1147. In this bonus segment that originally ran in October, we look at the fascinating history of the "new letters" of the alphabet — V, W, X, Y, and Z. Danny Bate explains why T was the original end of the alphabet and how letters were added by the Greeks and Romans. We also look at the origin of the letter Y, which was originally a vowel, and the two historical reasons we call the final letter “zee” or “zed.”
1147. In this bonus segment that originally ran in October, we look at the fascinating history of the "new letters" of the alphabet — V, W, X, Y, and Z. Danny Bate explains why T was the original end of the alphabet and how letters were added by the Greeks and Romans. We also look at the origin of the letter Y, which was originally a vowel, and the two historical reasons we call the final letter “zee” or “zed.”
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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 honeymoon, so this interview definitely deserves to be heard by everyone!
[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and we're here today with Danny Bate, the author of “Why Q Needs U.” 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 Na'vi to Old South Arabian. So it's a different language every episode. He is 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.
Danny Bate: Thank you so much for having me. And hi everyone. Hi to all your subscribers.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for being here. So, you know, I think it's just amazing that, you know, we think of the alphabet as such a fixed thing, but it seems like, you know, over the ages, people were just throwing letters onto the end of it as they made them up.
Danny Bate: 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 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 the original letter of the alphabet. And there is, if you have a sense that what follows T is a bit strange—like I've seen them referred to as the goth letters, for example, or the punk letters—the ones that are a bit old, 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 “ksa” 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 the kind of, 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's a kind of acquisition from the Phoenicians, the people who were using it in the Middle East before the Greeks. And then the Greeks represent a jump in terms of culture and definitely in terms of speech. The Greeks need the letters for different sounds, so they need to create more letters, or they need to, you know, split letters, modify the alphabet. Most of what they create gets put at the end. Where else are you gonna put it? Like, you know, 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, you know, 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.
Mignon Fogarty: And “U” and "V" used to be the same letter.
Danny Bate: Exactly. Yeah. And it is, I mean, that is an incredible and frankly, quite complex story of letters splitting in what sounds they represent in the way that they are written down, and lastly, in just their perception as two different letters. 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, you know, finish the alphabet, recite the alphabet, please. I mean, he'd probably tell you, you know, he'd probably ask you, "Who on earth are you? Why are you bothering me?" But you know, let's say you get through to him, and he would write out the alphabet with something that looks like a "T," he'd probably call it "theh." He'd write out something that looks like a "V." Confusingly, he'd probably call it “ooh.” 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 him, probably one or two sounds. It stands for the vowel, ooh, as in an English word. Like I know "goose," even though we write that with double O, that's an English development. And it stands for a "wha" sound as in "water." So you might write a word like the Latin for wine. You would write that, well, that word is "vinum" 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, at the beginning, stands for a "wha," and the second, the penultimate letter, stands for an "ooh" sound. “We noom.” 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, in Renaissance times, maybe like a thousand years after that. That shift is really happening, and the letters are going down different journeys.
And then the idea, 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 and 19th centuries. You pick up, like Dr. Johnson's dictionary, 1755, that's being published. The great Dr. Johnson was 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. And, you know, one of the chapters of his great dictionary is literally U and V side by side. You know, it goes "S T U and V" written as one, because for him, even though he acknowledges the different uses and different shapes, the kind of split isn't finalized yet.
Mignon Fogarty: And then W. W came even later. Right. And it's, were people just writing the two U's next to each other? So often they said, well, let's just make it a letter.
Danny Bate: Basically that, again, it takes time for people to recognize W as its own thing. And really quite late in the day. I can show you things from the 17th century, where people, at 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 you know, there are lots of different ingredients. There are 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, basically.
Mignon Fogarty: Why?
Danny Bate: 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. What 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, got a kind of flood of languages, and lots of these have the sound "wu," 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 need work. And because of changes that have happened within Latin, within kind of a safely Latin-speaking areas, there's no longer a letter that can write that down. Once upon a time, that would have been like the V, the "oo" letter, as I would have said. But that had changed.
That had changed in the sounds that it was representing. So what are you gonna do? And if "oo" is no longer, you know, capable of representing the sound "wu," double it. Then you've got to double U. Basically, you've got to double U. That's it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it's amazing. And then, okay, and so, and then the next one, how do we get X?
Danny Bate: 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 “huh” sound. It's a “huh” at the back of the, you know, back of the tongue. Likewise, the official symbol for that sound is a ha in the IPA. So, and what's going on there, like it, you know, it doesn't stand for a, as it does in English. That is essentially, that's a difference in the dialects of ancient Greek. The Greeks receive these letters and they invent a few more. X is probably a Greek convention. They probably didn't receive it from anybody else, but they have a free hand. I mean, Greece, if you've ever been there, there's all these islands and there's all these territories and kingdoms. If you know your island wants to use this letter that you've gained for a particular sound, no one's going to come over the Aegean 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 “ksa” a combination of two sounds, and some use it for “kuh,” like a breathy K sound. And that's the one that will later develop into “huh” as it is in modern Greek. However, crucially, the ones that used it for “ksa”they may not have kind of won out in Greece, but those are the ones.
So there's the dialects that then travel to Italy and give the Romans their letters. Hence, in this difference, Romans, and hence, you know, people who tend to be in the West and Western Europe, they're using K. I beg your pardon. They're using X for a “ksa” 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.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. Okay. And then moving on to Y people often ask, well, you know, is A-E-I-O-U sometimes Y for the vowels? And people say why sometimes, like, how can Y be a consonant? And I, from, I believe your book, it has to do with a letter. We don't even have anymore called “yulk” that we like kicked out of the alphabet. And somehow that gives us Y being a consonant.
Danny Bate: 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, very right to wonder what on earth is this letter Y, a vowel or a consonant? And in the beginning of the 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 gonna 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 the time of Alfred the Great, or something like that. It's a vowel. However…
Mignon Fogarty: Did they have Y back then? I thought Y was new.
Danny Bate: 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 “oo”, 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 "koning." Alfred the Great was a "kooning." In Old English times, you'd write that as "CY" rather than "KI."
Sounds have changed. Spellings have changed with them. However, this sound, over and over again, this "oo" sound just keeps 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. In 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 bent 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 "e," but "yuh," is all to do with the letter G at the top of the alphabet. Like the, you know, all those letters away, what is that? Something like 20 letters away? So 19 letters between the two, the letter G had developed over the kind of 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 "yuh." It's known as a "yulk." And if you ever read any English before, 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 yet; yuh just gets chucked out of English spelling. It's gone. But something needs to represent the "y" sound, no longer “”yuh.” Something needs to step in. And we have "i," we have "y." They are, you know, "y" is very much not pulling its weight at this time. Let's repurpose it. Let's use it for the “yuh” instead, the "yuh" sound; hence Y 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 "yulk," "yulk" 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.
Mignon Fogarty: I see. So I'm a little confused because I thought all the letters at the end of the alphabet were all new, but Y was there in Old English? Is it one of those that went away and then came back?
Danny Bate: You could say that.
Mignon Fogarty: Or am I wrong in thinking they're all new at the end?
Danny Bate: They're new at the end from a much older perspective, I would say. So they're new at the end for like the Venetians, as I mentioned. That's like 3,000 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, it's the Romans who really put the letter Y back into the place where we know it to be, basically the kind of penultimate spot. Second to last, at the end of the alphabet. That's a Roman thing.
And again, as I mentioned earlier, 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 called "ooh," from the Greeks, and then a couple of centuries later, they conquered Greece. They conquer the Greeks very slowly. They absorb the Greeks and their language into the Roman Empire. But by this time, the sound of the letter "ooh" has changed back in Greece, and they need something to represent this "ew" sound. They need to represent it. So what are they gonna do? What are they gonna borrow the letter Y all over again. That's basically what happens. Where are they gonna put it? They’re gonna put it at the end of the alphabet. It's the strange dance of letters that is really just so caught up in the circumstances of that time where they get the letters V and U from the Greeks. 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-Zed.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. 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: learning that Omega just means "big O," like “O-mega,” like big. I actually called my husband over. I'm like, "You have to hear this. It just means big O."
Danny Bate: Yes. Brilliant. Oh God, it's working. The book is working. I mean, that means a lot to me, so that's really nice. I may have to quote you on that. I just, 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 O-mega, 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, or O micro or omicron. That's basically it: Omega and omicron. So love that fact. It had to be in there.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. That's amazing. It's my favorite fact, definitely. And so, you know, it is, 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?
Danny Bate: It has them because they both deserve to exist. I think that 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 is 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 conquer 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, you not only have Greek, which is very much the language of Christianity to begin with, you've also got things like Hebrew, which has names like, I dunno, Zachary and Zebinah, all of these great biblical names, which they need a "Zed" to be written down with.
So that's one of the reasons why "Zed" 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," "Zita" in modern Greek pronunciation. And that is the origin of "Zed." That's where we get "Zed" from, basically. So 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 CD , 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 dunno, you belong to generation Gen Zed, or, you know, the rapper Jay-Zed. That sounds awful and pedantic and weird. I'm never gonna stand on my little British hill and say, no, it's Gen Z. And 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 that 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 Z. 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.
Mignon Fogarty: 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 gonna 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?
Danny Bate: 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 nerdy can I go? Like how, what scope?
Mignon Fogarty: 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 stuck with you. You know, just a good, enjoyable read.
Danny Bate: Great. I mean, I've certainly had the pleasure of many great books. It's just that a few of them are hardcore academic books as well. You know, there's one that inspired my own PhD that I thought might be a bit of a buzzkill if I were to mention it. Regardless of that, I think the books that I'd absolutely like to mention are one linguistic work 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 unpacks the field of linguistics, which I've been obsessed with for 10 plus years now. I mention this not only as a kind of advert for linguistics but because I really enjoyed reading it as well. So I would recommend that.
In terms of novels, I love “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco. 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 just an enjoyable book that really spoke to me, and I thought, okay, you know, medieval murder mystery. Brilliant. I've read it several times and enjoyed each one.
Finally, slightly less famous but still a well-known, well-studied book, and also Italian, would be “The Leopard” by Tomasi di Lampedusa, which was turned into a film, I think, with Burt Lancaster in the starring role. Again, that was a book where I loved the reading of it, and I have extremely fond memories of it because it's a great read. The characters are great, and it's a book that delights you with a story and yet impresses you with big themes of change, themes of history slipping away from your fingers, and the change within a family of a dying way of life. All very grand, but wrapped up and beautifully presented in a lovely story about the Sicilian countryside. So, “The Leopard” would be, yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Well, Danny Bate again. The book is “Why Q Needs U.” Where can people find you, Danny?
Danny Bate: They can find me online. It's not hard to. "Danny Bate." Type that into your search engine of choice, and that will bring me up. I have a website where I try to post accessible blog posts once a month on various topics and make that engaging and entertaining. On social media, you know, Bluesky, X, and Twitter, you can find me there, again sharing the fields and the stuff that I love. Maybe in the future, as I gain confidence, I will explore some other platforms too. Oh, and my podcast, which you very kindly mentioned at the beginning, “A Language I Love Is…” I'm not hard to find, and I hope to see you all there.
Mignon Fogarty: Great, and we'll put all that in the show notes so you can find it. To the Grammarpaloozians, thank you so much for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. If you are listening to this later, when we release it months later on the main feed, if you'd like to get it earlier and help support the work we do, you can learn more about that at quickanddirtytips.com/bonus. But either way, thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.
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