1125. This week, we talk with linguist and author Danny Bate about his book, "Why Q Needs U." We look at the ancient origins of our alphabet, tracing its conceptual leap from Egyptian hieroglyphs to symbols that represent sounds. Danny explains the "acrophonic principle" (one sound from a picture) and why the letter A was originally a consonant, not a vowel.
1125. This week, we talk with linguist and author Danny Bate about his book, "Why Q Needs U." We look at the ancient origins of our alphabet, tracing its conceptual leap from Egyptian hieroglyphs to symbols that represent sounds. Danny explains the "acrophonic principle" (one sound from a picture) and why the letter A was originally a consonant, not a vowel.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we're talking with Danny Bate about his new book, "Why Q Needs U." Danny Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster who is fascinated by the study of historical languages and etymology. He also has a podcast called "A Language I Love Is…" where he talks about different languages. Everything from the constructed language, Na'vi, to Old South Arabian. He has a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, and he is talking with us from Prague. Danny Bate, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Danny Bate: Thank you so much. Seriously, thank you so much. It's a great pleasure. As a big admirer of what you do, it's delightful and pretty surreal to be talking to you all the way from Prague to the West Coast, so thank you for having me.
Mignon Fogarty: I know. Well, it's exciting to have you here because I loved your book. It was fascinating, and you started out by explaining how we actually got from hieroglyphics to an alphabet and the conceptual leap that was involved to get there.
Danny Bate: Absolutely. I mean, it is this landmark in human history. I really feel that, in that at least, I cannot beat around the bush. It is an incredible piece of technology that is so successful that we kind of take it for granted today. You know, our letters are just so familiar. We learn them at such an early age, and I wanted to write a book that, among other things, is a chance to celebrate our alphabet and for most of us, myself included, as the writer, to reacquaint ourselves with the alphabet and where it came from.
As you correctly say, it is ancient; it has this really, really early origins in the kingdom of Egypt. So anybody who loves their ancient history out there, there are lots of Egyptians and lots of Phoenicians, and these people are absolutely crucial in getting the alphabet started. Although indeed, when it was happening, I really think that the people who got the alphabet off the ground may not have fully appreciated the significance of what they were doing. And indeed it may not have been appreciated by the society at large. I think it's not too much of a stretch to say that these people that we can thank for our alphabet are working very much in the shadow of grand Egyptian culture at that time. Probably very humble people, or most certainly they are foreigners. Let's say first, second, or third generation immigrants to the kingdom of Egypt. And because of that status, because of being outsiders, especially linguistic outsiders, they are, the alphabet is born basically to suit their needs, and everything follows from there.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, how did they get from the symbols to the letters that represent sounds?
Danny Bate: I mean, lots of people are involved in this. Unfortunately, I can't just point to one particular individual, some scribe working in Egypt. It's a lot of people; it's an international cooperation between nations. This project essentially all begins with hieroglyphs. If you can picture hieroglyphs, you may have seen them, you know, inside the sarcophagus, the mummy, or in some great tomb in Egypt or something like that. They are the symbols that write down the ancient Egyptian language, which is its own thing. It's what Egyptians spoke at the time.
Hieroglyphs, by the time that our alphabet starts to be born, have been around for a long time, probably about a thousand years. And it's an extremely sophisticated, very complex way of writing. You have lots of ways of using a particular hieroglyph. It could stand for one sound, two sounds, three sounds. It could stand for an idea, an object—usually the object that it appears to represent. Because hieroglyphs are usually pretty obvious about what they are meant to represent in the minds of Egyptians at that time. Or indeed they could represent the kind of category of the thing that you put that hieroglyph next to, whether it's a man or a woman, a pharaoh, a priest, or an animal—something like that.
What seems to happen, the key thing that gets us from hieroglyphs to our alphabet, our letters, is that this group of people that I mentioned earlier, these kinds of outsiders, streamline that whole system. So they keep certain symbols; they're very happy to reuse them, at least in terms of their shape written down on the page or whatever medium they're writing on. But crucially now, it's one of those symbols for one sound, and that's the breakthrough. That's the moment that we can kind of say, yes, alphabetic writing, as opposed to hieroglyphic writing, is basically up and running.
And there's lots and lots that I could go on to describe. It takes definitely many steps, many hundreds of years for them to represent kind of the abstract symbols that we know and love today. Certainly, they need to take a kind of journey around the Mediterranean, kind of anti-clockwise from Egypt, up the coast of the Levant to the Middle East, and then round Anatolia and into Greece. If you can picture that sort of anti-clockwise journey, lots and lots of hands that they need to pass through before they stop looking like things or stop looking like hieroglyphs. But that idea, one symbol for one sound, from that point, we have an alphabet.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, let's start talking about the letter A because that is a great entry point into a lot of interesting things. You know, for example, like I didn't know that—and now I can't remember what the hieroglyphic symbol stood for—but the thing that the hieroglyphic symbol stood for, they typically took the first sound of that and assigned it to the symbol. Right? And that's what happened with the letter that became our letter A. But also, it's amazing; it wasn't a vowel to start with.
Danny Bate: Exactly. So again, not even the shape of the letters, not even the sound that they represent can be taken for granted. Exactly as you say, when the alphabet first gets set up because of the needs of the speakers and what they wanted to put down in text. It stands for a consonant, a consonant, I mean. The difference between vowels and consonants, as I imagine you've explored, is phonetically kind of a bit blurry. But vowels are generally these extremely resonant sounds that we can hold for a long time, as long as your lungs will let you. So A is a vowel sound; ah is another one. Whereas consonants are things that impede the airflow. They kind of modify it or stop it in some way.
With that in mind, all that I need to say is that it's a consonant when it first is born, which is a glottal stop that A originally represents. It's the uh sound that is super common in English. I mean, every time I kind of use, I begin a word that starts with a vowel, actually, that tends to be a glottal stop immediately beforehand when I speak English. But, nonetheless, it's a super common sound, and yet we don't actually have a letter now to represent it, which is just a kind of accident of history and the journey that the alphabet has been down. So, as you correctly say, this groundbreaking change in the way of using these symbols—this streamlining—is all to do with what we call the acrophonic principle.
So we have a hieroglyph, we have a written symbol, and it looks like a thing. And in the language of these people who are setting up alphabetic writing, we take the word for that thing that the symbol represents, and the first sound of that word is what the symbol now represents. So take the letter A. To begin with it looks like it. It's an ox. It's a head of cattle, basically, literally, you know, a head. And this in the language of these people—we'll give the language a name—they're speaking something called a West Semitic language, which is related to Arabic and Hebrew today. And the word for a head of cattle in their language, an ox, is an "alp." It starts with a glottal stop. It's hard for me to kind of overemphasize it, but it's an "alp." Now the symbol or the hieroglyph of an ox stands for the sound that "alp" begins with, which is a glottal stop. So A equals uh, and from there we have our letter A.
Mignon Fogarty: It almost reminded me of the—I don't know—the NATO phonetic alphabet, the "whiskey tango foxtrot" thing where the word lines up with the sound or the letter, because for every letter, it seemed like it was that way in the beginning that the sound stood for the first, the letter stood for the first sound in the word that the hieroglyph represented, and that was the innovation that led to the alphabet, right?
Danny Bate: Exactly, and those words, those full words, I like that very much. The idea of Alpha Bravo, et cetera. Those words were also ordinary everyday words. They were things like houses and sticks and, indeed, oxen. But that remained for a long time. Also, the name for the letter. So the ordinary word came first, but because of the association between the letter, the name of the letter, and the sound it represents, it's basically that remained the letter. And so you and I, we still know this ancient word for an ox, "alp," because it's still there in the Greek name for the letter alpha. The Greeks continued to use these old names, the Romans, and that's the next participants in the story. They got rid of the names. They kind of simplified it in favor of something new. But nonetheless, we know this ancient word for an ox because it's there in "alphabet." If we were to break up this term, this everyday word that we have, "alphabet," these come from two ancient words for an ox, followed by a house: "alpha bet." The alphabet is literally, etymologically speaking, an ox house.
Mignon Fogarty: And it comes from the first two letters, the "ab," the alpha bet. It's amazing. So, it's so obvious once you know it, like a light bulb goes on and you go "alphabet, ab," and then if you were Egyptian, you would know "ox house." And the ox reminded me of another interesting thing about the way writing went across the page. Talk about, what is like ox plow writing?
Danny Bate: Exactly, yes. I mean, this is an important stage in the alphabet's development, in the history of alphabetic writing. I mustn't ignore, even though it seems very strange to us that it's not really around today, essentially when the alphabet gets up and running, there's tremendous flexibility in the direction of writing. So long as the symbols are following each other in some sort of consistent sequence, it's possible to write from right to left or left to right as we do today. But the kind of sister scripts or the cousin scripts of our English alphabet, things like Hebrew and Arabic, they preserve the original or the predominant original direction of writing, which was from right to left.
But there's another one. There's an alternative, which did take off for a long time, which is to write in a zigzag formation where basically you go in one direction across the page or stone block, whatever you happen to be writing on, and then for the next line, you switch and go in the other direction. So it kind of looks like this. And this, at least by present day, back and forth exactly. Kind of, yeah. This gets a lovely name at least by present-day experts and scholars, which is "booster feedin." And that literally comes from the ancient Greek for like the turning of a plow or the turning of an ox. Oxen, again, make an appearance in the alphabet story that keeps happening, and it's again, it's like a pharaoh's field, an old-fashioned field that goes this way and that way, and this way, and that way. And this is a genuine alternative to straightforward right to left or left to right in the early centuries of the alphabet. It's a way that we find the Greeks writing. It's a way that we find the Romans to a lesser extent, but kind of the other people who were around in ancient Italy at that time. The Phoentians, another extremely important link in the chain of the alphabet. Not so much, I don't actually think we have any evidence for them, but it's possible. And that's actually something I tried to acknowledge, that there are stages of the alphabet story that are still debated. And we'll just wait for new finds that maybe will show us the link between the early alphabet and ancient Greek in terms of writing in both directions. I did want to acknowledge in the book that this is a very complex story and academics, scholars. Well, there's still work to do and, well long may it remain so.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, surprisingly complex. And that is just wild. Are there any advantages to writing back and forth like that, and how did we get from that to going, you know, in just one direction?
Danny Bate: Absolutely. I mean, because of the number of surviving documents that we have that display each of these different possibilities, these three alternative ways of doing it, I think we have to believe that each one had its strengths. It wasn't like the victory of one was inevitable in any way. I suppose that in early alphabetic writing, perhaps when you are writing these texts, which are then intended to be read out, writing in one kind of seamless line where you are tracking it, then you drop to a new line may have helped if you are following along with your finger, for example.If you're literally doing this or I'm reading in one direction, I get to the bottom of the line and rather than jumping back, it may have helped to continue reading with your finger in the opposite direction too. That's been suggested. The same goes for the person who was doing the original writing as well, you know, rather than lifting your chisel if it's like a stone block in ancient Greece as it probably was for a lot of the time, it makes sense to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and then move your chisel to the next line in a kind of seamless fashion.
But nonetheless, it did die out, this booster feedin, this oxen-like way of writing. And there's been many theories about why this is, why indeed, you know, people in the Middle East continue to write from right to left. People in Greece really came to rally behind left to right as indeed we English writers still tend to, and there's all sorts of theories. The one that I put in the book, because I think it sounds the most plausible to me, is that it may actually be psychological. And all to do with the different hemispheres of our brain and that there was something about the meeting of the Greek language, what specifically about Greek speech the Greeks wanted to represent in writing, and indeed the human psychology of the brain that eventually meant that left to right. So, you know, the way that you and I, Mignon, tend to do things was what won out eventually among the Greeks and consequently among the people who live with the legacy of the Greeks’ brains, which is us basically, us English writers today.
Mignon Fogarty: Fascinating. And when you're talking about chiseling, it reminded me, you know, when we're looking at big buildings in Greece and things like that, the letters are often all capitals. And that's originally how the alphabet started. So how did lowercase letters come to be?
Danny Bate: I mean, it's a fantastic question, and it's almost something that I could have neglected to be honest in the story of the alphabet. And I fully admit this, I enjoyed, I basically at the start of one particular chapter, which I reserved to talk about the invention of lowercase letters, I just said at the very beginning, "Dear reader, I've been neglecting something up until this point," which is that the story I've told you in the previous chapters, namely from chapters A to C, that's what I went with for this book, really only gets us the story of the capital letters because they are the originals. I think we can safely say that they've been on their own journey. They've changed definitely in shape, but they are older than lowercase letters. Lowercase letters, which are far more common in the modern world today, are really a post-classical invention. They have their origins in the Roman Empire. So that's sort of, let's say around the year 100 onwards essentially. And basically up until that point, and from a long time after that point, people would, they really did not think of their alphabet being divided between upper and lower case. This is a division, a kind of conceptualization that really came a lot, lot later. There were definitely different ways of writing the letters of these ancient symbols that the Romans had inherited. But as literacy took hold and people started writing more and more, especially writing in different media.
So, you know, there's a difference between writing grand capital letters that you have time for and that you want people to read from a distance and say writing on some sort of scrap of papyrus that you don't want anybody else to read apart from your intended recipients. And unfortunately, those people and then a few nosy archeologists 2000 years later. I mean, those people, they never had those people in mind. The difference in the speed of writing, the material of writing, and just general literacy as more and more people in the Roman Empire started writing meant that a division, a kind of split developed between different ways of using the letters. And in the second, the kind of very fast-flowing cursive writing, where the letters don't have so much detail. They may be rounded; they may be kind of joined up in their shape in that, what we might call cursivization, we have the origin of our lowercase letters, but it would take a very long time, as I mentioned, for people to think of them as two separate things, and especially to use them alongside each other in one document as we now do today.
And really, I would say that it's kind of not until the High Middle Ages, maybe from the 10th century onwards, that people think of them as two ways of writing the same letters that you could put side by side in the same document. And indeed, the whole idea of upper and lower case, that really only comes along in the 15th century when printers are thinking, well, my printed documents, I need them to get up to the standards of a beautiful medieval manuscript that's been copied out in a very painstaking way. Basically, I need wooden blocks that can represent the grand old capital letters and the smaller, lower, or what we call minuscule letters. I need both. And to speed up the process of printing, I need two boxes to keep them in, to keep them separate, hence upper and lower case. So it's a case. It's literally a case to begin with, and I threw that fact in chapter D, and yeah, that's the story of the lowercase letters.
Mignon Fogarty: I love that fact. Yeah. And so I think I had this sense that I had a sense that the letters had changed over time, and all that, but that the alphabet even had changed. But I was surprised by how much, after rereading your book, so many of the letters have changed what they stood for. They came, went away; they came back different. They split into two different kinds of letters. I mean, I think K, the letter K, is a good example because it completely disappeared from the alphabet and then it came back.
Danny Bate: Exactly. I mean, it's no exaggeration to say that K is the alphabet's comeback kid. And it's featured twice in that phrase "comeback kid," even though indeed, as you say, it was purged from the alphabet or indeed a particular branch of the family tree of the alphabet. So take the Greeks. The Greeks have the letter Capa; it looks like our letter K. It's kind of the sister or aunt of our letter K, however you want to conceptualize it. And it's there. It’s there in Greek writing. It's still going strong. However, because of the alphabet's journey to ancient Italy, borne by the Greeks. They say you should beware of Greeks bearing gifts. But this one worked out pretty well, the alphabet.
Because of that specific journey and the version of the alphabet, what the Romans needed it for in Italy, one thing led to another. And K, the letter K, as we know, was essentially redundant. And the Romans decided to eliminate it in favor of redundancy and kind of efficiency. And to replace it in all contexts with the letter C, because for the Romans, due to various accidents of history, the hands that the alphabet had passed through, C and K were now equivalent letters. They stand for kuh as they do in something, I don’t know, a word like “cook” in English. They're standing for the same sound. Because of that, because of the Romans' kind of ruthless efficiency, K was purged from the alphabet. And you really see this in early Roman documents. By the time you reach the days of Cicero and Caesar—names, you know, that we spell with K—K is basically gone.
And yet it was gone but never forgotten. It remained a kind of intellectual curiosity. It remained something that people maybe knew the alphabet had. People may have had passing knowledge of Greek. And it remained in the, shall we say, kind of toolkit of writers through the Roman period and into the medieval period. And because of various reasons, especially to do with the Vikings—Vikings again—a word that we spell with a K, these peoples kind of suffused the medieval English language with all sorts of words that C alone just couldn't spell. It was unequipped. It wasn't ready for this deluge of words that were carried over the sea. First from the Vikings and then later from the Normans. Because of this, K made this triumphant return to the alphabet. And I just think it's a perfect example of how there's just nothing that we can take for granted in the way that we spell. Every letter's been on its own journey.
Mignon Fogarty: I think you said that if a word has a K in it, it's a pretty good guess that it probably came into English through Old Norse.
Danny Bate: Pretty much, yeah, that's a pretty good guess, especially sk as well—that combination of sc at something like a skirt or something like that. Sky is another one. Pretty good. Yeah, pretty good indication. So there's a little bit of kind of etymological detective work that you can do with this. You see a SK, probably Old Norse. And indeed, the reason for that is that Old English, what was already in Britain at the time, didn't have or got rid of that combination of sounds. They usually changed them in favor of sh instead, which we spell with SH. Hence we have a skirt—that's one type of garment. And we have a shirt as well—same garment at the end of the day.
Mignon Fogarty: It is interesting because in the past we've had guests on who talked about spelling reform and English spelling reform, and there's so much resistance to it. But it seems like over the millennia that spelling reform has affected our alphabet. As you said, the Romans, they just decided they don't need K anymore, so they got rid of it and started just using C. And it's amazing to me how many letters did change what they stood for over the years as they moved into different languages that had different sounds. And there's this tension between the sounds and the written spelling and how to represent them.
Danny Bate: Exactly, exactly that. That is one of the broader themes of the book that I really hope that I've successfully impressed on the reader. That sounds keep changing. And when you set the basis for your writing system as sounds—the kind of the key sounds of your language, what we call the phonemes—which is not the only way to do writing, I should say that, take Chinese writing, which has a different fundamental basis—you are kind of doomed to spend the next few centuries keeping up with sounds as they change. And, you know, one of the things is that when sounds change, as they naturally do, we absolutely have the right to change our spelling. We have this attitude within English of accepting spelling just as it is, and it's something I hope I've managed to communicate to the reader in the book that that is a valid attitude, but it's not the only attitude. It's not the only way that you can address it. There have been eras where it's been absolutely fine for people to take spelling into their own hands, and that's certainly been the case in the history of English.
We have moments in British history where the circumstances of the time have allowed people to just take spelling into their own hands, and no one's gonna begrudge them that; no one's gonna mind. I think that's especially true in what we call Middle English—that's kind of post-1066, post-Norman invasion English—very unfashionable by that point in time. And what we have written down may kind of look like chaos. It may look very unfamiliar, but it's remarkably true to how people are spelling because nobody's telling them to do otherwise. There are no spellcheckers or anything like that telling you, "No, you are wrong." The idea, I don’t know, of telling some scribe who decides to write in Middle English in the year 1100, "No, you are wrong. There should be a B at the end of a word, like thumb or lamb or tomb." And that scribe would be like, "Why? There's no need to do that." So we definitely have that power.
However, there is a huge caveat to that enthusiastic statement in favor of spelling reform from me, which is that at the same time, we shouldn't be careful to throw the baby out with the bathwater because sometimes, even when sounds change, and even when we lose that kind of one-to-one ratio of sound to spelling, sometimes the natural flow of sound change or whatever is going on in speech can allow apparently redundant or silent letters to take on some new kind of function. And like, let's take for example a word like “fight.” We've got this G and this H, which is wasting our ink apparently in it. We don't pronounce either of those letters, but I think you'll agree if we take it out, we are left with “fit,” which is a different word with a different sound. So there is something to that GH, which is all caught up in the development of speech. The progression of sounds that I try to express this. It was a very, very hard kind of relationship between speech and writing, but one of the metaphors I went with, which is like a kind of piano that's going out of tune even when it happens, even when one of the keys is going out of tune. If you keep hitting it as a piano player or as someone having fun with the piano, you'll kind of match up to what it now stands for. You'll kind of associate the two, and I think there's a little bit in the development of writing too.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, you did an excellent job of explaining why we have silent letters, and especially how they still do work today in the words telling us how the letters around them should be pronounced. And funny thing, just this morning I was seeing someone talk about Jony Ive, who's the famous Apple designer who I think is now at OpenAI, and he streamlined his name. His name is Johnny. And I believe he changed the spelling to make it more appealing or efficient or to look better. It's JONY. And then I saw people talking about how well he did that to make it look sleek, but now half the people aren't sure whether he should be Johnny or Joanie when they see his name because those silent letters that supposedly we didn't need actually were doing work in the name. And you talked a lot about how the silent letters, they're actually not completely silent because they're giving us clues. At the very least, they're giving us like hand signals about what we should be, how we should be pronouncing that word.
Danny Bate: Exactly. Exactly. And it's not just tech geniuses who benefit from these principles behind English spelling; it's also poor linguistic writers as well. My own name benefits from this. I mean, you are welcome to call me Daniel with one N; you're welcome to write my name as Dan with one N, but if you spell Danny, which is what I go by, with one N, then I become Dany. So the two Ns are contributing something in the spelling of my name. And that's again another example of, you know, you want to reform English spelling, go for it. But there are so many things that you do have to be conscious of, all these systems that are kind of working beneath the surface that maybe we weren't taught explicitly in the classroom. I mean, I have to, it was a long time since I learned English spelling because I'm a native writer of English since childhood. But I don't remember being taught this rule of double consonant letters indicating something about the previous vowel, which is what's going on in Johnny, Joanie, and Danny, Dany. So all of these things you just have to bear in mind. And, yeah, hopefully I've communicated the awesomeness of all of this to the reader in the book.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think the last thing I want to talk about is just this amazing reverence that people have for Rome that has shaped so much of our alphabet and much longer than you might imagine, you know, after the essential fall of Rome, the warm feelings that people had for Roman culture continued to affect our writing for hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe more than a thousand years.
Danny Bate: Exactly, yes, that is true. And that is certainly something that I've got at in the book, that writing and spelling reflect their society. They reflect the people who are using them. They reflect the circumstances of the time. So I give the example, I talk a lot about Old English, and Old English isn't Shakespeare; it's much older than that. It's this kind of earlier stage of the language, let's say, between sort of the year 450 AD or CE and the year 1066, around about that. And I give the example of Old English; I talk about it a lot because they took the Romans' letters, but they knew that they themselves were kind of not part of the Roman Empire. You know? They kind of had a free hand even though they respected Rome. It wasn't, say, the reverence for Rome that say somebody living in France might have that really had been a lot more Roman. And so Old English spelling reflects that. It reflects the fact that they kind of had more of a free hand and they were a lot more ruthless. Like they got rid of the letter Q. They never used it to write down Old English because it's silly. There's no need.
In comes the Norman Conquest, in comes this bunch of French or Norman speakers, and the reverence for Rome is just taken up a notch because now English really feels like it's part of the Roman or the Romance Club. It's been almost submerged in this flood of vocabulary that ultimately we get from Latin. And our spelling reflects that.
This, I would then say, is then taken up another notch, which is in later years when we've got things like the Renaissance where people are saying, okay, we can be as good as the Romans. We can get our language and our culture and our architecture up to their standard. We are getting a lot more texts from the ancient world. We are feeling a lot more classical in the way that we are living our lives. This is the cultural elite, I should say, who are doing this. Then, you know, we get another tendency, which is not only to use things like Q and use things like the letter V, which is a very kind of post-1066 thing. It goes even further where we are taking our old words that we get ultimately from Latin and we are bringing their spelling back to Latin standards. So that's things like, you know, putting or maintaining the L in salmon, the fish, or putting the B back into doubt and debt. And that is again, another way of doing writing. Like you want your spelling to reflect your values. And the people who in, say, like the 1500s, 1600s, they are proud classicists. They're people who love the Romans, they love Latin. They believe that it's their job to get their culture back up to what they see as proper Roman standards. And the spelling reflects that.
And you may say, well, that's ridiculous. Like, shouldn't we then take the B out of debt and doubt? You can! Like, that's my answer. You can do that. All I would only say, especially to the kind of the Brits among you, is that it's not a totally unreasonable thing to the English people out there, people who spell with what's called Commonwealth spelling, you know, I spell a word like “realize” with a zu sound at the end. I spell that with an S because I see that as British, even though phonetics tells me it definitely should be a Z, and I have all of the United States telling me it should be a Z as well. So there's elements of personality that we put into our spelling too. It's not just sounds.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I love that. And you reminded me, I almost forgot, but we have one more thing we have to talk about because it's the title of your book, "Why Q Needs U." So we have, you have to tell us why Q needs U.
Danny Bate: I mean, the short answer is the Romans. That's it in a nutshell. It's the Romans; it's a big thing. And indeed, I mean, you know, increasingly Q does not need U. I mean, there are contributions to our spelling. We've got things like the QWERTY keyboard that I have here in front of me. We've got, I don't know, the concept of Qi, which is coming from China, which is kind of the Pinyin spelling system where there's no U needed. But yeah, more or less a Q needs to be followed by U. And we learned this from a very early age that is all caught up in the needs of the people who are using the letter. The really, really kind of super short history of the letter Q is that once upon a time, way back in the Middle East, in the Bronze Age and Iron Age, it's standing for a specific sound, a sound which I can't really replicate because it's quite alien to me—a kind of kuh sound with a bit more glottalization involved. This gets passed on to the Greeks, and the Greeks say, we don't have that sound. We'll gratefully take the letter, but we don't have that sound. We'll just keep it for a plain old ku sound. This then gets passed on to the Romans, and the Romans again, like they did with the letter K, say, this is kind of redundant. We don't need this letter Q just as much as we don't need the letter C, just as much as we don't need the letter K because they're both representing K, and a C alone will do. But the Romans did have the sound qu. They did have this kind of combination of sounds. We might think of that as a sequence of two sounds in something like queen or quick or something like query. But for the Romans, they thought of that as one sound. They thought of a word like equus means horse, or something like that. They thought of that as one sound. So for that alone, because of that simple, subtle categorization of the sounds of the Latin language, they thought, okay, Q, we'll keep it so long as it's working in tandem with U together to represent qu. Ever since Q has needed U, it can only really appear when there's a U being followed by it, because that's the kind of function that the Romans ascribed to it. And it's kind of its saving grace that allowed it to save the cull of letters that the Romans often did. So that's it. That's kind of very briefly why Q needs U.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, it's a wonderful book again. It's called "Why Q Needs U." We've been talking with Danny Bate, the author. Danny, where can people find you online?
Danny Bate: If they'd like to, it’s not hard to find me online. I've made it my business over the past few years to not be hard to find online. You can find me on X, formerly Twitter, at Danny Bate. I am also active on Blue Sky, the platform. My podcast is "A Language I Love Is…" where I interview guests about a particular language that they love and do my best to make that an accessible linguistic output as well. As I continue to try and work and get my thoughts into as many different media as possible, maybe some other platforms in the future as well. But and my website, I should mention, I have a website where each month I try to write some sort of accessible piece on a topic that I love. So that's dannybate.com. So I'm not hard to find, and I love linguistic questions and helping people out on their linguistic journey. So if you have a question, get in touch.
Mignon Fogarty: Super, and we'll put links to all of that in the show notes, so you can find it there if you want to look for it later. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you are a Grammarpaloozian, a supporter, we're going to have a bonus episode about the youngest letters of the alphabet. We're also going to get Danny's book recommendations, so look for that in your feed or in your text messages. If you'd like to become a Grammarpaloozian and get all these great bonuses and become a supporter, we'd really appreciate it, and you can find more information about that at quickanddirtytips.com/bonus. Danny, thank you so much for being here.
Danny Bate: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.