the world where I happen to live. I can hold an instrument in my hand and tap the letters ‘y-is-s-s-s’ and ten seconds later my son hundreds of miles away knows that we are both celebrating the same goal. The instrument that makes this possible comes after 250 years of scientific industrialization and some dubious exploitation of labour and mineral resources that took place far from where I live. My freedom to write a word in this non-standard way comes as a result of the mass education and artistic revolts of the last 150 years: my son and I have both learned to write but we don’t get nervous making up new spellings. We’re not scared we might get told off by the invisible teacher, grammarian or priest in our heads.
    When I’ve texted my son, I put the instrument down on the table next to a newspaper and, let’s say, my copy of Emil and the Detectives , and I go on watching the TV. Though this all seems seamless, the frontiers of different technologies, different languages, different typefaces, and different uses of alphabets, symbols and codes are all nudging up against each other on my table. The names of the footballers I’m watching on the TV are a coming-together of different uses of letters: the commentator tells us that Cazorla would like us to pronounce his name as‘Cathorla’ with a soft ‘th’ as in ‘thorn’. Giroud, the commentator explains, has a ‘d’ on the end of his name but we don’t say the ‘d’, and the ‘G’ sounds like the ‘j’ in ‘bijou’. The goalkeeper’s name is Szczęsny. The commentator explains that the team look like they’re ‘playing 4, 4, 1, 1’ with Cazorla ‘playing in the hole’. This too is yet another system of signs created partly in language, partly by the movements of the players.
    This running of languages and sign-systems in parallel to each other is not new. In the British Museum sits the basalt slab known as ‘the Rosetta Stone’. Though one of its languages – Egyptian hieroglyphs – lay undeciphered for hundreds of years, the stone holds the key to understanding a crucial moment in the history of the alphabet: how human beings invented the idea that squiggles on a surface could indicate the sounds we make to each other in order to express ourselves, to communicate and to make meanings for each other that last as long as the material they are written on. Matching squiggles to sounds is known as the ‘phonetic principle’. It’s not known for certain who first invented it, and it’s not known whether different groups of people invented it separately or influenced each other. Though this kind of behaviour seems obvious to us, it was not how humans first invented writing. The first writing was a form of drawing. Matching signs to speech comes later.
    The history of the alphabet is also a history of how we uncovered that history. The Rosetta Stone is inscribed in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphs and two kinds of Greek. The script gives out the terms of a decree from the ‘Manifest God, King Ptolemy’ – a decree which included that no rower employed in the task of taking priests to the residence of Alexander should be press-ganged into service – a piece of humane legislation that I always spend a moment of pleasure thinking about, unless it was a neat way to prevent the Emperor from being surrounded by potentially recalcitrant and rebellious strong men. Incomparison, the story of how the stone was handled by Europeans is squalid. If ever we were trying to find an example of